Hi,
I am interested in the views of other users on this subject.

We live rurally, within spitting distance of our exchange. BUBA adsl service is available (no roadside cabinets off this exchange) and we have had an adsl connection since TCL brought out their PDQ product. Performance was good - sync speed is about 7000kbps down, and we used to  enjoy sustained d/l speeds in the range 3 - 5 Mbps.

Then in March this year d/l data rates crashed through the floor, dropping as low as 100kbps at times, and not more than 250kbps any time of day. Latency remained ok (65 - 85ms), as did u/l data rate (usually close to 700kbps) 

I contacted TCL customer help by email, and have had the most frustrating experience imaginable over the last 5 months! They seemed unable to take my complaint seriously, reminding me repeatedly that we had good sync speed, asking over and over for speed test reports from different times of day, had I tried different modems etc etc. Then they started talking about an upgrade to the Rangitikei backhaul, and I should see improvements in the weeks ahead as traffic was migrated from congested circuits (a tactic designed to get me to shut up for a while). True, there has been some slight improvement at quiet times - sometimes speedtest.net will report rates as high as 1000kbps!!! Most of the time it comes in between 250 and 600 kbps. Most frustratingly, my questions as to what had caused the downgrade of our once good service were never addressed.

Finally I wrote a letter to TCL customer help complaints department (ironically, only a snail mail address is published on the website) setting out my complaint about the performance of the help team. Finally I got a response (by email) the gist of which was that new subcribers have been added on our exchange which was unfortunately causing the data congestion. Nothing could be done, Chorus have  no plans to increase the size of the data pipe, and we would just have to live with it.

So, first question - why did it take 5 months to obtain this admission? Second question - do TCL not have some minimum service level agreement with Chorus as regards performance of the adsl connection? I can understand that Chorus don't care, after all each additional suscriber means more income for them. But I would have thought that TCL would care, they take the money and it is in their interest to have happy customers.

What is considered acceptable for adsl? For example, where I was once able to watch streaming video (u-tube, tvone on-demand etc), now it is impossible. The loading time far exceeds the actual viewing time, even for the video from Clear Net site. Example 2: a 10MB ftp file download takes over 4 minutes, when it was about 20 seconds.

Any thoughts out there?

Cheers,