Slingshot woes...

Forums › 2degrees (including Slingshot, Orcon, Flip, Stuff Fibre, MyRepublic, 2talk and Vocus) › Slingshot woes...

Splatgore

3 posts

Wannabe Geek

#70544 26-Oct-2010 14:28

Hi there,

I have a question regarding Slingshot’s piss poor service and I’d be grateful for any advice anyone may have.

In a nutshell, here is my situation – I live with 2 other people and we are all pretty heavy online gamers (mainly WoW and TF2). We also download TV shows, somewhere in the region of 2-3gb a week depending on the season (this includes Grand Prix which are about 1.5gb each…blech!) and then there is your usual browsing / VOIP on top of that.

We used to be on the 25gb plan with Slingshot but found ourselves having to buy extra bandwidth because we kept chewing through it at a ridiculous rate. It doesn’t help that Blizzard stream updates to each computer which means we have 3 different PCs downloading the same identical MASSIVE game updates every few days.

Naturally we decided that the best thing to do would be to go onto the All You Can Eat plan to reduce our extra costs when it came to splurging out on bandwidth. My housemate handled the account side of things and was told by the customer rep that we would still be at max speed and our gaming would be completely unaffected. Well, after 3 weeks or so on the new plan I am calling BS on that! Torrent speeds are ridiculously slow to the extent that TV shows have to be downloaded overnight as opposed to downloaded in the time it takes to make a sandwich and a cup of tea (small shows like 30 Rock, naturally).

Gaming, well, it isn’t impossible to play games now but it sure as hell isn’t easy or fun. I find with TF2 I am pretty much restricted to a handful of servers which are either packed or deserted. I don’t know if this is as a result of living in NZ or if it is because of being on Slingshot but I can live with it. WoW though! Sweet Jesus! Since going onto the new plan raiding has become completely impossible. It seems to be a combination of everyone in the raids addons spamming my connection for data requests. Guilty addons appear to be Gearscore (those who have not upgraded to GS Lite), Recount and a handful of others. I’ve done everything possible on my side to limit these intrusions up to the point where I have to put the entire raid on ignore during intensive fights otherwise I face disconnection. I can’t even log on to the game if one of my housemates has a torrent up and running, even if the torrent, and this is no exaggeration, is going at 9k downstream and 3k upstream.

My question is – What should I do about it? Obviously we can’t stay on this ‘All You Can Eat’ nonsense because the service is laughably dire and I will end up tearing out what little is left of my hair when it comes to raiding or downloading torrents. Going back to 25gb plan would seem to be the sensible option but I’m inclined to ditch Slingshot altogether. Has anyone else faced this problem and, if so, what did they do about it? We hassled Slingshot about the issues and they said that our connection was fine and there was nothing wrong with their service.

richms

28191 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#395813 26-Oct-2010 15:01

Slingshot posted that if you were not happy you could move back to the other plans without penalty. That didnt apply to the naked plan which I am on and I would be stuck with a 24 month term on calling and a landline I dont want so never moved over to AYCE.

The others are not really any better tho, the only decent speeds on torrents come from the slingshot cache, so if you stick to popular torrents from the likes of eztv then they will usually come in fast, but private trackers etc are 100kB/s tops during the day and down to 30-50 in the evening, and that 30-50 will cripple your connection for other stuff - their proxy or whatever will just hang with connections half open till they time out or you giveup and mash F5 a few times.

Im only still on them because I cant afford to run 2 connections simultaneously to evaluate other ISPs, and the only ones I know to not suck would end up doubling my spend or more. Im using the zero rated backup service, once my initial backup is complete I will consider other ISPs.

Check out the slingshot forums at http://forums.slingshot.co.nz for pages and pages of non indexed by google complaints about their service levels etc.

Richard rich.ms

unclehorse

33 posts

Geek

#395816 26-Oct-2010 15:04

Fear not,we are all experiencing issues with Slingshot at the moment,everyone in the South Island is experiencing outages,one minute your online the next the line is dead,they have put up a message on their faults line but this has been going on for 3 days now and as none of the other isp providers are having problems you have to ask yourself what the hells going on.Should it continue I would expect this to make the news or maybe close up as there are a lot of unhappy customers,interestly the All You Can Eat plan seems to have caused problems for them as well,no doubt they must have been aware of the amount of traffic this would cause but at the same time they should have prepared for this,still they do offer the best prices for broadband of any of the providers.

Splatgore

3 posts

Wannabe Geek

#395875 26-Oct-2010 16:15

Thanks for the replies! I might go and post on the Slingshot official forums and see what, if anything, they have to say for themselves. I noticed that another user posted something similar about being mislead during the CSR's pitch.

I'll be seriously annoyed if I'm stuck with this lame duck for much longer. :)

NZCrusader

646 posts

Ultimate Geek

#396284 27-Oct-2010 14:03

@ OP.

Its an unlimited data plan. It can go up to full line speed, but most of the time its probably not going to.

If you think that you will get the same performance 24/7 out of an unlimited plan as you will out of a capped plan, then you are a fool.

If unlimited plans operated the way you seem to expect them to, then they would just get rid of capped plans wouldnt they.

You should also take note that ADSL services are based on Best Effort.

Btw I dont have any gaming problems on slingshot. Pings are fine and no lag. Same goes for my friends on SS.
What ever you are smoking, I suggest you quit it.

NZ / AU Battlefield 4 Gaming Community
http://www.sonsofvalour.net/forums/forum.php

NZCrusader

646 posts

Ultimate Geek

#396485 27-Oct-2010 20:27

c71931f:
NZCrusader:

Btw I dont have any gaming problems on slingshot. Pings are fine and no lag. Same goes for my friends on SS.
What ever you are smoking, I suggest you quit it.

I suggest you stop being a dick.

Alot of people on Slingshot have high ping etc, you just need to browse here, GP & the Slingshot forum to know that. But like you, i don't have ping etc problems.. & i only get lag issues when my ps3 is far enough away from the router that it's got one bar of reception lol

Im not being a dick, im being realistic, especially about the plans.
If users are experiencing lag, then it must be their own handover point ( I hear there is 29 of them =O ) or personal line.

Hmm also another thing I see is that people * mainly flatting people * are expecting to share the internet & also on the AYCE plan to play games, torrent & stream at the same time.

Unless they have a good router, connection speed & QoS, there will be lag. The router alone needs to be able to handle multiple connections & p2p is not good for ping times & network performance. The basic routers which many have will probably not exceed in giving optimal performance in these scenarios, and most probably do not have QoS set up either.

* For signal strength just buy a wireless repeater. That should boost your bars.

NZ / AU Battlefield 4 Gaming Community
http://www.sonsofvalour.net/forums/forum.php

Splatgore

3 posts

Wannabe Geek

#396720 28-Oct-2010 10:19

Hi NZCrusader,

There is no call to be rude. My expectations of the AYCE bundle were not unrealistic - I didn't expect to have the same level of performance on my torrents but neither did I expect to see a degradation of more than a 1000% on torrent speed at any time of the day, not just peak time.

I wouldn't expect to be able to play lag free games online whilst someone else in the house downloaded a torrent at 100/5 kb/s (downstream/upstream) but to be unable to even connect to a server when a torrent is running at 9/3 kb/s???? That is pathetic and is only marginally better than 56k. I'd also expect to be able to take part in raids and not get disconnected because one of my other housemates is playing WoW as well. Again, this performance is what I'd expect if I was on a package which imposed restrictions on people who had used up their bandwidth allowance for the month, not on a package which boasted unlimited bandwidth and same line speed or whatever their pitch was.

I have a good router with an extremely strong signal, not one of the crappy little boxes that ISPs tend to offer to new customers.

This isn't a case of 'boohoo - I can't download at 700kb/s anymore', this is a case of 'my connection all around has gone from being reasonable to being utter poo' and, if I was paying less $$$ per month then I might be a little less incensed about the whole thing but the fact is I pay more $$$ per month for a connection that doesn't perform even half as well as the previous CHEAPER package.

richms

28191 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#396854 28-Oct-2010 14:40

When things are bad, try disconnecting and reconnecting the PPP, that seems to reset the limting, and after a while slingshot seem to put you in a naughty pool. I was not seeing anything on torrents last night, till I reconnected the router, and suddenly the cache connected on 4 of them and I got linespeed and pages were loading again.

Seems to need doing every couple of weeks or so.

Richard rich.ms