Telecom Big Time plan trouble thread

Forums › Spark New Zealand (including Skinny and BigPipe) › Telecom Big Time plan trouble thread

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#314270 2-Apr-2010 21:25

ArranH,

Up until three weeks ago, the global gateway wasn't broken. It is (apprently) being fixed. Once it has been absolutly (with out a doubt) confirmed that it is fixed, we can complain about the individual plan not performing. But right now, it is effecting BigTime as well as the Pro plan (apparently).

Once thing I have learneded these past months is that patience is required with Telecom. If you nag, beg, poke and nag some more, then wait a week and start again...Stuff eventually gets done. Once it is done, whatever you ask for seems to perform.

Those who move will kick themselves in the teeth later on when the plan performs well and they are locked into a capped plan for 24 months. amiga500 is right to a certain extent, GoLarge was a flop but for those who remained loyal and stayed on the plan got an amazing plan for the price.

As for the tone of Talkiet's previous posts...There is none. He is here to help as much as he can. Don't argue with one of the only link this forum has to the Telecom network. If he suddenly disappears, our frustrations, problems and complaints will be even more usless than before. I find if I read this thread again in the morning when I'm not in "Anti-Telecom" mode, I understand the point of view of others much better.

ArranH

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#314271 2-Apr-2010 21:27

Talkiet:
ArranH: [snip]
Thanks for the posts though, will be useful if anyone does deicde to go after Telecom for a breach of contract in any way.

I'm confident I have said nothing inaccurate but I dislike the tone you're taking so I'm electing to not respond to you any further.

Regards
Neil G

I do apologise for calling you arrogant earlier, I was out of line and I will not make any excuses.

I guess its just frustration at seeing Telecom turning around towards a brighter future, away from the poor view the public had of them, and then the last three weeks with many of our connections going crazy, and just hearing mixed messages from Telecom.

But once again my apologies, I won't respond to any more of your posts if you do post again.

Mooseboy

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#314272 2-Apr-2010 21:30

Talkiet:
nitrotech:
Talkiet:

While of course you are free to lay a complaint with whoever you wish, you're also free to move to another plan, or even another ISP if you value performance on demand for all protocols above the benefit of no download cap. Please read the Bigtime T&Cs before stating how it's promoted. It's been VERY clearly advertised since day one that it won't be suitable for all users and specifically P2P, downloaders and gamers may find other plans more suitable.

There are a vast number of people happy with BigTime, and at least dozens complaining about it.

All that said, the traffic management is under continuous review and if it actually turns out to be the rules or the traffic management box that is genuinely slowing normal (non P2P / RS type DL / non gaming etc) traffic to 22bytes/sec than I'm sure that changes will be made.

Also remember that this forum is NOT the official grievance airing point for performance issues. You can't expect Telecom to take offhand reports of terrible performance as an item to action. Log the issues and have all the normal troubleshooting done.

At the end of the day though, we're not holding a gun to your head, you're free to change plan.

Cheers - N

I can smell the corporate arrogance over the Rotorua sulphur tonight ..........

Fact is it's sold as a 'broadband plan' and 'optimised for adsl2+' telecom can not hide behind the traffic managment policy as all they say is 'reduced speeds' and for a lot of people is practically at a stand still.

According to the above there seems to be little chance of anyone at telecom taking any interest in fixing it which is why comcom seems the only option.

We are paying good money for a service, and just like any serivce there are minimum standards - big time is way below the minimum.

Sorry mate, I'm in no way a corporate spindoctor - I'm giving accurate information which is in stark contrast to the majority of posts here which are emotionally charged and usually vary between almost accurate and wildly wrong.

ALL broadband in NZ is a best efforts service, and there aren't any (significant) specific standards committed to by any ISP (that I am aware of) on residential broadband plans.

You state "big time is way below the minimum".. .Please quote this minimum standard you speak of. Note I say "standard"... I'm not talking about what you want, or generally accepted interpretations of some words - but a standard that Telecom has committed to.

My comments in the above post are meant to indicate that it's totally unreasonable to expect ISP staff to poll all sorts of online forums for problem reports, instead of their own reporting systems and helpdesk. You're being very unrealistic if you think that's a good idea. Most of the 'reports' in the forum here lack any form of details that would actually help in determining the problem, with the odd notable exception. I have also forwarded these odd posts with useful info to the product manager - but I don't bother him with the emotive, inaccurate stuff.

Even though an individual helpdesk ticket may not (and I am sorry about this) result in heaps of staff dropping everything else to address your problem, it DOES contribute to certain thresholds being hit and the problem (or class of problem) being escalated.

As for Broadband... I refer you to wikipedia to see what it actually means..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadband

And 'Optimised for ADSL2+' is Telecom corporate-speak for simply not having a 128k upstream limit... It in no way guarantees that you'll get high ADSL2+ speeds at any given time to any given location.

I understand your frustration and Telecom is (as I have said) reviewing the traffic management rules (plus other streams of work to optimise the BB network), but I can't tell you how fast these things will progress or if they will improve Big time to your individual satisfaction.

Finally, bear in mind you're paying peanuts for an uncapped service - there are customers pulling in _LOTS_ of data.

Feel free to move to another ISP offering a better unlimited ADSL plan, or to a Telecom Pro plan.

Cheers - N

Though I'm sometimes frustrated to the point of anger by some of the speeds I get on Big Time, I have to agree with you on everything you say.

As a normal person, it was my reasonable expectation that on an unlimited bandwidth plan I would be getting slower speeds than a more expensive limited plan.

ArranH

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#314273 2-Apr-2010 21:33

DravidDavid: ArranH,

Up until three weeks ago, the global gateway wasn't broken. It is (apprently) being fixed. Once it has been absolutly (with out a doubt) confirmed that it is fixed, we can complain about the individual plan not performing. But right now, it is effecting BigTime as well as the Pro plan (apparently).

Once thing I have learneded these past months is that patience is required with Telecom. If you nag, beg, poke and nag some more, then wait a week and start again...Stuff eventually gets done. Once it is done, whatever you ask for seems to perform.

Those who move will kick themselves in the teeth later on when the plan performs well and they are locked into a capped plan for 24 months. amiga500 is right to a certain extent, GoLarge was a flop but for those who remained loyal and stayed on the plan got an amazing plan for the price.

Yeah, I'll be staying with Telecom as I haven't found an ISP that I stay satisfied with for any period of time (at least since I left London) and I really hate having to watch my usage. Hopefully they get the global gateway issues sorted.

DravidDavid

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#314279 2-Apr-2010 21:46

ArranH:
Yeah, I'll be staying with Telecom as I haven't found an ISP that I stay satisfied with for any period of time (at least since I left London) and I really hate having to watch my usage. Hopefully they get the global gateway issues sorted.

I'm confident once it is fixed, performance will return. As far as I'm aware, our traffic is being re-routed slowed and to top it all off...Low on the priorities list. It explains everything from gaming to streaming to time-outs. When the gateway is fixed, these problems should get significantly better (in theory) and perform as they did three weeks ago.

I have to admit. I expected it to be fixed within the week it was discovered. But I am not a communications engineer dealing with the issue, so I remain patient hoping they are working on it round' the clock

EDIT: Ignore the crappy spelling and grammar in your quote of my post. I didn't bother checking for it, haha!

ArranH

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#314283 2-Apr-2010 22:07

DravidDavid:
ArranH:
Yeah, I'll be staying with Telecom as I haven't found an ISP that I stay satisfied with for any period of time (at least since I left London) and I really hate having to watch my usage. Hopefully they get the global gateway issues sorted.

I'm confident once it is fixed, performance will return. As far as I'm aware, our traffic is being re-routed slowed and to top it all off...Low on the priorities list. It explains everything from gaming to streaming to time-outs. When the gateway is fixed, these problems should get significantly better (in theory) and perform as they did three weeks ago.

I have to admit. I expected it to be fixed within the week it was discovered. But I am not a communications engineer dealing with the issue, so I remain patient hoping they are working on it round' the clock

EDIT: Ignore the crappy spelling and grammar in your quote of my post. I didn't bother checking for it, haha!

There's a great little addon for Firefox that underlines misspelling, except that it doesn't know the word movie for some reason.

I think if we heard from them that it was being worked on we'd be understanding, but half the time when I call I get told there are no problems and its probably my router. But hopefully its just an problem with the frontline not being told of known issues.

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nitrotech

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#314290 2-Apr-2010 22:26

Just to illustrate the frustrations here I have started the download on the same file from HP.com which is a driver file for my netbook, now I think most of us would expect that downloading from HP should be at a resonable speed and it would be resonable to expect that drivers from HP should be available at an acceptable speed.

The upshot is that on Big Time the download took 3 minutes before it started and as you can see it is coming down at 145bytes/s (yep bytes not kb) so will take several days to download on big time.

On my vodafone mobile broadband device I got over 300kb/s the whole thing would be down in 7 minutes.

Is this acceptable?

l43a2

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#314292 2-Apr-2010 22:27

HP does use FTP which is traffic managed

nitrotech

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#314293 2-Apr-2010 22:29

l43a2: HP does use FTP which is traffic managed

Yes ..... all traffic is managed on big time - doesn't mean we should be able to download it.

(edit)

DravidDavid

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#314294 2-Apr-2010 22:33

ArranH:
There's a great little addon for Firefox that underlines misspelling, except that it doesn't know the word movie for some reason.

I think if we heard from them that it was being worked on we'd be understanding, but half the time when I call I get told there are no problems and its probably my router. But hopefully its just an problem with the frontline not being told of known issues.

I have the addon installed. It works on every forum but this one for some reason.

I know the level of communication is below average (way below). But most people who call the help desk complain about not being able to receive email because they accidenatly jerked the black cable out of the box with flashy lights. You can't expect a CSR to know about a memory leak in the global gateway. The last one I called didn't know what a trace rout was.

ArranH

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#314296 2-Apr-2010 22:35

l43a2: HP does use FTP which is traffic managed

Traffic management to the point of uselessness makes the service pointless, as found with my 22B/s average speed earlier today. People use the web for more than HTTP, and Telecom knows that.

But I'm thinking its the global gateway issue still, as speeds seem to be better during the evening than in the early morning, which would indicate something beyond traffic management. Or someone got there AM and PM mixed up :)

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ArranH

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#314297 2-Apr-2010 22:39

DravidDavid:

I have the addon installed. It works on every forum but this one for some reason.

I know the level of communication is below average (way below). But most people who call the help desk complain about not being able to receive email because they accidenatly jerked the black cable out of the box with flashy lights. You can't expect a CSR to know about a memory leak in the global gateway. The last one I called didn't know what a trace rout was.

A simple message on the status page would suffice, or even just letting the frontdesk people know that there is an issue. I don't expect them to know much, but being aware that issues are occurring (without having to know the exact details) would help them and the customers.

Yeah, for some reason I need to keep turning it on in the right-click context menu for this forum.

freitasm

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#314298 2-Apr-2010 22:47

ArranH: Yeah, for some reason I need to keep turning it on in the right-click context menu for this forum.

Probably because we use TinyMCE, which is completely Javascript-based. If you don't mind the lack of rich-text editing you can turn it off in your profile.

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#314309 2-Apr-2010 23:24

Talkiet:
I understand your frustration and Telecom is (as I have said) reviewing the traffic management rules (plus other streams of work to optimise the BB network), but I can't tell you how fast these things will progress or if they will improve Big time to your individual satisfaction.

Talkiet: It's broken, and were being told its business as usual. That is making us rage.

The total irony is that my torrenting speeds are relatively unaffected, yes each thread is being throttled to death but I just end up with lots of really slow seeds and still resonable speeds. Web surfing, http downloads, and god forbid https surfing are all completely fubar.

I'm a geek, a gamer, a dad, a Quic user, and an IT Professional. I have a full rack home lab, size 15 feet, an epic beard and Asperger's. I'm a bit of a Cypherpunk, who believes information wants to be free and the Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. If you use my Quic signup you can also use the code R570394EKGIZ8 for free setup. Opinions are my own and not the views of my employer.

Ragnor

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#314310 2-Apr-2010 23:27

It feels like a heavy handed rule to shape people abusing https / SSL for downloads is causing a lot of grief for general web usage.

eg:
Accessing Gmail via https or IMAP over SSL is horrible.

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