Anything BAD to say about ADSL24 or FALCONNET?

WOOHOOO!!!

After over 2 months of Supanet problems and 87 email complaints I finally gave up trying to get back the decent service Supanet offered when they started. So 21 calls later trying to cancel the service (well over 5 hours total wasted time listening to a recorded message telling me how important my call was to them not to mention many broken promises to ring me back) I finally got my MAC code from Supanet!!

So I am going over to Entanet and have shortlisted ADSL24 and Falconnet. The information I have found so far is all good and no bad which isn't bad, it's good but it would be good to hear the bad as well as the good so I can decide how good or bad they really are (sorry - I am in a mildly delerious euphoric state at leaving Supanet even though it cost hundreds to free my hostage MAC).

What I am keen to avoid is starting out with a provider who offers an excellent service only for it to deterioate over time to the point where I would be as desparate to leave as I was with 'Supa'net. Rupert Englander has given me much hope for Falconnet's customer service and ADSL24 comes very highly recommended too but how will things be as more and more disenchanted mainstream customers in serch of honest, reliable connectivity migrate to Entanet providers? Will they for example still be posting and replying in person when they have hundreds of thousands of customers? After all there are a huge amount of people out there craving a decent (indeed ANY) level of customer service. Won't they all like me be moving over to Entanet in the future? Maybe we should all keep it under out respective hats! :-)

Cheers! Boggie

I don't see any reason for things to change. As more customers join this allows Entanet to add more bandwidth, more support staff etc

I hear what you are saying but I wouln't get too hung up on it as if things change it is only a one month contract (with most resellers). No being held to ransom at Entanet.

As for resellers they are all much the same, just the extras they offer can be slightly different. I'm with UKFSN and have never really needed their support that often to be honest as the few technical issues I have had were resolved directly by Entanet over the phone. The only time I ever really needed to use the reseller was when switching from an office to home service, and I found their response to be very quick.

I joined Enternet early July after reading glowing reports about them. However, whilst I am getting speeds of 6 to 7 on weekday early evenings, the speed drops significantly at weekends and after 10pm to 1 or 2 megs. Enternet, when I phoned them said that there is nothing that can be done about it as it's because so many peaople are downloading during those times and there is a contention ratio of 50:1.

Am now thinking about BE Unlimited who say there is no Contention ratio. I would be interested to here from anyone who is using them.

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Am now thinking about BE Unlimited who say there is no Contention ratio.

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Which is of course nonsense. This would require a connection to serve 100 users to be 1600 Mbits/s which I suggest is much larger than the reality.

They don't have many customers so their network isn't overstressed but you do see some speed issues in the Be forum from time to time.

How much monthly bandwidth do you need?

Be customers/activated exchanges = ~40 last time I had both figures. So I don't think they have much contention at the moment.

the speed drops significantly at weekends and after 10pm to 1 or 2 megs.

Is it possible you're seeing the effects of Enta's ALT (anti-loss tool), which purposely cuts back speeds to prevent the centrals from overloading when off-peak kicks in.
Overloading centrals affect pings and packet loss, and can lead to random speeds (what users of many other ISPs suffer from).

A helpful hint....If you find yourself on a slow central (that's suffering a bit more from the short-term speed limit), you can often switch to another by restarting the PPPoA (or ISP) connection in your router.
Some routers allow this (Netgears, Belkins, Speedtouch, 2-wire). Others don't.
If yours doesn't, a re-sync or reboot will be needed.
If you take the situation now (23:07) the speeds across the 5 centrals are; 3.7Mbps, 5.2Mbps, 5.3Mbps, 4.4Mbps and 7.2Mbps (the 7.2Mbps being down to BT's inability to assign users to less congested centrals).
So, if you were on the 3.7Mbps, you could get on the 5.3Mbps or 7.2Mbps one, by restarting the PPPoA session.

Because of Entanet's massive 300GB off-peak allowance, they have a large number of uber-downloaders, who all seem to start their download queues at 10pm.
You can see the effects of this here. Notice the massive upwards spike at exactly 10pm (this is all the download queues starting).

You'll notice, from the graph, that it only lasts until midnight (sometimes a little before, sometimes a little after).
You'll also notice, again from the graph, that the loading on the centrals (blue line) is well below the capacity (red line).

So, in order to solve a two-hour peak in demand, Enta could do one of several things: -
1. Forcibly stagger the off-peak start, for their users, to smooth out the vertical spike at 10pm.
2. Provision loads more capacity, that will remain unused for 22 hours a day, just to cover the two hours after 10pm.
3. Throttle back speeds, during the short periods of high demand, so those users with time critical applications (gaming, VOIP, etc.) don't suffer, whilst the downloads just slow down a bit for a couple of hours (simple browsing is not affected too much, as it's pretty difficult to notice speeds above 2-3Mbps anyway).

They chose option 3.

If you have no use for the 300GB off-peak, and can cope with around 30GB, you'd probably be better off elsewhere.
If you need the high capacity, go to someone like BE (although there are a lot of postings about poor speeds there, also).
If your exchange hasn't been unbundled for BE, you're already using the next best thing.

Edited by adebov (Wed 18-Jul-07 23:09:57)

Thank you adabov, yarwell and random jointer for your interesting and useful replies. They do indeed place a different perspective on the issues. In view of these I think I will stay with Enternet for a while longer to see how it goes!

Thanks again.

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Because of Entanet's massive 300GB off-peak allowance, they have a large number of uber-downloaders, who all seem to start their download queues at 10pm.

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Downloaders never are the sharpest knives in the box

I would save Entanet have a small proportion of users going anywhere near 300 GB off-peak, as the bandwidth isn't there to support more than a few %.