Maybe, but I'm not complaining.

nztim:

rb99: I keep defending them because customers of other ISPs also sometimes have issues, but you never see anyone round here saying - Friends don't let friends join Vodafone/Stuff/2Degrees/Voyager/Bigpipe/etc.

That is not true, I say “friends don't let friends Join Vodafone” they are Just as bad IMHO

Due to the population growth here in Mangawhai I'm asked for RSP recommendations regularly, by new residents.  And I will actively discourage potential VF customers from signing with VF.

I do this as a service. And with good reason (well many good reasons.).  VF support is diabolical & not just at the CSR level.

rb99:

I keep defending them because customers of other ISPs also sometimes have issues, but you never see anyone round here saying - Friends don't let friends join Vodafone/Stuff/2Degrees/Voyager/Bigpipe/etc.

I don't think they're the best thing since sliced bread, they do seen to have done some pretty dubious stuff, but they're always a target.

"...support from engineers here on Geekzone."

Isn't this an admission that there is a problem with the official support system for these ISP's?

k1w1k1d:

"...support from engineers here on Geekzone."

Isn't this an admission that there is a problem with the official support system for these ISP's?

Talkiet:

k1w1k1d:

 

"...support from engineers here on Geekzone."

 

Isn't this an admission that there is a problem with the official support system for these ISP's?

 

LOL. No. It's an admission that ISPs are known to employ geeks.

N

It's more of an admission IMHO that the staff personally care about their customers who don't need "basic" support and do all the troubleshooting first before they post here with an issue

And, there was a "geek" on here who worked for MyRepublic who left. Needless to say, even he does not recommend MyRepublic to anyone...

Whinery:

 

https://www.trustpower.co.nz/promotion/ww-details#fmaxww 

 

Trustpower has $134 per month for unlimited gigabit, if you sign up for power (average prices). Some of the items on their bonus list are close to the $3216 you'll pay for the broadband for the length of the contract. Like buying an appliance with 0% interest over 2 years, and getting free broadband.

 

I've heard bad things, but I've been having a good experience with them, since I finally got fibre in November (one of the last UFB1 areas). I had an item on their rewards list on my wish list for a while, but couldn't justify the cost for a new dryer.

 

Plus, though others here disagree, DHCP is a much much better setup for an ISP. No encapsulation, and no issues with authentication. No VLAN and no PPPoE is my preference. But the choice of good signing bonuses was enough to get me to sign up. One year in, no problems I couldn't track down to my fault (I got their router, it's free, and I'm using it as a WiFi extender, and my router for the main router).

 

Don't get MyRepublic.

 

Regards,

 

Former MyRepublic NZ Employee

 

From: https://www.geekzone.co.nz/forums.asp?forumid=165&topicid=274515&page_no=1#2550057

Whinery: I was MyRepublic Employee #5. As much as people complain about them here, it's worse. The CS team tried, but there's only so much you can do when the whole thing is fatally flawed. I could tell stories, but I expect to be sued if I said any more than I already have. Not that they'd win but that they'd do so just to be evil. Paying someone to keep the books to the legal requirements costs more than the penalty? Then simply ignore the requirements, pay the fine and claim they are 100% legal because they paid the fine under the law, as it's "perform or pay" and they paid, so just as legal as everyone else. If they spent as much effort performing as they spend on trying to game the system, they'd be good.

From: https://www.geekzone.co.nz/forums.asp?forumid=165&topicid=272985&page_no=1#2530546

Those are only 2 examples. There are more on here. There are more horror stories. This isn't just because "we don't like them", this is because they're actually seriously dodgy and my own personal experience of them comes from helping people out who (were) with them, and also from what I've seen on here, Reddit and Facebook about them. I've never personally been a customer of theirs and never will.

quickymart:

 

same comment would apply to Bigpipe

 

Bigpipe's Facebook Team is super responsive and a customer of Bigpipe is likely to have Facebook messenger/Bigpipe App along with Data on their phone to get support

michaelmurfy:

 

Whinery:

 

Plus, though others here disagree, DHCP is a much much better setup for an ISP. No encapsulation, and no issues with authentication. No VLAN and no PPPoE is my preference. But the choice of good signing bonuses was enough to get me to sign up. One year in, no problems I couldn't track down to my fault (I got their router, it's free, and I'm using it as a WiFi extender, and my router for the main router).

 

 

Quick sidebar - why do most NZ ISPs use PPPoE rather than DHCP for UFB? It's literally the one part of MyRepublic's (and Trustpower's) service that appeals to me. PPPoE overhead is an irritating thing to deal with when you're trying to route gigabit speeds. Is it just a holdover from the DSL days?

allio:

 

Quick sidebar - why do most NZ ISPs use PPPoE rather than DHCP for UFB? It's literally the one part of MyRepublic's (and Trustpower's) service that appeals to me. PPPoE overhead is an irritating thing to deal with when you're trying to route gigabit speeds. Is it just a holdover from the DSL days?

 

With a modern router the overhead of PPPoE vs IPoE is very minimal 

PPPoE does have an advantage with a few routers (Namely Sonicwall) which drop all active connections when WAN DHCP lease renews

nztim:

 

allio:

 

Quick sidebar - why do most NZ ISPs use PPPoE rather than DHCP for UFB? It's literally the one part of MyRepublic's (and Trustpower's) service that appeals to me. PPPoE overhead is an irritating thing to deal with when you're trying to route gigabit speeds. Is it just a holdover from the DSL days?

 

 

With a modern router the overhead of PPPoE vs IPoE is very minimal 

 

PPPoE does have an advantage with a few routers (Namely Sonicwall) which drop all active connections when WAN DHCP lease renews

 

PPPoE has so many advantages over IPoE / DHCP from an ISP perspective... But the main one is:

When moving customers from one handover to another or making IP addressing changes (dynamic <-> static etc) you can be guaranteed that the connection will drop and will be back up and running in less than 90 seconds, and if that change is done at 3am the numbers who notice are minimal.

From personal experience I have seen this happen with 60k+ subscribers coming back up in less than 3 mins.

To achieve this with IPoE/DHCP you need to have a super low DHCP lease time (1 minute) which can cause all sorts of additional load on your authentication server and even with a short lease time some DHCP clients (aka the home router / CPE) don't honour the DHCP lease timer or just fail if they get a whole new IP. This results in more people being offline, and them requiring a reboot of the router to bring it back online. That problem occurs very infrequently with PPPoE whereas is very dependent on the device with IPoE/DHCP.

Also with IPoE/DHCP you need to provision subnets and routers (ie a /22 and you have a default gateway of x.x.x.1) and depending on the BNG and router you can get broadcast traffic to all other devices in the same subnet which you don't get with PPPoE. With PPPoE you don't have "subnets" as it is a PPPoE link to the BNG, so the routing / broadcast issues go away.

So in short PPPoE is awesome for ISPs, and not really a problem for customers as every router support PPPoE.

BarTender:

 

Also with IPoE/DHCP you need to provision subnets and routers (ie a /22 and you have a default gateway of x.x.x.1) and depending on the BNG and router you can get broadcast traffic to all other devices in the same subnet which you don't get with PPPoE. With PPPoE you don't have "subnets" as it is a PPPoE link to the BNG, so the routing / broadcast issues go away.

 

So in short PPPoE is awesome for ISPs, and not really a problem for customers as every router support PPPoE.

 

This is probably the biggest gain for an RSP, not having a /22 or somthing with all that ARP traffic floating around

and as I said above, most modern routers have enough grunt to route PPPoE and 1gig

Those are completely sensible reasons. Thanks for writing up the explanations.

nztim:

 

quickymart:

 

same comment would apply to Bigpipe

 

 

Bigpipe's Facebook Team is super responsive and a customer of Bigpipe is likely to have Facebook messenger/Bigpipe App along with Data on their phone to get support

 

For sure, but not much good if you don't have any other connection. Is My Republic's Facebook team any good (do they even have one)?

quickymart:

 

For sure, but not much good if you don't have any other connection.

 

IMHO a customer who does not have any other connection (e.g. a smart phone with Facebook Messanger or the Bigpipe App) would be with Spark not their discount brand Bigpipe which has a full support by phone :)

quickymart:

 

Is My Republic's Facebook team any good (do they even have one)?

 

Probably not (on both counts) :)