Futureweb
www.futureweb.com.au
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.
7%
3%
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.