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-------------------------------------------------------------- This story was printed from ZDNet Australia. --------------------------------------------------------------
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Australian ISP Shootout September 16, 2001 URL: http://www.zdnet.com.au/reviews/software/internet/soa/Australian-ISP-Shootout/0,139023437,120106660,00.htm
The Internet is in the process of taking over our lives, so if you aren't connected, maybe it is time you were. If you are connected already, are you getting the best deal possible for your usage patterns? Here we have tested a selection of national ISPs with points of presence in most states and territories. When you are choosing an ISP, there are a few things you need to keep in mind. Probably the most important is locality. You really want an ISP that is in your local call zone. The next most important thing is probably usage; most ISPs charge like a wounded bull for hours used in excess of your set hours per month, so work out how many you think you will use, and then double it. If you have kids, double
it again (we may be joking, then again, we may not . . .) When you have worked that out,
you will have narrowed the field down, and you can choose the pricing plan that suits your
budget and usage patterns. One item of note is that many of the "unlimited" plans do have a
few limits. Often there is a limit on downloads or the length of each connection, idle time
or all three.
AAPT Smartchat was approached to participate in this comparison but America Online and AAPT
announced in March a 50/50 joint venture to operate AOL Australia. As a result, AAPT's
Internet business strategy is changing, and it declined our invitation to participate in
the ISP review at this time. However, because of the joint venture AOL Australia is now
AAPT's primary consumer Internet brand and this was tested by the Lab. AOL is a tad unusual when compared to the other ISPs in this comparison; there is a
facility to connect online- sort of! You can apply online and provide all your address
details but you cannot start surfing immediately as AOL must send a CD of software to
complete your connection. The reason for this is that AOL has created its own browser and
interface-a very bold move when you have competition like Internet Explorer and Netscape
and even the Daewoo dog probably knows how to use them.
AOL's CD installation is pretty simple and should be no fuss. The interface itself is
"interesting". It tries to be "pretty" and user friendly but, to be perfectly blunt, even
novices that have no experience with IE and Netscape tend to pass it over for the big two.
It came as no surprise that staff at the Lab ended up simply minimising the AOL interface
and launching one of the other browsers.
AOL offers two major price plans: Lite and Unlimited. AOL Lite is for those who will use
their Internet connection mainly as a tool to pay bills and send e-mail but who will not
spend a great deal of time surfing. AOL Lite at $8 and four hours per month breaks down to
one hour per week so it's for pretty infrequent users. Any additional time will cost a
relatively high AU$2.50 per hour. However, in the first month, to start you off on your
Internet adventure, AOL throw in a bonus 50 hours for free.
AOL Unlimited looks a pretty good deal if you use the Internet much more than 10 hours a
month, as you pay just AU$24.95 for unlimited access. And unlimited here appears pretty free
of provisos. AOL may choose to log you off, however, if your connection is idle for an
unspecified amount of time or your current connection time is longer than 12 hours.
Both plans offer the user up to seven e-mail addresses and 14MB of space for their own Web
pages.
AOL will have around 70 Points of Presence (POPs) around the country by September increasing
to 78 by year's end. The distribution of the POPs is quite good and offers more locations
than quite a few other ISPs (particularly in WA and SA). We had a lot of trouble dredging
information from AOL-as our features table shows-with information on bandwidth, cache,
modem ratio, and number of users confidential.
Customer support hours are about as good as you can get with 24-hour, 7-day-a-week phone
support, not to mention a maximum e-mail response time of 24 hours claimed.
You would certainly expect acceptable performance from one of the world's largest ISPs and
it is fair to say that our test results confirm solid performance. AOL was slightly below
average in our local download tests but conversely was slightly higher than average in the
international download testing. We found little variation in AOL's performance as far as
our three time "windows" were concerned. While the Sydney POP produced slightly better
performance than Melbourne there was really very little in it. Using Optus as a carrier we
obtained some fairly anomalous test results for AOL with the performance well down on our
Telstra carrier test. Unfortunately, testing time constraints did not grant us the luxury
of re-running this series of tests and it is the opinion of the Lab staff that our
connection to AOL was experiencing an unusual glitch at the time. We at least know it was
probably not a problem with the carrier as the connection speed reported by AOL was very
good. It was interesting to note that despite AOL's above-average USA download performance
its ping times were some of the worst we recorded.
AOL can actually be a tad expensive for casual users on the "Lite" plan and the download
speeds, while not bad, are certainly no justification for the higher-than-average pricing
in this category. However, for heavy users AOL is certainly worth a look with unlimited
access at just AU$24.95 per month. Asia Online was one of only a few ISPs that had no facility to allow users to subscribe
online. The Web site quite happily tells the user how to connect and setup their computer
with clear and easy-to-follow instructions. However, getting other information such as
connection plans is like getting blood from a stone. The site is nowhere near as friendly
as the other ISP Web sites and some users would probably not bother to use the e-mail
facility to enquire about Asia Online's connection plans, rather choosing to go to another
more user-friendly provider.
The news is not all bad however; once we got through to the staff at Asia Online we
actually found them to be the most friendly of all the ISP staffers we talked to.
After dredging through the Asia Online Web site for quite some time, we were able to find
quite a long list of POPs both in Australia and also numbers in New Zealand and Hong Kong.
There is a total of around 100 POPs in Australia. It seems that just about any two-horse
town has a point of presence. When we received the feature tables back from Asia Online
however, they listed only about 40 POPs. We were not able to reconcile this difference in
the time we had available.
Plans range from 15 hours per month for AU$14.95, through 50 and 100 hours permonth for
AU$29.95 and AU$49.95m respectively. There is also an unlimited plan for a AU$25 setup fee and
AU$19.95 per month. Please note for whatever reason, these prices do not include the 10
percent GST.
Connection support is the standard of KFlex and PPP. Modem ratio seems about average at
10:1. Asia Online would not disclose their number of users, cache size or exact bandwidth
for reasons of commercial sensitivity. Help desk times vary from POP to POP, but for example,
the Melbourne hours are 7:30am to 7pm.
Asia Online's performance is best described as variable. They had amongst the best ping
times tested, both the international and national downloads were generally good, but some
particularly slow downloads to Sydney brought the average right down.
As Australia's original and largest telecommunications provider, it is no surprise that
Telstra offers quite a range of Internet connection options through its Big Pond brand.
As well as standard dial-up connections, there are options for both Cable and ISDN
connections via Big Pond (though these were not tested).
The setup was simple: the Join Big Pond option on the Web page leads you easily through the
steps of: selecting a new or existing account; signing the membership agreement; filling
out contact details, credit card number, plan selection, access numbers, software source,
certificate registration, username and password; and finally creating your account.
Telstra has an excellent selection of POPs in all states as well as a Rural Connect plan
that allows you to dial in from anywhere in Australia (for a price).
A broad range of plans are available from very casual three hours per month for AU$7.65, up
to 150 hours per month for AU$37.50 (only available in some areas). Telstra does note,
"Premium Plan customers may be disconnected after one hour of idle time. Members can set
their preferred idle timeout period by visiting "Idle Timeout Settings". This can be a
great feature if you forget that you have left your machine dialled in.
Web hosting is free and is available via the Personal Home Page or Personal Web Site
option. From the Big Pond home page: "Personal Home Page" allows you to select a theme
from a number of available templates, then add your own information and links to create
your own Personal Home Page. The Personal Web Site service gives you the ability to build
your own Personal Web Site of up to 10MB in size and 100MB served per month, using the HTML
editor of your choice and an FTP client you can build your Web site on your PC and upload
to Big Pond Home for instant publication on the Web.
Up to five e-mail addresses are provided to each account holder via the Family Mail
Service, where there is one parent account and four subsidiary accounts. The parent account
can access the subsidiary accounts but not the other way around, so a responsible person
can supervise the other members of the family. There is a Kidz.net service that enables
children to get the best out of the Internet while at the same time protecting them from
the undesirable aspects of the Web.
For the gamers, Wireplay supports over 100 of the top PC games including, Quake III Arena,
Half-Life Counter Strike, Soldier Of Fortune, Age of Empires II and Starsiege Tribes.
In the performance tests, Bigpond was, as would be expected, right up there at the top.
Across the time windows, there was an even stepping down from 10am through to 9pm as more
and more people log in. There also seems to be very little difference between using Bigpond
from Melbourne or Sydney. Although Telstra seems to have huge bandwidth available out of
Australia, it must be remembered that much of this is onsold to other ISPs and some may
also be used for other services at other times. Bigpond lists its number of users at
650,000 but information on modem ratio and cache is considered confidential.
The Help Desk is open from 8am to midnight, 7 days a week. All up, Telstra provides an
excellent service. Connect is, as the tiny writing under the ISP's logo proclaims, an AAPT company.
Creating a new account online was pretty simple with three distinct routes that can be
taken for Windows 9x, Windows 3.x and Mac users respectively. The only real stumbling
block is that the process is not totally "online"-you must obtain a "new account key" from
Connect either by phone or e-mail. This is a bit of a nuisance, other ISPs have the option
to skip this step and the process dynamically allocates your "key" to speed up the process.
Connect has eight plans ranging from the imaginatively named Plan10 up to a Plan150 where
the numbers represent the monthly charge, without GST; hours range from 3 to 100 hours
respectively. Including GST this breaks down to an hourly rate of AU$3.66 down to a low AU$1.65
but, surprisingly, no matter which plan you are on, if you go over the allotted time for
the month, the charge per hour is a fixed $3.85 at peak times and AU$1.92 off peak. Peak, of
course, refers to the times of the day that any sane person would want to use the Internet-
7am to 12am.
When you first register you are slugged with an $8.74 registration fee but to sweeten the
deal Connect offers five free hours for the first month no matter which plan you choose.
With around 74 POPs distributed quite well through NSW, Victoria, Queensland, WA, and SA,
finding a local POP should not be a great problem for a large slab of the population. There
are also five POPs spread amongst Tasmania and the two Territories which is pretty typical
of this group.
Support of modem connection speeds is excellent with K56Flex, V.90 and X2 all supported.
Connect claims a modem ratio of 10:1 and we are in no position to argue, as we did not
experience any busy signals during our testing. Connect was also a lot freer with
information than many of the other ISPs with a claimed total of 82,700 users; but this also
includes users of smaller ISPs that utilise Connect's infrastructure. Claimed overall
bandwidth is a pretty healthy 282MB with 450GB of cache.
Telephone coverage for tech support is very good with weekdays at 8am to midnight and
weekends midday to 8pm with the support lines only closed on Christmas day.
We did not test it but Connect also claims an exceptionally good 4-hour turnaround on
e-mails-we presume they mean during support hours.
Of all the ISPs tested, Connect had one of the lowest hop counts to and from the USA and
the ping times were the lowest, on par with Asia Online. You can therefore expect the ISP
to sneak ahead of the opposition in the USA download tests. However, Connect was not the
performance leader in this test but it did manage an average throughput that was middle of
the road. We also noticed a rather wide variation in the USA download times with the ISP
peaking at fourth fastest in one instance and dropping back to sixth slowest during another
test run.
During our local or "national" tests Connect was very impressive indeed, only Netspace was
faster (and then only by 0.01KB/sec). Daytime download times were quite consistent but
Connect did drop significantly after 6:30 at night. Melbourne's POP also appears to be
slightly faster than Sydney, at least during the day.
When we compiled Connect's performance scores we found that overall it was the fourth
fastest of the ISPs but you certainly pay for the speed. Connect was one of the most
expensive for both the casual user and the power user and their peak rates for excess
hours was easily the most expensive of all the ISPs we looked at, and considering their
definition of peak is 7am to midnight, it can become quite an expensive proposition. dingo blue is a wholly owned subsidiary of Cable & Wireless Optus, and they offer local,
long distance and mobile telecommunications as well as Internet access. Connection is very
simple: fill out the online form with your credit card details, and you are on the way.
There are approximately 45 POPs across Australia, covering each of the states and territories.
dingo blue offers only one plan, with unlimited time and unlimited downloads for a flat rate
of AU$49 per month (or AU$27.50 per month if you use their long distance service). According to
dingo blue, there is no maximum connection time for this account either.
Up to 5MB of Web space is provided and five e-mail addresses are allowed for each user.
The FAQ pages on the dingo blue Web site are excellent. They provide full setup information,
step-by-step instructions for dialling in and configuring various applications and
information on uploading Web pages to your site. All of this information is provided for
Windows 95/98/NT and the Mac OS. Browser setup is included for various versions of Internet
Explorer and Netscape on both platforms and there is another section for uploading pages to
your Web site from FTP Explorer, WS_FTP, Fetch, and Transit. Linux support is not heavily
advertised, but http://k9.dingoblue .com.au is a Macintosh G3 running Linux that provides
information on all the basic setup information for Linux.
dingo blue's performance was a little below the average for the ISPs tested. In particular,
it scored fairly low in the International Download Performance test. Time seemed to affect
performance in a big way, with speeds in the 6:30pm window dropping 30 percent from the
performance seen in the morning slot. The lack of speed is generally offset by their
excellent prices.
Information on bandwidth, cache, modem ratio and number of users is considered confidential,
and was not disclosed. The helpdesk is available Monday through Friday: 7am-11pm; Sat:
9am-5.30pm; Sun: 9am-5.30pm. Also if you are having any problems (after you dial in) or
want to ask a question, you can chat online to a consultant 24 hours a day. I spoke to a
helpful staffer, who was happy to answer my questions and point me in the direction of
other valuable resources.
If speed is not your most critical concern, dingo blue provides real value for money. Futureweb is another of the ISPs that has no online facility for a potential new user to
connect, they must instead use the "locate your nearest dealer" link and go out and purchase
the Starter Kit software. The Starter Kit costs a cool AU$60 but does include two CDs full of
Internet tools, a book on how to use the Internet (which should be useful for novices),
and-the real sweetener-60 hours prepaid access and the first monthly account keeping fee is
waived. What's an account-keeping fee, we wondered? But only the Standard, Casual, ISDN,
and "permanent" modem connection plans include the fee. The remainder of the plans, and
there are quite a lot (12 in all), have no monthly fee or, in the case of the "Bandwidth"
plans, a one off AU$33 setup charge.
Actual cost-per-hour fees can be a rubbery figure on some of the plans. Take the Standard
Account, for example, which provides the user with 50 hours. These hours do not have a
"use-by date", which is nice, but the plan does include an ongoing monthly fee of AU$11. So
if you are an infrequent Web surfer the cost per hour can actually be quite high.
The Casual Account is another example where the price appears fixed at AU$1.21 per hour but
it is not really because you must factor in the monthly service fee. The first plan that
has a truly fixed hourly cost is the appropriately named Hourly Account, where AU$33 buys you
20 hours (no service fee), but the 20 hours must be used within six months.
If you need to remain connected to the Internet (for example, if you need to accept sales
orders that come in at any time as small e-mails) then a flat hourly charge is not the best
way to go. Futureweb also caters for people with Bandwidth plans, which allow low traffic
users to sustain an uninterrupted Internet connection. The Bandwidth 200 plan for example
has an initial setup fee of $33 and an ongoing monthly fee of $55. If you exceed the 200MB
per month of traffic each additional megabyte is billed at 27.5 cents. The "Unlimited" plan
actually has some limits like a 5-hour maximum connection time and a limit of 150MB per
month. All personal dialup accounts include 5MB of space for your Web pages.
With 80 POPs to choose from Futureweb has a fair proportion of the population catered for.
NSW and Victoria are very good and WA and SA are better than average with eight and five
POPs, respectively.
Connection speeds and protocols supported are typical amongst this group and while the ISP
was not able to supply us with the number of users they did claim a modem ratio of 10:1.
This is rather interesting given that Futureweb was the only ISP that we had difficulties
accessing during the day with half a dozen occurrences of busy signals during the day tests
at the Sydney POP.
Telephone support times are reasonable although Saturday afternoons and Sunday look very
desolate-if you come across a problem after 1pm on Saturday you must wait until 8:30am
Monday morning. In light of this, we were a little confused that the ISP's claim for e-mail
responses is 24 hours; presumably they are alluding to weekdays rather than weekends.
Consistent is a word that leaps to mind when we looked at the national download performance
of the ISP. Admittedly with our local download Futureweb was the slowest of all the ISPs
but not by a significant margin and it is worth mentioning that five of the other ISPs
actually managed to log slower download speeds although their averages were higher.
In the US download test Futureweb was also one of the more consistent with pretty middle of
the road performance. There was not a great deal of variability in the ISP's performance
through the day although the 6:30pm tests provided the best download speeds. Unfortunately,
a fatal glitch of the equipment at the Sydney test site left Futureweb without any valid
test results. Interestingly Futureweb's download performance over the Telstra carrier was
slightly higher than the Optus carrier test despite the fact that the average connection
speed for the two was 48K and 49.3K respectively, in Optus' favour.
For very casual users that only want a few hours per month, Futureweb is certainly not the
way to go and is actually the second most expensive of the ISPs. For the power user some of
the plans are quite inexpensive but unless there is a convenient POP for your country
location other ISPs appear to offer better performance/cost services. iPrimus is a division of Primus Telecommunications, a part of the international Primus
Telecommunications Group. Connection options include signing up via the Web, over the
phone, or ordering a connection CD. The Web signup was plain but effective. It steps you
through the process and you are ready to start.
Coverage was quite good with over 65 POPs around Australia covering 174 local call areas
with more POPs planned in every state and territory across the country. Plans are available
from the economiser at AU$9.75 per month for 6 hours and the Family Plan, which is AU$16.25 for
11 hours per month. Then there is a AU$300 per year for unlimited access in 4-hour blocks
with disconnection after 20 mins of idle time. Most of the plans feature four e-mail
addresses and 10MB of free Web space. A newly introduced plan, the "Infinity" is available
in Melbourne only for AU$24.95 per month with unlimited hours/unlimited download.
According to the iPrimus Web site, prepaid kits will soon be available for 10, 30, or 60
hours from retail outlets.
The Service and Support area of the iPrimus Web site contains a plethora of information on
configuring dialup adaptors for both Windows and the Mac, information on Web browsers,
e-mail, news, and ftp. Web editor setup info is also provided.
iPrimus has an excellent modem ratio of 7:1 so you should never get a busy signal (total
number of users is reported to be about 167,000). Total bandwidth seems pretty good with
five STM-1 links (155Mb each) to a variety of different peers. This gives iPrimus good
speed and a large degree of fault tolerance. Cache size was not specified.
Customer support is available 7 days a week, 24 hours a day, and email responses should be
received within 12 to 24 hours.
iPrimus was right up at the top of the speed tests, both international and national. It was
quite consistent across different times of the day, although in our tests it performed
better in Melbourne than it did in Sydney. International downloads suffered from a range
of speeds. It provided the fastest time recorded, but also one of the slowest. Overall the
performance was ranked number two just below Netspace. Users cannot complete a connection to Netspace online-it is possible to register online but
users must then wait for the connection CD to be sent by mail. Netspace does have online
purchasing but it is limited to a couple of software packages, a Swann modem, and the
ability to pay any excess charges you may have incurred on your existing Internet account.
There are six plans for home users ranging from a Home Casual plan with pay-as-you-use
charges up to a Saver 200 plan that gives users 200 hours per month. The Casual plan has a
yearly "service" fee of AU$27 and each hour is charged at a flat AU$2.20. All the other plans,
including the Saver 200, have a one-off AU$25 connection fee and a monthly fee (in the case
of the Saver 200 this is AU$41.50, which equates to a very low 20.75 cents per hour with
excess hours charged at AU$2.20 each). Each plan includes 10MB of server space for e-mail and
personal Web pages.
Netspace has quite an extensive list of services for business users from straight dialup
accounts to Web Hosting, Secure Socket Layer Server, mail Gateways, Web site design
services, and permanent connections.
Netspace's POPs are pretty thin on the map with Victoria the most blessed (six POPs). NSW
has a grand total of three, and while the other states and Canberra manage at least one POP,
the Northern Territory misses out.
On the other hand, modem connection speed and protocol support is very good with K56Flex
and V.90 connections catered for and PPP, SLIP, and Unix Shell protocols available.
At first glance, the bandwidth for Netspace does not appear all that impressive but then if
you do not have a zillion users a more modest bandwidth can still provide good throughput.
Netspace claim a modem ratio of 11:1 and during testing we did not come across the
frustration of a busy POP line. Also of note is the relatively large cache size for such a
modest bandwidth.
Netspace customer support times are reasonable at 9am to 9pm weekdays and 10am to 6pm on
weekends EST.
Netspace's performance in a word is brilliant. In both the national and international
download tests the ISP led the field, and with very consistent performance. Performance
across our three time "windows" was also great with only a slight dip in the afternoon. It
also made no difference which POP, Melbourne or Sydney, we dialled in from with similar
download speeds from both sites.
With great performance and reasonable prices for both casual and power users, the only real
let down with Netspace is the low number of POPs. But if you are lucky enough to be located
near one of them then you would be hard pressed finding a better ISP. One.Net is the Internet arm of One.Tel, the 100 percent Telephone Company. They offer POPs
in around 35 locations. Most of these are on the eastern seaboard, though they are
represented in all states and territories around Australia. Plans vary from a flat 2.3
cents per minute through 10 hours per month for AU$10.95, 30 hours per month for AU$21.95 to an
unlimited plan for AU$26.95 per month.
We had a few problems signing up online. The page we filled out with our address details
was a bit clumsy, with the street number, street name and Street/Road/Avenue parts being
separate, which is time consuming to fill in. Then the server would not return the next
page a couple of times, and we had to go back and re-submit. In the end we submitted the
completed form and never received a message that our application had been accepted. We had
to phone the help desk and check on the status. (The request had been received, but the
server never told us.)
The 2.3 cents per minute plan is billed in 1-minute increments, while the other timed plans
are billed in 15-minute increments. The unlimited plan has a 300MB download limit and will
disconnect you after four hours of usage. Web space is free up to 3MB and usage above 3MB
is charged at AU$3.30 per megabyte or part megabytes per month. E-mail space is free up to
10MB and usage above 10MB is charged at AU$3.30 per megabyte.
One.Net has quite a good value for money service. Their speed is about average of the ISPs
tested, but their rates are generally pretty good. There was a fairly large range in the
international download speeds, and even at the most expensive; connection rates are only
AU$1.10 per hour.
The help desk is available Monday through Friday: 8am-2am; Saturday: 9am-12am; Sunday: 10am
to 12am; Holidays: 10am to 7pm, and e-mail response should be within 30 minutes.
One.Net lists its number of users at 170,000 with a modem ratio of 8:1 but information on
bandwidth and cache is considered confidential. Optusnet does allow you to join online but when we were attempting to do so there was a
minor glitch in the procedure. The page www.optus.com.au/ internet/1,1648,5008,00.html had
the option to join online but when we attempted to go this route the next page presented us
with the message that "the document you have requested is not found on this server" and to
please call customer support. On the same page however, there was a "join now" link which,
when we clicked on it, worked fine. In common with some of the other ISPs, Optusnet asks
the user to insert a "registration code", unlike some of the competition however, if you
do not have a code you can still continue on and register. The registration process is very
simple and user friendly with a progress bar at the top of each page displaying how far
through the procedure you are.
Optusnet does not exactly offer a great gaggle of plans for the home user with four at last
count. With your first month, no matter which plan you select you get a bonus 100 hours.
And, while we are on the subject of bonuses, if you are connected to another Optus service,
say your local phone for example, then Optus will throw another five hours per month into
your plan free or subtract AU$5 from the monthly access fee depending on your choice of plan.
But wait, there's more: nominally up until December 31st this year, Optusnet are offering a
dollar for dollar on your monthly access fee back in the form of a electronic voucher than
you can spend at online shopping sites such as d-store for example.
Plans range from the NetSaver at AU$10.65 for five hours per month (10 hours if you have
another Optus service as well) up to the NetMaster AU$42.80 (AU$37.80 if you participate in
another Optus service), which buys you 200 hours per month.
Naturally there are some caveats-in the case of NetMaster only-when Optusnet is experiencing
"extremely high network usage" time restrictions may be applied. Exceeding NetMaster's 200
hours will incur a charge of 55 cents per additional megabyte while NetSaver has a sliding
scale: the first 20 hours in excess are charge at AU$2.20 per hour, there after until 200
hours excess the rate is AU$1.10 per hour and over 200 hours it drops back to the same as
NetMaster just 55 cents per hour.
Interestingly, OptusNet has a plan specifically targeted at students, with unlimited access
between 6am and 6pm Monday to Saturday. Outside of these hours the access is charged at a
flat AU$2.20 per hour.
Each plan includes five e-mail addresses and 5MB of Web space to exercise your Web page
creativity. And, if surfing the Web on a 56k modem reminds you of watching grass grow and
you have a bit of cash to spare, then try Optus' cable modem plans under the Optus@Home
brand. Installation fees, which include the cable modem, range from AU$199 to AU$398 with
monthly access fees of AU$74.95 and AU$63.95, respectively. Optus appears a bit coy about the
speed of the cable modem link but, needless to say, it is heaps quicker than the poor old
56k modem.
If you really want to keep a tight rein on your costs, then one of four offered prepaid
packs may be the way to go. They range from AU$21.35 for 15 hours up to AU$85.70 for 100 hours.
Businesses are also very well catered for with a very broad range of services including
ISDN, DNS, Webhosting, and Telehosting, to name a few.
While Optus' POP list is not exceptional, some of the other ISPs have more, it is certainly
very good with around 84 sites Australia wide and a presence in every state and territory.
Modem connection speeds and protocols supported are pretty typical of this group of ISPs.
The customer service hours could not be simpler or more generous-24 hours a day, seven days
a week.
Optus was slightly above average in terms of national download performance, and with
consistent performance to boot. International download performance on the other hand was a
little disappointing. On average Optus was the fourth slowest with some of the opposition
almost 30 percent quicker. Although in this test Optus' performance displayed quite a deal
of variation with peaks at 3.3KB per second and one low of 1.65KB per second. Throughput
slid off slowly from morning through to the 6:30pm nighttime window but not to a degree
that would concern us. Sydney is the lucky POP site compared to Melbourne with consistently
higher download speeds than our Melbourne POP.
We must admit to being quite surprised, and confused, when comparing connections to Optus
over both Telstra and Optus carriers. Our Optus carrier actually connected slightly faster
on average than Telstra yet the download speeds with Telstra as the carrier were slightly
higher. Optus' performance overall was good, nothing stunning but not bad either and if you
are, for example, an Optus long distance or local telephone subscriber, the extra free five
hours per month on their NetSaver plan actually makes it one of the most cost effective
plans for the casual 10-hours-per-month user. According to their Web site: "OzEmail Internet is Australia's favourite Internet Service
Provider (ISP) providing outstanding service and unique benefits to our members. In the
past four years OzEmail has won nine Internet awards for our quality service." Commencing
operations in 1991, OzEmail grew to its present size in four short years. It was the first
Australian high technology company to list on both the Nasdaq National Market in the US and
the Australian Stock Exchange. As of February 1999, OzEmail is a wholly owned subsidiary of
UUNet, an MCI WorldCom company.
The OzEmail online signup requires you to phone the Customer Service Desk, they can issue
you a "Phone Confirmation Token". This seems a little odd and defeats the purpose of a
Web-based registration in our opinion. There is also the option to receive a CD that will
allow you to connect and sign up on the spot. Often using this method will also give you a
bonus 50 or 100 hours.
OzEmail operates an extensive network of POPs across all states and territories in
Australia, and claims "local call access to over 85 percent of Australians".
OzEmail plans start at AU$7.95 for 3 hours per month, the OzE10 plan costs AU$15.95 for 10
hours per month, OzE20 at AU$26.95 for 20 hours per month, and OzE30 at AU$30.00 for 30 hours
per month. There are also the OzMegaSaver+ with 150 hours for AU$37.95 per month and OzE250+
with 250 hours for AU$49.95 per month. Casual rates of AU$5.50 are available with an annual
subscription of AU$55. Both the OzMegasaver+ and OzE250 plans have connection limits of eight
hours.
Each account provides 5MB of space for the hosting of your personal Web pages.
Performance was quite good, with high download speeds from both locations and carriers at
all times of day. There was a slight drop in performance in the 7-9pm time frame which is
when most people are using the Net. Customer Service is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a
week.
OzEmail will not divulge its number of users and information on bandwidth; modem ratio and
cache size are also considered confidential. When we accessed TPG's URL to register online we noticed that the access to the site was
noticeably slower than most of the other ISPs at around 10:30am in the morning. Even so,
registering was quite easy with TPG opting for a single, admittedly reasonably long,
registration page. The page is clearly laid out and includes a short description of each of
the plans offered.
TPG has nine dialup accounts (that is, if you count their Trial Pack), and to be honest,
what any particular plan has to offer is not clearly explained. We found that unlike many
of the other ISPs we had to reread the plans to figure out precisely what the user was
entitled to.
The Wild Pack is a case in point, it is not terribly clear whether the AU$33 is per month or
per quarter although delving deeper it becomes apparent that the charge is quarterly. TPG's
plans are interesting in their structure; the Wild Plan, for example, is for unlimited
three-hour blocks per month as long as you do not exceed 100MB for the month. If the
megabyte limit is exceeded, every additional megabyte is charged at 22 cents and if you
remain online longer than the 3-hour limit it is likely that TPG will kill your connection.
An option for low-volume Internet users is the Basic Pack, which is 12 hours per month over
12 months for $192.40 (that includes AU$13.20 per month and a one-off AU$33 connection fee). If
you don't use your 12 hours per month you lose the unused portion, however if you exceed
the 12 hours it comes off your next month's tally. If pay-as-you-go appeals, then the Easy
Pack at a flat AU$1.10 per hour with no service fee looks pretty good, but then there is also
a "free" Internet option. It's called the Night Rider but, and it's a big but, only if you
are an insomniac and connect for no longer than three hours at a time between 1am and 8am.
Nor will you get the trimmings like e-mail or server disk space.
The lowest cost plans with respect to cost per hour and cost per megabyte are the
Professional Pack (AU$330 per year for 50 hours a month, unlimited download and no connection
time restrictions) or the Value Pack (AU$21.95 per month for unlimited hours, 300MB maximum a
month and limited to 3-hour connections). In the latter case, downloads in excess of 300MB
are charged at 22 cents per megabyte.
All the dialup accounts (excluding Night Rider) include 10MB of Web space and an e-mail
address with two aliases. And, for all new subscribers, TPG offers 150 bonus hours free of
charge for the first 30 days.
For business TPG offer permanent modem or ISDN connections, Domain Name Hosting and Web
Site Hosting with the full range outlined on their Web site.
There is a reasonable number of POPs in NSW, Victoria, and Queensland, but all states
except ACT have at least two POPs. Modem support is also pretty good with X2 being the only
standard not supported. As for protocols Slip and Unix are not supported, but PPP is.
Support hours are good with 8am to midnight Monday to Friday and shorter hours over the
weekend.
To be blunt, we were a bit disappointed with TPG's overall performance. True, the local
performance was only slightly behind the leaders, however international downloads were the
problem. TPG faired the worst in this test by quite a large margin, while all other ISPs
managed over 2KB per second, and some up to 3.5KB per second, TPG languished on an average
of just 1.15KB per second with a peak of 2.15KB per second in the morning time window.
While TPG's average performance in the morning and afternoon time windows was relatively
consistent it did take quite a dive in the 6:30pm time window. TPG's POP performance in
Melbourne was superior to Sydney by a reasonable margin and as far as carriers were
concerned, the performance of TPG over Telstra and Optus lines was nigh on identical.
It was interesting to note that TPG's relatively low US download performance coincided with
some of the worst US ping times that we recorded.
For the casual home user and Net junkie TPG has some of the lowest priced plans on offer
amongst the ISPs we tested. Unfortunately, this is somewhat overshadowed by some of the
lowest performance scores amongst the target ISPs as well. winNet is the product of a business alliance between WIN Corporation and OzEmail to provide
a gateway to the Internet for rural and regional Australia. Win has 36 years experience in
the television broadcast arena and is Australia's largest regional television network. They
service rural and regional Australia.
WinNet provides all the same POPs, pricing plans, and services as OzEmail although some of
the service names are slightly different as can be seen from the features tables. Let's cut straight to the chase, if you are after the shortest download times then you
cannot go past Netspace. Not only was Netspace the fastest of the ISPs it was also very
reasonably priced. The only downside is the rather sparse distribution of POPs. If you do
not have a Netspace POP located conveniently within your local call zone then try iPrimus,
it's almost as fast as Netspace and, while it is slightly more expensive for the casual
user, it is considerably cheaper for heavy use Internet junkies.
Worthy of a Merit Award is dingo blue. Although its performance was not great, it
nevertheless offers truly unlimited connection, dingo blue has no connection time or
download limits. The cost is just AU$49 per month or just AU$27.50 if dingo blue is your phone
carrier. National & International Download Performance Charts
ISP Time Dependence Chart
Points of Presence Dependence Chart
ISP Carrier/Line Quality Performance Comparison
Digex (USA) Hop Count & Ping Time
All the ISPs that were fromally tested for this article were "fee for service", by far the most
common at this point in time. We are however starting to see more of the "free" ISPs popping up
and without digging too far our quick list would include FreeOnline (www.freeonline.com.au),
GoConnect (www.goconnect.com.au), Free.Net (www.free.net.au), GlobalFreeway (www.globalfreeway.
com.au), and FreeISP (www.freeisp.com.au). Lets take a quick look at the types of "free" services;
FreeOnline and GoConnect are two good examples.
One of our staff members has been using GoConnect for a few months now and it is truly free
ISP. You can surf anywhere you want at any time of the day with no time or download restrictions.
There is a "price to pay" for this freedom and that is the occasional small advertisment in the top
right corner of your PC (much the same as Pay TV) but your Web surfing continues--albeit a little slower--
while the advert plays in the background.
At the other end of the "free" scale is FreeOnline. Yes, you do get free access to the Internet
but, and there are a couple, the service is only free to somewhere around 4000 selected sites
on the Internet, and there are time limitations. The 4000+ "free" sites, called the FreeZone,
have arrangements with FreeOnline; for example, a site may pay FreeOnline for every subscriber
that visits them through the ISP. In addition the subscriber also has free access to the rest
of the Internet for 30 minutes between 8am - 4pm and 4pm - 11pm, and for two hours between 11pm -
8am-- a total of three hours per day. If you want to surf sites outside the FreeZone outside
of the restrictive hours then FreeOnline has $19.95 plans for unlimited Internet access out side
this zone. They also have a pretty neat SmartZone which also costs $19.95/month but it provides
your kids with access to 20,000 "safe" internet sites specifically selected to aid in their educational
requirements.
We performed four series of tests on each ISP under the following conditions: In addition, at our Melbourne site we tested using two carriers: Telstra and Optus. This
allowed us to determine what, if any, difference there is between carriers when connecting
to a particular ISP. It is very important to note that the results do not imply that one
carrier is superior to another across the board. It simply illustrates the difference in
carriers in the Bundoora area in Victoria.
Test 1: Test 2: The significance of using the Digex site is that it's all very well pinging or tracing a
particular site but this only gives you information on the path to the site, and as the
Internet uses asymmetrical routing the return path can vary significantly in both the
number of hops and ping times. And, for downloading, you are going to be much more
interested in the performance of the return path.
Test 3: Test 4: Test Scoring
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