|
aardvark (ard'-vark) a controversial animal with
a long probing nose used for sniffing out the facts and stimulating thought
and discussion.
NZ's leading source of Net-Industry news and commentary since 1995 |
|
Right of Reply
3 September 2003 From: Malcolm Dick For : Right Of Reply (for publication) Subj: Commentary on Slingshot's Jetbuster As one of the owners of Slingshot, I'd like to make a few remarks on your recent commentary about our new service based on Jetstream that we are claiming to be faster and have no download limits. Firstly, we developed this product because, like everyone else we were annoyed by Telecom's persistence in charging outrageous sums for volume usage on Jetstream, and hoped they would launch new faster products with low cost or no download limits. Our raw cost for bandwidth, as a medium- sized ISP is well under half a cent per megabyte. Telecom's cost must surely be a fraction of this, so there can be no justification for their charges of 20 cents per megabyte after a very small free limit. Jetstart 128k is the only product where they make no volume charge, (and direct the traffic to the ISP's bandwidth). Secondly, our Xcelerator product definitely speeds up web pages by a factor of at least 2 and often a lot more. I use it with Jetstart myself regularly, so I know this for a fact. So by combining Jetstart 128k with Xcelerator and adding no download limits, is the best we can do to help break telecom's stranglehold on DSL. We are of course worried about large numbers of clients taking full advantage of this service and, since we do have a real cost on International bandwidth based on the volume of traffic, we will be applying some contention during the peak hours to file downloads, but not to Web pages or email or other sporadic types of traffic. Also there will be no contention applied on national traffic. We think this approach is far more appealing than getting a huge bill at the end of the month for excess volume charges. With regard to your comments on our terms and conditions regarding excessive usage - we have never disconnected any client for this reason. In fact, I'm removing this clause because it's not relevant in today’s cheaper International bandwidth. Thanks for bringing it to my attention. As far as bandwidth goes, we have probably the most generous policies around - there is no shortage. Recently however, we were subjected to some massive denial-of- service attacks, where a person or persons hacked into about 20 overseas educational institutes servers who have huge pipes into the internet, and they have directed massive volumes of traffic at our servers. This has caused periods of slow surfing while we identify the source and block their access. Why they were doing this to us is beyond me. While no ISP is immune to such attacks, we can take measures to rapidly block such attacks, and of course work with the authorities to catch the culprits. The reason why we charge quarterly in advance is to reduce the administration costs associated with billing. We pass this on to our customers by charging less than any other national ISP. Does anyone really want to pay $16.95 every single month? Finally, with respect to the long term future of Slingshot - I bet we outlast Aardvark. While it’s true that Annette and I are investing in Australia high-tech companies, this is out of frustration with the poorly established regulatory environment in New Zealand, which pretty much confirms Telecom's monopoly for some time to come. We are raising our family in New Zealand and are staying here. Please publish this reply, as I know Telecom read your forums and I challenge them develop some decent wholesale DSL products which would make Jetbuster obsolete. Regards Malcolm Dick, Slingshot
|
