(26/12/2009) Edit 2: It seems that Telecom are truly trying their best with this plan, and the few employees I’ve spoken who have anything to do with Big Time and its implementation are almost zealous about making it the best possible plan that they can! They’ve even been watching the likes of geekzone, gpforums, pressf1, helping out where they can, and adding certain gaming traffic to the ‘whitelist’ so it’s not slowed:
http://www.geekzone.co.nz/forums.asp?forumid=39&topicid=43761
(2/12/2009) Edit 1: Have changed DNS to Telecoms DNS servers instead of OpenDNS. YouTube now flies down regularly, even at peak times!
It sounds too good to be true, flat-rate broadband in New Zealand, there has to be a catch, right? Well, here’s a summary of my experiences, which are all documented in slightly longer posts on PressF1.co.nz
Prior to switching I had one kick-ass connection with Orcon. It wasn’t super fast, I would sync at around 4m/bit. Not too bad, but not too great. I’d obtain almost max line speed each time when I ran speed tests, download tests, and any other kind of throughput test I could, with the exception being when I classified it as lower-priority traffic in my QoS.
I could honestly be downloading from several different places at once, at around 3200kbps, my wife could be on a VoIP call and browsing, I could have a torrent trickling in, and HOST games via my VPN service DotALAN, and it never missed a beat!
However when TiVo was announced, and I saw it was Telecom-only I had to investigate it. Read more…
