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wwwalker
WiFi Master
User
| Posts: 14 |   |
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Soul review |
- 2007/12/08 10:46 |
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#1 |
They aren't too bad. They couriered the Linksys AM300 modem out and I had to pick it up at the depot (3km walk from my place) as courier did not ring me to arrange new time although it would only cost them 25c to call - I am not impressed with cheapskate couriers in Orange. After that it was pretty easy to connect the modem up and wait for the modem to synch. The modem firewall often has false alerts and blocks Google traffic at times which is annoying. It must be the AJAX calls that are flooding requests and my firewall is stupidly blocking.
The speed is much better than dialup and no dialing costs.
I use Debian Sarge Linux and I use apt-get install <package> to install software and the speeds are 1Mbit/sec or higher generally. I downloaded 80MB in a few minutes not a few hours! I have even downloaded 600MB ISO images of FreeBSD in an hour or 2 which would have been unheard of using dialup so my software collection and resources are much better now with broadband.
The modem has a DHCP proxy so I can share the connection with several different PCs all running different operating systems - Windows XP, Linux, FreeBSD - another success as before I was having to share the connection via Windows XP as it alone had the dialup modem attached.
Some videos are too fast and the modem keeps buffering every few minutes till the video catches up. If I keep the video screen size small the framerate is OK and there is less buffering problems. Fullscreen is a bit too hard or jumpy. Video can also crank up the data to over a 1GB in an hour or 2 of video.
The cost is very reasonable. I pay $29.95/mth for 4GB and $2/GB thereafter capped at $60/mth. Telstra would be $153/GB so Soul is much better that way. The most I have paid is $34/mth as I had to pay $4 excess data charges which is not much considering I was paying $20/mth in dialup phone calls for a $19.95/mth dialup account - cheaper and faster using broadband.
The call centre is pathetic and very overloaded as I waited 45 minutes to 1 hour per call this month to get through. They should have ringback like Westnet or a queue indicator but they are too lazy and blame shortage of staff on the huge queue problem - cheapskates.
We had a downtime this month with the DSLAM in Orange Exchange going down. It took about 2 hours to come back up again.
Sometimes URLs don't load and I have to reload about 3 or 4 times to get through their proxy.
I think Soul is a mobile phone company so their internet service is OK but not superb.
If you register, get your name or business name right as it takes about 1 month and 3 or 4 faxes and a few phone calls to transfer an account to another name they are so slow!
They also did not want to know about the courier stuffup when my modem was held for several days before I hunted it up myself (Orange Courier were pretty poor in delivery - my house entrance is down a driveway and they did not bother to find the right location to deliver the modem so they took it back to base and I had to chase after it about 3 days later to find where it had gone!)
It is a 24 month plan if you don't want to pay for the modem. If you break the plan it is very expensive - $22/mth not used in the plan! The 12 month plan is $119 for the modem. It is $119 to move house. This is the only downside as I wanted to move house because someone threw a rock through my window in October to scare me away because I am a computer geek. It would have been very costly to move so I ended up staying and the thugs moved somewhere else so no more rocks through my window.
Post edited by: wwwalker, at: 2007/12/08 11:08
Post edited by: wwwalker, at: 2007/12/08 11:10
Post edited by: wwwalker, at: 2007/12/08 11:12
Post edited by: wwwalker, at: 2007/12/08 11:13
Dwight Walker
WWWalker Web Development Pty Ltd
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