I think they have sensible group policies and they have sensible per user policies for traffic management.
The unknown factor is how bad is the contention ratio, how oversold is the international capacity which you can only really find out from asking something who's on Orcon (not me).
I've never experienced what I could conclude as being shaping/limiting on Orcon. However, if you plan on using your connection after 4 pm, and connecting to sites in the US or Europe, you won't really be able to tell the difference on Orcon. Contention during peak hours is abysmal, and packetloss sensitive applications like online games are in many cases unplayable (unless you play on NZ and maybe Aus servers). Download rates seldom fall below 1 Mbps (at least for me), so web browsing and standard quality video streaming are still feasible. I suspect they could still do a lot better with their prioritisation rules, however, especially for gamers.
I can't really recommend Orcon (though I still haven't got around to switching to someone else) unless you ignore the issue of international bandwidth contention. I'd like to see them stick around and up their game, but right now there are much better options for moderate to heavy users (like Telecom and TelstraClear).
They should get a PeerApp cache in there and offer free off peak, unlike Xnet and Slingshot based on reading those posts I reckon Orcon has the proper hardware to do free off peak properly.
Free off peak is still the best way to get downloaders and torrenterss to schedule their downloads overnight it just needs to be traffic managed properly which neither Xnet or Slingshot did with their cheaper/nastier hardware.
Getting heavy downloaders to shift their downloads to offpeek and running a p2p cache like peer app could dramatically improve their peak time performance for regular users/gamers/people using voip.
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#31351 13-Mar-2009 23:01
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