Maxnet == Hi-net?

[Upcountry]

Just read the new Maxnet brochure they printed up, and now they clearly state that BitTorrent and VOIP is blocked on the Maxnet4home package.

Proves once again they hooked everybody up to the smeor life package since both BitTorrent and voip worked perfectly for me until the speed suddenly dropped. After that the bitTorrent ports were all blocked...

The above quote is from the closed Maxnet warning thread (shame the thread was closed, punishing all, for the abuses of a few). I won’t use the posters handle because this is a new thread.

That’s really bad news. If VOIP is blocked, that means to me that all important Skype calls would be impossible to make. That’s a life-line for me. As for Bittorrent, it’s been very very slow on Hi-Net, so I gave up on that anyway. But other P2P tools still sort of work – and P2P is not all about the kinds of stuff that Big Brother does not want you to share.

I complained about an extreme slowdown in my Hi-Net service the other day (right after a power outage), and today I got a call from someone who said he works for CAT. He suggested I change from Hi-Net to Maxnet. But as I have been researching it (and based on the above quote), I think I’m better off staying with Hi-Net until they force me to change. They’re offering one month free now, but the “warning” thread discussion seems to indicate that I would not see any improvement in the change. Now, the blocks mentioned for Maxnet may apply to Hi-net as well, but I haven’t seen any explicit mention of this anywhere, and I am able to use Skype.

Regarding my connection problems, after more than 36 hours of worse than dialup performance, I’ve noticed brief increases followed by a return to molassessness. This bouncing is reminiscent of a problem I experienced before. It went away after a while and things returned to the usual much-less-than-advertised performance level. So maybe patience is the answer.

[thohts]

A lot of web services block traffic from Hi-Net (spam is rampant on the network), so it could be that traffic is blocked, but not by Hi-Net

I suggest you find another provider.

[Upcountry]

Interesting. Maybe that explains all the spam I'm getting in mailboxes that never used to get spam. I use a firewall and spyware tools, etc., so I don't think I have a trojan (yet one never knows).

Yet I'm not having trouble with email other than slowness. My problem is with web pages, mainly. I have been trying to download a couple of desktop search tools for days now and the downloads go slowly, then hang forever. They are overseas websites, so the CAT bandwidth problem might explain that.

I'm thinking of CS Loxinfo, which has a good deal and a good reputation now. The cost would be the same as I'm paying now for the same theoretical bandwidth (at least for download). Trouble with that is I may have to get the family to change house phones and wait a week without Internet (use it for income) to get the new service set up.