Schinckel.net

I’ve been with Wild Internet & Telecom for about 4 months now, which is my longest ADSL supplier. Admittedly, the one month I spent with Opti Internet (before Veridas went south) was the only other ADSL I had, so take that with a grain of salt. Anyway, a month or so ago, Wild IT went into Voluntary Administration. Which basically meant they weren’t viable as a company, or were being so badly managed they were about to go out of business. They were very quiet on the subject on their own site, however there was a huge debate on the Whirlpool forums regarding their imminent demise. And then, GoTalk stepped in and purchased the customers. Almost immediately, my speeds became very slow - but I put this down to the fact I had gone over quota about two days before the end of the month, and my shaping hadn’t been removed. So I put in a complaint. Then I received a phone call from a Help Desk operator, basically saying that their network was under significant load. Which I thought had to be a load of shit, since with the talk of the demise of Wild, customers had apparently been leaving in droves, which meant that for all of March, I was downloading at basically full speed for the whole month. Apparently, 1,955 MB is about as much as can be downloaded at 256kbps in one day. So, I felt that basically the concept of their network being congested was rubbish. And this was confirmed, at least partially, on Whirlpool, where people had comments from GoTalk stating that all users were being shaped. They claimed that it was because of network congestion, but I think it was to annoy all of the heavy users, and cause them to want to change ISP. I wasn’t able to get speeds faster than ~64kbps for about a week. Happily, that seems to have now changed. When I grabbed the latest Azureus 3 update from the BT network, it came down at 26kB/s, which is about flat out. Hopefully, this is the end of the crappy speed, and with Timmy B no longer being in control of my ISP, hopefully it’s the end of heaps of the bullshit. Having said that, I’m going to read the Gotalk terms and conditions very carefully. If they don’t match up with what WildIT was offering, then I might just have to go elsewhere. I was looking for a way to get out of the exit fee anyway…