Your expertise in this area is impressive. How do you find out how an ISP routes its traffic? How would you quantify the impact that different routes have on the user's experience? I use PublicVPN to encrypt my wi-fi connections - that means all my traffic is going via somewhere in the U.S. I've notice the occasional slowdown, but I have no way of quantifying it.
Two people responding to my post mentioned VoIPGate. What advantage, if any, is there to this operation over Skype/SkypeOut/SkypeIn?
For the price, they are no more the cheapiest, since Tele2 launched its ADSL Illimité from 23 € 99.
I don't know how often you check the ISP's prices. As of my last check yesterday, Alternet is matching Tango/Tele2 at the 1Mb and 2Mb level, and only 1€ more per month at the 3Mb level. And they don't require you to migrate your phone line to them. This business of local service resellers (as I believe you can call Tele2, Tiscali, MCI and Cegecom) blocking your access to cheaper long distance options is a scandal. How are they allowed to do this? Isn't it against the principles of deregulated, competitive telecomms policy? I wonder if this happens if you sign up with Tele2 as a preselection customer?
One thing I'm trying to get verified: A Tele2 rep told me today that if I wanted to sign up with them, I had to pay 80€ to have DSL installed on my analog line, as a one-time fee. (I understand it could be higher - P&T has a published fee of 149€ to have a new DSL connection hooked up.) Apparently, they were offering free installation to the first 1024 subscribers. However, my discussions with Alternet lead me to understand that they do not impose such a fee. I strongly dislike the idea of P&T charging a fee to let me allow them to make money off me on a monthly basis. Alternet takes my money and forwards most of it to P&T to pay for their access to the P&T network. Over a year or two, P&T stands to make a lot of money from my DSL use - why annoy me with a fee, and an expensive one at that?
I agree with you on what a good ISP should do about up-selling and blocking. If Alternet doesn't do any of that (I've heard about Coditel blocking port 25, or other ISPs blocking ports associated with BitTorrent. An even more pernicious thing I've heard of is ISPs offering "flat rate" but then qualifying it with a vaguely defined "fair use" clause. Which means it's flat rate unlimited until they decide otherwise.
My current selection is (partially for historical reasons and local availability reasons)
[snipped]
Your "current selection" seems well thought out and worth looking into. I wonder whether you'd recommend a shop selling the necessary hardware? I thought I had a complicated approach to making phone calls to get the cheapest rates with a local phone provider, one LD provider for calling overseas mobile phones and a dial-around service for the rest! I understand most of what you specified, but, forgive me, what is "an analog DECT system"?
You mention CrossComm as worth looking at instead of Alternet. I was looking very seriously at their offerings, as they have good prices and I've heard a couple of knowledgeable people speak highly of them. But the fact that they have still not responded to my email asking about my DSL modem (I heard from Tele2 today, three days late!). I think that if Tele2, Alternet/Tiscali, CrossComm, DSL4All (and for slightly more, VoxDSL) are offering the same price, the best way to distinguish them is a) good package extras and b) tech support/customer service. CrossComm would seem to win on package extras - but don't you think the customer service issue is a serious question?
On 15-Dec-05, at 8:02 AM, Eric Dondelinger wrote:
This is Luxembourg - we're quite happy not to be limited to a single
provider charging 3x usual european rates any more.
There is still a monopoly (do you know monopolies are illegal in E.U. since years ?) and all ADSL ISPs are still reselling EPT accesses (but locally for some of them, such as Alternet).
I think ADSL ISPs will always be reselling access to a common network, in any country. That situation is not in itself a monopoly. Building a parallel network would be prohibitively expensive. Historically, building national networks is one of the main reasons telecomm monopolies were allowed.
The monopoly aspect of it seems to be that P&T is allowed to directly operate an Internet service on a network is owns and operates in direct competition with operators that buy service on that network. That's a conflict of interest. What Luxembourg should do is force P&T to sell of its internet division, and maybe split P&T into a network operator and a local/long distance service provider. But I've heard that ludicrous arguments stemming from exceptional circumstances affecting Luxembourg are allowed to stand as the "Luxembourg Exception".
Thanks for reading.
Mike G.