Joel - Hi. Not sure if anyone replied, but here's mine.
I am in the process of moving into a flat on Sunday. And volunteered to sort out comms. I come from a heavy network architecture point of view, but need some recommendations from people here about the following. 1) ISP choice. So far I have established there are 5 ISP's (this is a tiny fraction of the number in NZ). And I am used to dealing with small Minoe ISP's and knowing people who run them. My choice of ISP generally depends on 3 things; 1) Actively Peer at Public Internet Exchanges, and are committed to improving global network infrastructure when they can 2) Offer personalised service, without 'valued added' crap (I.e I want a pipe, and maybe a /29 subnet, I can deal with a single static IP for the moment tho) 3) Quality of service is acceptable (I don't expect to have my ping and RTS times fluctuate erratically in peak periods). I don't expect a 5 9 SLA either tho, so long as I can reach someone during outages who can not feed me bullshit lines as to the problem, I am happy sucking up for the outage window. So these are my observations on the 5. I am leaning towards Pacnet as the can offer me Cable with decent upload speed (I need at LEAST 1mbit upstream, down is not so important). And I know they actively peer. However I have heard mixed things about there QOS, and there support line seems to be manned by monkeys... I am hopping I am missing an ISP here... otherwise can anyone offer recommendations. I deffinately want to try and avoid either of the encumbents (Singtel, and Mediacorp) as they have both done dirty backhanded things in terms of international peering arrangements and I have heard there filtering is invasive. (Shaping protocols, moving IP's) Singtel - Government Owned, But offer good range of services Starhub - Mediacorp Owned, Again good range Pacnet - Privately Held, but I have heard service levels are not great M1 - More Media Corp ownership + Vodaphone Qala - Only offer ADSL in consumer segment, fibre and frame services are heinously expensive
May I suggest Super Internet. I use them for DSL and VoIP. They are a boutique ISP and do provide hosting if needed. They are at www.super.net.sg. What attracts me to them is their smaller size - attention to customer as a result of, and they peer with all the "big name" ISPs here as well as MCI/Worlcom (or whatever they are called these days).
Please add your own observations. (I plan to use this post as a base to fixup the current wikipedia page). 2) Voip providers. I want one thing from a voip provider, that they use standard sip or iax protocol that asterisk plays nicely with, and give me a local (Singapore) number with compeditive local rates. Who do people use here for such a thing, anyone know a company that offers this (I have seen the above going for around 13$ a month sing, but that seems overly expensive considering local calls are not free here)
Super Internet provides that. I have their VoIP service (phone number starting 3125.xxxx) and am generally OK with it.
3) I know that many of the ISP's either monitor or filter content in singapore, I have seen it happen to a machine I was admining from NZ which was in singapore. Basically I think in this case was singtel, but they deliberately forced a very low DHCP renew time on the ADSL connection so that interactive services were a pain to use. I also noticed that Bittorrent traffic gets shapped a bit (when not tunneled), and the latencys are all over the place (which can be the result of too many clients on a single DSLAM or stream monitoring...)
Not sure if Super Internet does that, but I have not seen any issue at all.
What do people know of the methods employed here by ISP's to filter/tamper with service ?
Work around it. Mind you, the all-knowing-all-seeing people at the Media Development Authority (www.mda.gov.sg) issue quarterly lists of "domains" to block. There are about 100 and almost all of them are supposedly pornographic. Most of the ISPs run a transparent proxy service but none of them do keyword searching - that I am aware of. Harish _______________________________________________ Slugnet mailing list [email protected] http://www.lugs.org.sg/mailman/listinfo/slugnet
