On Wed, Oct 08, 2008 at 11:03:25AM +0200, Geoffrey S. Mendelson wrote:
As for reliability, service and speed, the best thing to do is to call
HOT and ask for their business internet sales office. They offer higher
speeds, better reliabilty and they will come and fix problems a lot better
and a lot quicker than a consumer connection. The only downfall besides the
slightly higher price is that they will not let you combine a business class
connection with basic cable and a voice line for a cheap price.
Just to add some more to my post, I have a 5m down/256k up cable modem
from Hot and use Netvision as my ISP.
I have had several (5-10) outages in the last year, one big one in September
where everything was down for half a day. I called HOT and they arranged
to send a technican out in about two hours, but he called and said the problem
was with a wide area and it was being worked on, so there was no need for
him to come.
It was, of course the morning my teenage son was home recovering from dental
surgery and I heard no end of it. :-)
Since then I do have a problem with VoIP. Using a Linksys PAP2 which uses
outgoing port 5060 for connections, some times I get a "tunnel" from Netvision
where it is blocked. Once I figured that out, I was able to change the port
from 5060 to 5061 and it has worked fine ever since. I assume if I did not
change the port, I would have to call Netvision and complain.
It does not happen using a Windows or MacOS softphone, which use a different
outgoing port.
My VoIP provider is based in the US and uses Level3 as their ISP, so I
get 160ms ping times with a rare peak of 180-190, which is well withing
the 150ms latency limit. When I had Vonage, I could not ping them, so I
don't have any stats, but after 6pm on Wednesday until Sunday morning it
was useless.
Skype computer to computer is fine in Israel, but Skypeout is IMHO better
than Cell-Com was in 1996 when I made aliyah, but not as good as POTS.
Skype computer to computer outside of Israel is too variable to guess.
As for download speeds, I have my download speed capped at 4.5m for QOS
reasons, and my bit torrent speed capped at 300k bytes per second.
I often get download speeds over 200k, and occasionaly 400k bytes per second
using FTP and HTTP, and see 300k total torrent download speeds.
Sometimes I get less than 1k per second torrent speeds too, so it depends
upon the torrent.
I don't watch streaming video from within Israel, so I can't comment on it,
but streaming video from the US and Asia work fine until about 6pm when they
start to bog down.
Anyone does decide to go to HOT and call their "business office", please
let me know what speeds they currently offer.
Geoff.
--
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel [EMAIL PROTECTED] N3OWJ/4X1GM
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