New slingshot customer - disappointed :(

Forums › 2degrees (including Slingshot, Orcon, Flip, Stuff Fibre, MyRepublic, 2talk and Vocus) › New slingshot customer - disappointed :(

spazz

266 posts

Ultimate Geek

#36421 24-Jun-2009 21:48

Switched from Vodafone.

They stuffed up the install, and we had 3 days without phone, fax, or internet.

Great start.

Now, despite line rates of ~7mb, I'm getting ~2mbps throughput (off speedtest.net). Torrent speeds seem to be capped at 20k/s.

Really, really unimpressed. Is this consistent with other users' experiences?

http://walkingisoverrated.com

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Mad Scientist
29763 posts

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Lifetime subscriber

#228112 24-Jun-2009 21:56

have you read the other recent posts? that's about right. as for most consumer stuff you have satisfied and dissatisfied customers ... some more towards one type and some the other

spazz

266 posts

Ultimate Geek

#228116 24-Jun-2009 22:01

Haha, too true. But I guess you always think it'll never happen to *you*, right?

http://walkingisoverrated.com

Nimma

98 posts

Master Geek

#228122 24-Jun-2009 22:22

That's unfortunate, I've been connecting at about 3.0MB and downloading torrents at 200-300kb/s after a 2 hour switch over period. Very much the same speeds I got with vodafone red. Don't mean to patronise if you already know but have you opened up the ports on your router/modem for torrents and have a torrent with decent seed ratio?

Also try download a large file from a fast site as another speed check

spazz

266 posts

Ultimate Geek

#228126 24-Jun-2009 22:27

Yar yar ports all open. Getting green face on Azureus which means NAT is sweet. Even downloading the same movie (legitimately!) through iTunes store is slow slow slow :(

http://walkingisoverrated.com

eXDee

4032 posts

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#228136 24-Jun-2009 23:26

Slingshot is known to use very aggressive traffic shaping, not sure if its been toned down recently though, but any comment on it to slingshot seems to be stonewalled, or at least it used to. Correct me if im wrong - i'd like to be.

Back a while ago, slingshot used to be a top ISP for gaming, high speeds etc, now they seem to have messed up priorities. Again, correct me if im wrong - i would like to change how i see this ISP.

To check if its the torrent thats the problem, pop open a torrent of the latest Ubuntu release, i get 900kb/s on that and thats only after a minute or two of starting it.

I suggest you refer to this thread, it looks like they have fixed some things, 1gkar seemed to be quite happy but it'd be nice to see more feedback: http://www.geekzone.co.nz/forums.asp?ForumId=81&TopicId=33289

Detruire

1771 posts

Uber Geek

#228141 25-Jun-2009 01:18

~30kBps sounds consistent with my own speeds.

Speeds are definitely worse now than they were a couple of months ago (I'm finding it difficult to exceed 120kBps using non-P2P downloads whereas before it was ~200kBps)

rm *

Ragnor

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#228204 25-Jun-2009 11:00

You get what you pay for... you've gone for the cheapest bargain basement provider so effectively you are paying for a Charade and expecting a Ferrari.

If you want better performance be prepared to pay a bit more and go with Telecom, Telstra, Maxnet or Snap.

GoodSync

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61 posts

Master Geek

#228227 25-Jun-2009 12:14

Yeah I lost phone and Internet for 24hrs when switching to The Next Big Thing (Phone and Internet). I think the problem was caused by the engineers at the exchange (Vodafone,Telecom,Downer,Chorus or who ever).

I have contacted Slingshot via the contact us page with a billing enquiry (not getting first month free) 3 times and not had a reply.

As for the speeds. I am getting 7M down and 700k up using speedtest.net.

I think they may have issues with international data rates as pulling iso from ftp.citylink.co.nz was quick however getting an ISO from an overseas site took 7 hours.

Web access appears snappy due to their transparent proxy cache which appears to be working well at the moment.

I don't use torrents much so I am happy to see it "throttled" to allow the rest of us to surf at a reasonable rate

Slingshot

1004 posts

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Slingshot

#228253 25-Jun-2009 13:31

spazz, best contact techincal support. Sorry I'm just marketing ;)

ad, can you PM your account number and I'll follow up on first month free. You definitely should have had an answer at least.

If you have the incident number what would be great too.

www.slingshot.co.nz

www.twitter.com/SlingshotNZ

https://www.facebook.com/SlingshotNZ

tardtasticx

3075 posts

Uber Geek

#228295 25-Jun-2009 16:08

ha. be happy, my speeds are usually around 250 - 300, sometimes even less. telecom doesnt seem to care because its a little faster than dial up and technicly classes as broadband.

Detruire

1771 posts

Uber Geek

#228325 25-Jun-2009 17:28

250kBps?

A LITTLE faster?

You've got to be joking. That's ~50 times the speed of dialup!

rm *

tardtasticx

3075 posts

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#228333 25-Jun-2009 18:11

Detruire: 250kBps?

A LITTLE faster?

You've got to be joking. That's ~50 times the speed of dialup!

im proving a point here. lol. but so many people on here moan and *(female dog)* when their speeds drop to 2mbps, im just saying anyways to the origional poster, be happy with that speed

Detruire

1771 posts

Uber Geek

#228668 26-Jun-2009 20:50

I agree that 2Mbps isn't anything to moan about during off-peak or a couple of hours on-peak.

Unfortunately, speeds on SS drop far lower during on-peak hours.

rm *

1gkar

722 posts

Ultimate Geek

#229647 30-Jun-2009 17:35

Seeing as how eXDee got me involved

, here's my 1.78cents+GST:

I was lucky, it seems in that my changeover went perfectly. I got good text notifications prior to the event & when it would happen: it did. I get very good (I would say average D/L speeds. Have just tested: 15202kbps (36ms ping) on Slingshot server; 4.84mbps (242ms ping) off Miami server.

I thought there were issues with the torrents (but was not worried about low speeds there), so I checked the ports to be open, then downloaded OpenOffice which downloaded at over 340kbps, indicating it was probably the seeding ratio of the torrents I was downloading.

I had an issue with being charged twice for a 5GB data block. Just recently (have not even had the chance to post on this, yet) discovered, I also was not receiving my free month. PMed Scott (Slingshot) on both issues & they were resolved just like that: he is doing a brilliant job.

I do admit I have noticed at times the streaming TV channel I watch is buffering (I think, as I'm not sure how to diagnose that yet) as it hangs momentarily, at times in the evening. Other times it is perfect.

Overall, apart from the issues I have stated, I am happy with my changeover: a large part of that is directly due to Scott's intervention at rectifying issues (caused by others higher up the Slingshot foodchain, I would suspect).

Silverstone LC14 HTPC Case/Intel E4600 CPU/GA-EP35-DS3 MOBO/Asus EN9500GT graphics/2GB RAM/total 2TB HDD space/HVR-2200 & 2X 150MCE tuner cards/LG GGC-H20L BD Drive/MCE2005/Mediaportal/TVServer 1.1.0Final/LG 55"3D LED-TV/Denon AVR-1803 receiver/X1 projector

webwat

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#236324 17-Jul-2009 01:11

Well my slingshot connection is pretty sad too, although I am not complaining about torrents being excessively slow (they are, but I understand its low priority). I switched the router setting to PPPoE since connected to a vodafone node on an unbundled line (next big thing...) and the throughput on Slingshot speedtest shot up to 15Mbps compared to 2 megs. Great, but every other NZ speed test runs between 2Mbps and 5mbps, with international speeds under 2 megs. Looks like they are short on international bandwidth, and maybe APE is running a bit slow these days. No suprise really.

Disappointed in their customer service. They got the username wrong and cant change it, seems to be linked to their provisioning system because they would have to disconnect everything to change the username. They forgot to send the free router. They take a week to reply to help emails. And they still havent enabled the phone feature requested. Not great at all.

Time to find a new industry!

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