Byron Hillis wrote:
When it comes to unwired, I have nothing but negative things to say. I
would strongly discourage it's use unless you don't mind the following
features:
- Even though I'm in a good coverage area (Summer Hill), and
occasionally get the supposed full signal strength (green light), I get
drop outs regularly for no apparent reason. In addition, the modem
doesn't recognise that it's dropped out until you actually attempt to
send packets and then it tries to reconnect. Incredibly annoying.
- You can get good speeds, but the latency is poor. Don't even think
about any sort of gaming.
- The plans are expensive in comparison to ADSL. In reality, I don't
think you'll save that much when compared to a similar plan + line rental.
- Support is pretty poor.
- They block outgoing SMTP except to their SMTP servers that are not
hosted by Unwired, nor are they even in Australia. In addition, this
server does not support any form of secure connection, which means you
need to authenticate with your Unwired username and password to send
mail. Even more annoying is the fact that this SMTP server is
occasionally listed on SpamCop which means your mail gets blacklisted
and bounced...fun. I've brought this up with tech. support, but they
won't make the changes necessary (it appears to be a semi-open relay).
- They selectively shape traffic such as FTP, Bittorrent etc., which as
Linux users, is a killer. And when I say shape, I mean, they just start
dropping packets until you get about 95% packet loss.
- And the clincher, once you get capped, you get dropped to 32K speeds,
which, on an Unwired connection with packet loss, is the equivalent of
no connection at all. Seriously. To make matters worse, they changed
this speed from 64K WITHOUT informing their customers, essentially
changing the contract Terms & Conditions without notice.
It might seem like I'm being overly harsh or perhaps just ranting, but
everything is the truth. Just head over to the unwired forums or
whirlpool and you'll see exactly the same stuff.
Wow I didn't know they had so much crap going on in their network. A
good friend of mine from Glebe had Unwired, and the 5 religious
disconnections per day was enough for him to get rid of that ISP. Yes,
they made sure he got his daily dose of at least 5 disconnections per
day. Thank god I never had to deal with them. They would have driven me
crazy...
If you're going for ADSL, I give Internode 5 starts for support, service
and every other category you can think of. =P
Carlo
Byron Hillis
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