In all honesty, you will get what you pay for. All packages offered by any ISP will have restrictions, whether that be blocking certain ports or traffic shaping. This is particularly so with the lower priced packages.
If you are paying for a Lada, will it perform like a Ferarri?
I decided on the Business Lite package as I use it in a SOHO situation. I do not have any login problems, there is no login necessary on a Business package. I am direct to Cytanet, there is no NAT to go through. I also cannot get MiVision. This is because they cannot guarantee QoS, if your connection is slow and you have MiVision on at the time, I guess MiVision might just be the cause.
Faster packages are on offer from other providers, all with some kind of restrictions. I have no restrictions and pretty much full speed as advertised most of the time. The only problems have been where Cyta have had problems with their external bandwidth, which is not often.
Cyta's external routing is actually not bad and the way it is set up, there is a certain amount of redundancy built in. There may be a slight issue with Latency, ping times can be a bit higher than they might be, this is something I can live with.
I've gone through most of the serious ISP's over the years. I was one of the first people online here. 9600 modems with the external connection being a 64k ISDN line to the Internet, those were the days, Netscape took hours to come down
Logosnet was good in those days, can't say the same now.
Spidernet's Proxy was a pain in the bum, smoke and mirrors does not work for me.
I've been bitched at by Thunderworx for downloading too much on a 128k ISDN line, I was paying premium and they wanted to tell me how I could use it, I guess I will not be going with their latest reinvention Primetel for that very reason.
I've done the one way satellite route too, whilst waiting 3 years for the local exchange to be wired up for ADSL. I worked in the industry too, so I have seen both sides of it. That said, getting a decent package as a perk was great. So was testing a 4mbit downlink for a week.
I ended up with Cyta and despite what some others may think, I'm satisfied with what I get.
I will be glad when the Competition Comission finally allow Cyta to roll out faster packages, this is pending and will come soon, I'm hearing the end of August on the grapevine. Hopefully this will give a sensible bandwidth increase without any financial hit.
Hopefully uplink speeds will increase too. A 128k uplink that is maxed out will saturate any connection and seriously decrease your download speed. Put simply, if you are doing P2P and your speed is slow, before you blame the ISP, check out things on your own system. Get a bandwidth meter and see what uploading is going on, if it is maxed out, you will find that the connection will slow down.
On the subject of DSL enabling services, they are all using a big buzzword, ADSL2+, to me that means the possibility of 10-20mbit connections (theoretically it can go up to 24mbit) yet all I see is it being used as a platform to push TV signals down a telephone line. The Internet is not their main priority.
I look at parts of Europe, where 8mbit is the norm for a basic package, with most having 10mbit, Sweden is moving to 100mbit with some areas rolling out 1gbit (sure, it's not realistic as hard drive speeds cannot handle it) - we on the other hand are just going up to 4mbit with a cable service offering 10mbit in very limited areas and practically no expansion going on.
The lack of planning by the government here has created this situation. All of the network should have been separated from the providers and set up as an infrastructure. Fiber should have been rolled out everywhere and a carrier neutral fiber to home network set up. This would have put Cyprus in the forefront and the size of the island would have made it viable. A further carrier neutral wimax network would have provided the necessary infrastructure to put in place the next generation of wireless data and telephony network, basically doing to mobile telephony what the internet and VoIP did to regular telephony. Wireless data, alowing PDA's and Laptops to be used anywhere would create a fantastic environment for business. This network would be carrier neutral too. All this would enable service providers to provide services and maximise their profits without needing to invest a fortune in their own networks.
It is way too late for that now and as a result we now have the legacy of bad planning for the forseeable future.
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