Broadband, Slingshot style
Since May 27 I've been on what must be New Zealand's slowest broadband connection, with an upload speed of between 12 5 kbps and 32 kbps, and download speeds of between 700 560 kbps and 2 Mbps. This on a plan which is nominally supposed to be 2 Mbps / 128 kbps.
Slingshot has not been able to tell me what the problem is, nor have they made any efforts to fix it. They have refused to acknowledge that it is a fault arising out of the provisioning for my service by Telecom, preferring instead to tell me that Telecom has tested my line and my line is capable of achieving the contracted speeds.
On their part, the customer service reps that I've spoken to seem more interested in offering me credits on my account rather than providing the right level of service.
In frustration, I've asked to be reverted to my old plan of 256 kbps / 128 kbps. I'm hoping that this will require that Telecom move me to another part of the exchange equipment, and hopefully this won't result in a total loss of service. I've been told that this cannot happen until mid-June. In the meantime, I'm supposed to live with a broadband connection which to all intents and purposes is slower than dial-up!
All this from Slingshot that boasts on its website that it has won an award as New Zealand's best ISP.
Slingshot
I work for Slingshot and I have this plan also and receive fantastic speeds. I have found it to be FAR better than my previous provider and I am extremely happy with the service and support.
What I do hear a lot of is user complaints of slow speeds however whenever I have troubleshooted the issue, every time I have found the problem to be congestion on the Telecom ATM network, mis-configuration by Telecom or poor signal levels (wiring) issues on the local loop or in the home.
Regards.
PS: You are welcome to contact me via the lug site - user antonio and I can check things out for you but will not guarantee any performance increase as Slingshot do not have your local loop and therefore we are affected by Telecom's ATM network.
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Like you, I used to be very
Like you, I used to be very happy with my 128/256 kbps service from Slingshot until I moved to the 128/2048 kbps plan. It was obvious to me from the beginning that the problem was with Telecom's provisioning of the new service — if there had been a problem in the local loop it would have affected my previous service.
What really got me was the failure of Slingshot customer service reps to acknowledge the fact that Telecom had done a bad configuration and put pressure on them to fix it. They also refused to escalate the issue within Slingshot. That to me, was a failure of Slingshot's trouble fixing and customer service process. In any case, I eventually got an e-mail through to Mark Callander who must have got on Telecom's case, as the service subsequently improved.