Connect
www.connect.com.au
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.
13%
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.