Thank you all for the warning - Slingshot 'AYCE' sign-up abandoned

Forums › 2degrees (including Slingshot, Orcon, Flip, Stuff Fibre, MyRepublic, 2talk and Vocus) › Thank you all for the warning - Slingshot 'AYCE' sign-up abandoned

dhazen

63 posts

Master Geek

#72938 5-Dec-2010 16:26

Our story so far...

On Friday (December 3, 2010 for those of you living in the future) I received a call from a Slingshot telemarketer who offered me an "All You Can Eat" (AYCE) plan which would provide me with un-capped high-speed broadband service, along with phone service for $120.00 per month. I asked her to confirm the "hi-speed, un-capped" part of the offer which she did.

I fired off my happy post here and then read with horror the helpful warnings that followed.

The next day I trolled through even more posts and did a few speed tests until mid-day when I called Slingshot and asked them for a guarantee on my performance.

After a long-ish wait in their queue a Slingshot help-desk guy told me they give no such guarantees so I asked him to cancel my application for an account with them -- apparently one needs to "Abandon" the request rather than "cancel" the request which, if completed means being yanked off the internet alltogether, whereas "Abandoned" means returned to previous provider. Help-desk guy agreed and offered to put me on to one of their technical guys to explain how it worked.

The technical guy was most helpful and explained Slingshot will give priority to people who are actually at their screens working (this means browsing, VOIP, email etc.) over people not at their screen (ie. P2P). As I spend a lot on time on P2P downloading educational and inspriational material, I would get the worst service.

In my view, I've been lied to - I was sold a product based on the promise of un-capped high speed service when in fact I would be unlikely to see anything like that. I doubt that the telemarker who sold me on this deal knew much about broadband technology, or "packet-shaping" as we called it when I worked at Voyager, but the management of Slingshot most certainly do, and they are the ones I hold responsible for this situation.

I wonder if any regulatory bodies would be interested in this situation?

Thanks again for all the warnings.

-- Deck

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3892 posts

Uber Geek

#413059 5-Dec-2010 16:38

"I wonder if any regulatory bodies would be interested in this situation? "

I'm going to guess the current answer is NO.

You got an ok outcome which is good.

The RB's seem sick of the net/telco space in my view.

However send an email to the coms minister and the comcom and let us know what the responses are. Would be interesting to see.

oldmaknz

536 posts

Ultimate Geek

#413062 5-Dec-2010 16:53

Slingshot's own staff are pushing for AYCE closure. It's that bad.

DonGould

3892 posts

Uber Geek

#413073 5-Dec-2010 17:15

maknz: Slingshot's own staff are pushing for AYCE closure. It's that bad.

And so they should: http://www.telecomwholesale.co.nz/tw/public/website/wholesale/products/!ut/p/c5/vZHbCoJAGISfxSf4_600vFRcT7guppbuTdgBUSs3CEWfvtO1XkUzlwPzDQwIePlWdFVZPKr2VlwgA6HtdU64bhID-cpU0dOoGaipvXQQYQcZrvZxPUhvbMZNPUYLFvheaKU9s2zOagcZ1f24uQ8xfQSJlfeMShY2hJOjTrZ2RA0u0pMbKa8uMUPDUP3mOCEDIQexnl5LIPnh2lmWg39kaT9l-SDKS3t4f29C6LbXM8hrJ90x-_hsKMoTi_KBdw!!/dl3/d3/L2dBISEvZ0FBIS9nQSEh/?pcid=3028a50043b4187dbbb8ffac002ac5ce

"WVS Handovers dimensioned at 96kbps per end-user compared to 45kbps for our other best efforts broadband products"

Do the math - you can only move averaged 15gb/m/user though that.

AYCE is like saying 'unlimited' which it clearly can't be unless they're not using the TW product.

dhazen

63 posts

Master Geek

#413087 5-Dec-2010 18:50

I'll chase this up a bit more and report back.

thanks,

- Deck

dhazen

63 posts

Master Geek

#413095 5-Dec-2010 19:06

Update:

I've sent this to the Advertising Standards Authority ( http://www.asa.co.nz/index.php) and I'll let you know if they come back.

-dh

I called slingshot and asked if they could provide me with a guarantee of performance and they said "no" they could not. I then talked to one of their technicians who informed me that people who use the internet interactively (browsing, Voice over IP phone, email, etc.) get their bandwidth at a higher priority than those who use Peer to Peer file sharing. I asked, as a P2P user, what kind of performance I could receive and was told the performance would not be very good. I have since heard similar complaints from other Slingshot users. (http://www.geekzone.co.nz/forums.asp?forumid=81&topicid=67884)
In my view Slingshot promised me high speed internet service when they knew they could not provide it.

sbiddle

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Biddle Corp

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#413098 5-Dec-2010 19:07

DonGould:
maknz: Slingshot's own staff are pushing for AYCE closure. It's that bad.

And so they should: http://www.telecomwholesale.co.nz/tw/public/website/wholesale/products/!ut/p/c5/vZHbCoJAGISfxSf4_600vFRcT7guppbuTdgBUSs3CEWfvtO1XkUzlwPzDQwIePlWdFVZPKr2VlwgA6HtdU64bhID-cpU0dOoGaipvXQQYQcZrvZxPUhvbMZNPUYLFvheaKU9s2zOagcZ1f24uQ8xfQSJlfeMShY2hJOjTrZ2RA0u0pMbKa8uMUPDUP3mOCEDIQexnl5LIPnh2lmWg39kaT9l-SDKS3t4f29C6LbXM8hrJ90x-_hsKMoTi_KBdw!!/dl3/d3/L2dBISEvZ0FBIS9nQSEh/?pcid=3028a50043b4187dbbb8ffac002ac5ce

"WVS Handovers dimensioned at 96kbps per end-user compared to 45kbps for our other best efforts broadband products"

Do the math - you can only move averaged 15gb/m/user though that.

AYCE is like saying 'unlimited' which it clearly can't be unless they're not using the TW product.

In many cases this isn't the big bottleneck that people make it out to be. It's also a 15 minute average.

DonGould

3892 posts

Uber Geek

#413101 5-Dec-2010 19:12

sbiddle:In many cases this isn't the big bottleneck that people make it out to be. It's also a 15 minute average.

Can you explain what 15 min average means?

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dhazen

63 posts

Master Geek

#413133 5-Dec-2010 20:25

... and I've sent this complaint to the Commerce Commission regard the Fair Trading Act, and the "Bait Advertising" they've engaged in. ( see http://www.comcom.govt.nz/bait-advertising). I also considered the section under "fitness for service" section.

============

A Slingshot telemarketer offered me high-speed un-capped internet service for $120.00. I asked the telemarketer, and her supervisor to re-confirm the high-speed and un-capped performance of the internet connection being offered. The both reconfirmed.
I found out after further investigation that the performance of the line is very poor and not "high-speed" as promised. There have been very many other complaints about this service from Slingshot in internet-related forums like Geekzone.co.nz .

In my view I've been the victim of "Bait Advertising" as described on your web page http://www.comcom.govt.nz/bait-advertising/ and I think Slingshot should be compelled to stop advertising this product and release any existing customers from any obligation to continue paying for it if they don't wish to.

Kyanar

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#413135 5-Dec-2010 20:30

DonGould:
sbiddle:In many cases this isn't the big bottleneck that people make it out to be. It's also a 15 minute average.

Can you explain what 15 min average means?

It means that when you say "15gb/month per user" averaged, that's not correct. The 96kb/s is an average over 15 minutes, which means that when you consider how many users are not using their connection every minute of the day, there's a lot of room to move in off peak times. At least, that is my interpretation.

sbiddle

30853 posts

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#413148 5-Dec-2010 20:50

The biggest issue appears that Telecom have started enforcing the 45kbps limit at handover points. This has previously been dimensioned at 32kbps per user however in many cases no enforcement was happening. This was increased to 45kbps during the UBA migration.

45kbps still represents a relatively high contention ratio (around 225:1 if you aim for a 10Mbps target speed), and ISP's who offer flat rate plans only need a handful of users who are torrenting 24/7 to cause themselves massive problems.

DonGould

3892 posts

Uber Geek

#413182 5-Dec-2010 21:57

http://www.bowenvale.pointclark.net/wp/t.nz.dim.xls

Can you point out what's wrong with my maths?

I've just made the assumption that you're pulling 45k CIR for 24/7, which gives you 14.2GBytes per month per user.

Sure if you have 10 users and 9 of them are doing 2gb/month then the last user can have more than 14.2GB... but what if the user base line is 10GB, then how many users can have more per month? What if 5 users want 20gb and 5 want 10gb?

I don't understand how you can offer 'all you can eat' on a 10mbit link with a .045mbit CIR. Sorry if I just seem dumb, can someone explain more clearly?

richms

28168 posts

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#413240 6-Dec-2010 00:09

DonGould: "I wonder if any regulatory bodies would be interested in this situation? "

I'm going to guess the current answer is NO.

You got an ok outcome which is good.

The RB's seem sick of the net/telco space in my view.

However send an email to the coms minister and the comcom and let us know what the responses are. Would be interesting to see.

Aaactually I have heard back from my email to the commerce comission wanting to arrange a time to talk to me about the internet with slingshot, so you should get onto that asap IMO.

Richard rich.ms

Ragnor

8219 posts

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Trusted

#413447 6-Dec-2010 13:45

Your Line > Cabinet/Exchange > Backhaul > ISP Handover point/links > ISP Core > ISP transit domestic/international etc

Backhaul is not the issue it once was because even though it's 32kpbs CIR most new cabinets have 1Gbps+ fibre backhaul to regional aggregation network points and presumably fibre from the RAN's to the big locations where most ISP's do their handover has been fairly well upgraded now.

So basically there seems to be plenty of backhaul bandwidth available to for traffic to "burst" and use.

Handover links are a big issue!

Each ISP has handover dimensioned at 45kbps per subscriber + growth factor.

So if you are an ISP with 1000 customers and expect 10% growth in the next 6 months you get a handover link with a max throughput of ( 1000 * 45 ) * 1.1 aka ~45Mbit delivered over Gigabit fibre.

This is straight up nasty and appears to be nothing other than artificial scarcity.

It even seems like Telecom cutting off their nose to spite their face since all new Telecom retail connections since 1st Jan 2010 have to use the same Telecom wholesale services (like handover links).

wongtop

563 posts

Ultimate Geek

#413463 6-Dec-2010 14:00

Handover links are a big issue!

Each ISP has handover dimensioned at 45kbps per subscriber + growth factor.

So if you are an ISP with 1000 customers and expect 10% growth in the next 6 months you get a handover link with a max throughput of ( 1000 * 45 ) * 1.1 aka ~45Mbit delivered over Gigabit fibre.

This is straight up nasty and appears to be nothing other than artificial scarcity.

It even seems like Telecom cutting off their nose to spite their face since all new Telecom retail connections since 1st Jan 2010 have to use the same Telecom wholesale services (like handover links).

I don't understand why Telecom wholesale are doing this. Shouldn't they be trying to help out their customers (ISPs)? Isn't this just an artificial restriction that they are pretty much inviting the ComCom to come down on them (again) like a tonne of bricks?

richms

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#413477 6-Dec-2010 14:12

Dont blame telecom, blame the commerce commission.

It seems ridiculous that telecom are using those low specs for their own customers when any other ISP can put their own dslam in and do what they want for backhaul, yet telecom are choosing to use the low quality option they are forced to sell to other ISPs.

Has any other ISP negotiated another contract that has higher backhaul or are they all using the service dimensioned by beancounters at the commerce commision?

Richard rich.ms

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