just moved to Lausanne and rented an apartment. I am looking for internet providers and basically found swisscom and cablecom. According to Cablecom's site, Lausanne is not yet covered so I'm left with swisscom.
I went to a swisscom store and the service I was interested in costs 45 chf/month + phone line access (which basically I don't need). also I need to make a 12-month commitment. The issue is my stay in switzerland is initially for 6 months (may be extended later but as of yet I don't know)
Can anybody provide alternatives?
Thanks
http://perftest.cablecom.ch and smile
It's clear that customer service is important. ADSL is a best-effort service. You get what you pay for. If you buy a leased line in some form or other - dedicated access - the telco or ISP that purchases the line will monitor pro-actively and rectify the fault on your behalf. Because you have paid for that service.
ADSL/Cable is a cheap and cheerful solution for the masses. Telco's don't make any money from you in spite of the network build-out that is required and so they don't waste their top engineers on dealing with crappy queries like "my internet is not working" or "it's slow today, let's do a traceroute, that'll show them!" Go figure.
Have you a direct backbone connection at home or are you just the usual holier than thou troll?
I have never, ever had a problem with my internet connection in which it would have helped to get through to the NOC, and I have had my fair share of problems. Even if they could help they wouldn't, they'd be pissed off you'd called them direct. Sorry but I really don't think you know what you're talking about.
I just want a ISP where I can phone up, speak to a helpdesk or customer service bloke and they will say "yes Mr Peach this will be sorted in 3 days" and actually have it sorted in 3 days. I feel I have found this with Swisscom.
Those sorts of speeds are really only going to appeal to business customers and I find it hard to imagine that even they will realistically find the need to fill those sorts of pipes at the moment. But if business customers want it then ISP's and Telco's will invest in it. Also, DSL is a bit "cheap". I despise any business that uses it even as a backup solution. DSL is only ever a best-effort service.
Metro-Ethernet is starting to make an impact finally.
I have a friend at Swisscom who is a bit "leading-edge" with his home-based technology and he told me 6 months ago that Bluewin TV wasn't up to scratch even though he had VDSL. Yet. But it will get better. Like IP telephony. I've worked on lot's of IP telephony projects in the last 8 years and they haven't been so successful. Don't believe the hype.
BT are trying to converge their old TDM voice network onto IP with a redundant Juniper and cisco network but I bet it won't be quite ready just yet. Too much marketing chat and not enough realism.
But the more bandwidth that the punters want means the more project work I have upgrading the core - so keep with it!
The throughput that you might see with a provider for testing your line is really only local to that ISP. Often they will place an ftp server on a LAN inside their network and tell you that the line is not broken because you can reach them. It's fair comment. But not the end of the story. The true story has alot to do with their IP transit and peering uplinks on their backbone.
With DSL, you only have a single user on a pair of copper wires from your house to the local exchange so there cannot be any contention. But once the traffic is on the core it is.
In essence, because you have good throughput to an ISP test server is only interesting for the ISP in closing the call or ticket. But it doesn't challenge - among other things - their uplinks or peering points where bandwidth may be congested due to over-subscription.
I'm posting this as OFF-TOPIC somewhat, but useful info nonetheless.
About a month ago, I upgraded my 10 meg broadband to the latest 25 meg. I was always happy with the speed on the 10 meg, and whenever I downloaded stuff from usenext, (which I pay a subscription to because of the ultra fast downloads achievable), I could always get the full 10 meg.
The first night of the upgrade, it averaged between 14 and 18 meg, which I could deal with. Then all of a sudden, the maximum download speed I can get is 4 meg, (usually alternating between 256K and 4 meg). I contacted cablecom and they said that the area was overloaded and would be upgraded in just over a month. In the mean time I am still expected to pay more for crappy service.
It would appear that cablecom first get all of the punters, then only create the infrastructure to handle it when they have everyones cash.
Anyone else experienced problems after the upgrade?
Are you still experiencing speeds far below 25mb? I'm very close to signing up for the same but you have me thinking...