Slingshot Unlimited looks pretty good

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JohnButt

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# 110217 5-Oct-2012 10:18

Some solid changes evident this month

Investment in their network has paid off for Slingshot, making them the lead ISP due to "significant investment in bandwidth and caching" according to their Chief Technology Officer, Adrian Dick. Slingshot's improvement was across the board for both Surfing and Speed consistency. Coincidentally, TrueNet separated Slingshot's Capped vs Unlimited plans and found thatSlingshot is performing as well as the best ISPs for the most common capped plan while their Unlimited plans are better than some ISPs capped plans.

https://www.truenet.co.nz/articles/september-2012-report

NonprayingMantis

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# 696648 5-Oct-2012 10:33

"making them the lead ISP"

aren't they only the lead ISP on one of the tests?

Looks like they are about 4th or 5th on the time of day one. looks like the winer of the other test is either Snap or Actrix (hard to see on the chart)

and again, I need to wonder whether the results should be stated with regards to the relevance of the difference between the ISPs.

If ISP x is number 1 on web page downloads, but is only 1/10th of a second better than others is that something that anybody really cares about?
It's such a meaningless difference as to be (IMO) totally unworthy of discussion, yet you can bet that ISP x will take that result and crow about how they are the no 1 ISP according to independant testing, even though the difference is immaterial

http://www.fallacyfiles.org/fakeprec.html

"Sometimes [a] big ado is made about a difference that is mathematically real and demonstrable but so tiny as to have no importance. ? A case in point is the hullabaloo over practically nothing that was raised so effectively, and so profitably, by the Old Gold cigarette people.It started innocently with the editor of the Reader's Digest, who smokes cigarettes but takes a dim view of them all the same. His magazine went to work and had a battery of laboratory folk analyze the smoke from several brands of cigarettes. The magazine published the results, giving the nicotine and whatnot content of the smoke by brands. The conclusion stated by the magazine and borne out in its detailed figures was that all the brands were virtually identical and that it didn't make any difference which one you smoked. ?But somebody spotted something. In the lists of almost identical amounts of poisons, one cigarette had to be at the bottom, and the one was Old Gold. ?Big advertisements appeared in newspapers at once in the biggest type at hand. The headlines and the copy simply said that of all cigarettes tested by this great national magazine Old Gold had the least of these undesirable things in its smoke."

Ragnor

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# 696677 5-Oct-2012 11:03

Jon, you should caveat those statements as based on domestic performance only imo.

vexxxboy

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# 696711 5-Oct-2012 12:03

why is that major news when 1 ISP manages to catch up to the rest and finally gets decent speeds. I still dont trust them and would never go back to them.

Common sense is not as common as you think.

JohnButt

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# 696814 5-Oct-2012 14:56

@nonprayingmantis:- I have tried to be clear about the use of first, ie "Slingshot's capped performance for September is equal to 5 other ISPs, Snap, Actrix, Xnet, Orcon and Telecom. " I do not see any difference at this point, but Slingshot are still first - along with the others and in line with your "It's such a meaningless difference as to be (IMO) totally unworthy of discussion" Slingshot not only got their TOD performance in line, but also improved the test webpage downloads to "equal" to Vodafone, and actually a squeak better.

The heading on my first post is aimed at showing the impact of investment, an activity we hope all ISPs are doing to maintain performance, hence the need for TrueNet and the reports.

The point is made clearly in almost all of the article, that "Slingshot has improved performance" in practice so much that they are now equal first.

What is more interesting is that SS is managing to retain their unlimited performance ahead of the capped plans of Vodafone and TelstraClear. Many posts on Geekzone have asked about the performance of Unlimited plans and this is the first time a definitive answer has been available.

@Ragnor:- yes that is clearly National Performance and I should have stated - will edit - we are close to publishing international tests, but I am trying to ensure they are not tainted by caching, else it would not be an international test.

1080p

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# 696832 5-Oct-2012 15:42

I can only speak from my personal experience but my Slingshot connection has been able to sustain stable speeds for ages now. I am impressed that their game has been upped so much.

raytaylor

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# 696962 5-Oct-2012 21:36

1080p: I can only speak from my personal experience but my Slingshot connection has been able to sustain stable speeds for ages now. I am impressed that their game has been upped so much.

+1

I have been impressed since day one of them introducing AYCE
Their investment in both web / youtube caching and torrent caching has made almost everything incredibly fast. And with so much content cached, it frees up alot of their international bandwidth for things that arent cached.

It would be awesome to see some of their caching statistics.

Ray Taylor
Taylor Broadband (rural hawkes bay)
www.ruralkiwi.com

There is no place like localhost
For my general guide to extending your wireless network Click Here

richms

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# 697006 6-Oct-2012 00:15

Im not getting any hits on the torrent cache off very popular things off dailytvtorrents, so either im the only person getting 720 so its not on the cache, or its just plain broken for me.

Have restarted the slingshot router several times, made sure that the machines I am using have the slingshot router as its primary DNS, still nothing from the cache range over the last few weeks.

Thats why I ended up having to change the machine over to using my snap connection to finish some shows as it was getting dangerously low on disk space since it only has a 128 gig drive since its limited to the free microsoft VM drive limits.

Richard rich.ms

Ragnor

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# 697279 6-Oct-2012 21:47

Will be interesting to see if Maxnet's results improve dramatically when they migrate customers to EUBA off BUBA.