AOL
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.
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1%
Do not use Dodo ADSL- They have really bad customer service. And technical support.
On their unlimited plan. You start downloading until it get to 1G and then the service starts to have ‘problems’ and you can’t connect no more.
When you call technical support, they give you a phone number to call only to find that a machine answers and ask you to leave your phone number. And then no one call back.
When you call customer service, you speak to a person, they redirects you to a blank line and then you hear a dial tone. Which means the line hung up.
I spoke to a customer sales representative called Steve to pay the bill using credit card. When I asked him to select a plan for the next month, instead of having to call back, his reply was : “ You have to call back next month to select.” And then he hung up on me. This is the kind of service Dodo provides.
I have never spoke to any customer service person who hangs up on the customer.
And then later I find that my service was suspended. Even though I had just spoke to Steve 5 minutes earlier to pay for that month using my credit card.
I am on a 3 months contract with DoDo. I still have 2 months left to go. After this kind of customer service I get I will not be using them after the 3 months period.
Note: If you disconnect before 3 months they charge you a disconnection fee $100.
Don’t sign any long term contracts with any ADSL Provider unless you are sure that you trust the service.