Please could I have a decent and transparent ISP?

[Tharaxis]

@ Tharaxis - I respect your opinion, however it is not mine. Please try to positively contribute to this thread with a suggestion of an ISP.

Of what you're asking for, the following is true:

1) No ISP exists that will meet all your criteria, and of those who meet the most you won't go near them because you deem them liars.
2) Some of the information you're wanting is never going to be made available for competitive reasons.
3) Some of the information you're wanting is already available, whether you believe what it says or not.
4) The rest of the information you're wanting is irrelevant in determining the quality of a service.

So what I'm saying is, good luck, you aint going to find what you're looking for, because what you're looking for is completely unrealistic.

 

[Tinuva]

Just weigh the pros and cons and choose which one's cons you can live with or which one's pros you can't live without.

 

[davemc]

<snip>
6) International bandwidth provisioning and redundancy:

If you're looking for Mbits/s or GBits/s you won't get it, and likely never will. Many ISP's will *never* give out this information for competitive reasons. However indicating that redundancy is in place and how making use of it would affect service performance would be helpful.

<snip>

Bloody hell, they could at least tell us what backbone they're using, what landing points are contracted at source and destination, and the latency at these landing points.
And, these points should be seen as selling points, to improve customer expectations.

 

[who.is.michael]

Of what you're asking for, the following is true:

1) No ISP exists that will meet all your criteria, and of those who meet the most you won't go near them because you deem them liars.
2) Some of the information you're wanting is never going to be made available for competitive reasons.
3) Some of the information you're wanting is already available, whether you believe what it says or not.
4) The rest of the information you're wanting is irrelevant in determining the quality of a service.

So what I'm saying is, good luck, you aint going to find what you're looking for, because what you're looking for is completely unrealistic.

Might this not be an indication on why ISP's are able to supply such poor offerings?

 

[Tharaxis]

Might this not be an indication on why ISP's are able to supply such poor offerings?

Hm, I'm not sure I would constitute all offerings as poor, but the air of secrecy that surrounds these products can definitely breed an environment in where it's easier to "hide the problems" than tackle them straight on.

The only real problem is the info that ISP's don't want to give away for "competitive" reasons. Most, if not all, of that information would be helpful in determining how good or bad a service is likely to be, though it would only apply to power users (your average user would neither care about, nor understand such information). I'm all for having ISP's publish actual network metrics (since I'm not running such a company myself), however, I know that it'll never happen, and were I in their position I would not be so quick to offer up that information.

To remain competitive a certain amount of secrecy is almost mandatory.

 

[Tharaxis]

Bloody hell, they could at least tell us what backbone they're using, what landing points are contracted at source and destination, and the latency at these landing points.
And, these points should be seen as selling points, to improve customer expectations.

I would argue that what backbone is being used should be the LAST thing that should be used as a selling point (backbone providers shouldn't be talked about at all, quite frankly). The current environment makes it all too easy for ISP's to pass responsibility for issues on to "upstream provider XYZ" because people have gotten to know these upstream providers as separate entities. The buck should always start, and stop, at the ISP, whose responsibility it is to ensure that their network is resilient to any failures, especially since they are the one dealing directly with the customer.

Whether that resilience means buying bandwidth on EASSY/SEACOM/SAT-3/MAIN-ONE, etc. is (and should be made) absolutely irrelevant. 100mbits on SAT-3 is nearly identical to 100mbits on SEACOM and any number of other cables, so choosing one over the other doesn't mean one product will be superior to another. What does differentiate them is the price point to the ISP as well as any built-in redundancy (such as SAIX with SAT-3 and SAFE), but in the end of the day that's up to the ISP to choose which makes business sense, it means nothing about the product. In fact, price-wise, SAT-3 without the SAFE redundancy costs almost the same as SEACOM.

 

[Referer.us]

I am using 384K All-in-1 Uncapped for R499 include ADSL line
It's quite OK, about 40KB all the time, I am using 96+G last month.