Telstra Clear vs Xtra

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JAMMAN2110

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#7887 18-May-2006 21:25

A very nice Telstra guy came to my door today, amazing how he actually knew what he was tlaking about (I never got that from xtra so far).

Unfortunately for Xtra, our contract with them expires soon and we are currently looking for other providers.
Im not saying I hate xtra, I think thats too strong of word ... dislike maybe :P

Will post what Im offered in comparison - total savings and perks etc
Hes back tommorow at 4PM If he keeps to that time he has a great chance of making a deal.

ljbade

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#36052 18-May-2006 21:38

Extremely good internet.

If you can get Cable than it will be faster than anything you have seen (no longer do you have to select 'Slow' when watching American streaming video)

Also it is more reliable, i.e. no major outages lasting three days during peak hours!
(if it is taken down for maintanence they make their engineers work at 1am when customers are less likely to care)

Plus they have a super fast Debian Linux mirror which I did a netowrk install from in less than 2 hours!

JAMMAN2110

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#36059 18-May-2006 22:07

I liked the look of some of the plans I saw briefly and the benefits they would provide me - such as freeing up the sky dish by swapping it with saturn.... Ive always wanted to play with one of those and maybe NASA tv :P or maybe Wifi Dish ;)

I was looking at Actrix ... Talked to some people who had switched from Actrix to TC and they seemed happier.

Well anyway Swap Saturn for Sky Digital, Cable for Xtra, Phone for a phone and wow thats a lot of extra money we have in pocket.

barf

643 posts

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#36063 18-May-2006 23:07

my $0.02 is get cable (not ADSL 'telstraclear broadband')

the modem they give you is an ethernet bridge, which is cool. cheap D-link ADSL modem-routers are not as good.

Also AFAIK they honour the ToS nibble in IP headers and dont do any layer-7 filtering.

Sniffing the glue holding the Internet together

ljbade

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#36075 19-May-2006 08:16

If you get Saturn for TV then no more rainfade!
(But you don't get some of the extra's like Playin TV but who uses that junk anyway, a computer always has better games and Sky ones aren't even multiplayer!)

JonC

425 posts

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#36084 19-May-2006 09:41

I'm pretty happy with the Telstra Clear cable broadband service. It's especially good for uploading as you get 2Mbps upstream. I've consistently got 1.8 or 1.9Mbps on the NZ download/upload speed tests and my firewall has reported full 2Mbps when I'm using a download manager (one that splits download files into chunks and does them simultaneously) and that is from international sites.

BTW, has anyone else noticed this sort of behaviour where if you're downloading a single item from an international site it sometimes peaks out at about 40-50 kbytes/s, but if you use a download manager that splits the file into chunks and does simultaneous downloads, you tend to get a lot better speeds. It's like single connections are limited to a low speed over the international connections. Or maybe it's just the site that does that???

sbiddle

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#36087 19-May-2006 11:33

TelstraClear cable is the best residential highspeed internet available in NZ. Period. Phone and TV are also very good, the only real fault with Telstra is their digital TV decoders that only have composite output but it's one of those issues that 90% of people couldn't care less about!

freitasm

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#36089 19-May-2006 11:54

Amen to that. Shame about coverage...

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ljbade

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#36110 19-May-2006 16:17

The reason download managers apeed up downloading is because they open many connections to the remote server at once downlaoding different chunks.

On many servers there is a limit set on the downlaod speed of each connection. This helps ensure everyone gets a fair share of the bandwidth. Otherwise a computer on a T1 connection would swamp the server leaving no bandwidth for people on Cable for example.

By opening many streams you can bypass this limit. But it only works if you connection speed is hiher than the server's cap.

Some website owners don't like downlaod managers as it hogs their server's resources and speed which is unfair to other users. Becasue of this many websites block the use of download managers using a variety of tricks.

JAMMAN2110

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#36114 19-May-2006 16:26

Allright everyone its 27 minutes past 4 and he has not yet showed.
If it gets close to 45

;)
Seems there was a power cut 8 hours ago also.

I'll update this post as it goes along... 29 minutes

EDIT: It took him 35 minutes, he came to the right door, gave me some interesting little fact sheets about a few certain networks...

WE'll be getting back to him next week about our choice on saving $25+ each month <- thats a lot of bread

sbiddle

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#36115 19-May-2006 16:30

freitasm: Amen to that. Shame about coverage...

It will be interesting to see what happens in Wgtn with ULL. TCL already have fibre running right through Tawa and Porirua as well as old fibre originally laid by Clear that follows the railway line. The talk a few years ago when ULL was first on the cards was that they would provide a full phone service using their existing switch as they would only have to install a few cabinets and run a bit more fibre to connct back to their existing network. Of course those people won't get cable internet or TV but with TCL launching IPTV next year any ADSL2+ DSLAMS they install could let them roll out a TV service as well..