Hi Ben, in addition to my tweet we are of the opinion that this is more complex than the scenario you have outlined above. We would certainly appreciate the opportunity to share our side of the story. I want to make sure that I have the details right, so will get those from our tech team on Monday and come back to you.

Sorry, should have added my sign off so that it was clear who I was.

Duncan Blair
Head of Brand and Communications
Orcon

Interesting that from all providers I’ve read about so far, the only one that I did not find a single complaint from was Snap Internet.

I’m still an Orcon customer and plan to say this way since I’m not necessarily experiencing any issues at the moment, but to hear so many stories about them makes me wonder when I should start worrying.

Just chiming in to say that I live in Mt. Eden and have nothing but praise for Orcon. Fast, solid connection with great plans and a few (good) surprises thrown in for good measure (2 for 1 movie passes, free you tube for a few months, Iggy Pop!!).

Thanks Orcon,
Thorcon.

I’ve never had a faster connection or better support than I’ve had in my last two places with Orcon.

Judging by the occasional speedtest.net share-a-thon on twitter, no one else has as fast a connection as I do either, so while this may be anecdotal it’s also measured and consistent, and not imaginary.

It’s a bummer they couldn’t sort it out, I think it became quite obvious that the problem was at the exchange. Does that mean Orcon were at the mercy of the vagaries of Chorus, or does it mean an Orcon engineer never did the obvious thing and tried plugging you into a different port?

I’m interested to know if you have the same disconnection problems if you are downloading a file over say ftp, maybe orcon have a set up where they disconnect large numbers of connections (eg p2p) as they cause more damage to the network bandwidth than one connection downloading.

I had a billing issue with Orcon a few months back but didn’t get anything useful from their phone support until one time I called and found myself talking to Duncan. He fixed my problem and also promised to look into why it had happened in the first place. So all I can say about Orcon is – they’re fine if you deal directly with Duncan!

So I had a similar problem with Orcon, the link became unstable under load. Orcon escalated my problem quickly to “Technical Support” where they sat on it. Eventually, my only option turned out to be to switch to another provider as orcon said they wouldn’t look at my problem for “weeks”.

I didn’t need to use bittorrent to provoke the problem, downloading an iso from citylink’s ubuntu mirror was more the sufficient to make the link drop. The problem was that the PPP LCP echo reply packets seemed to be prioritised below the regular internet traffic, so when you max out your connection, the echo reply packets stop coming back and PPP thinks the link has died. When you stop downloading, the missing echo reply packets all arrive (assuming the link is still up).

The problem was eventually resolved (switching to another provider turned out to be harder that you might expect) when Telecom installed cabinets and Orcon moved me onto the telecom service (because their unbundled service went to crap with the cabinet in the way).

Kak. That first link should point to http://carrott.org/cgi-bin/twiki/view/Main/OrconInternet#15_5_9_ish_called_by_orcon and the last link should point to http://carrott.org/cgi-bin/twiki/view/Main/XnetInternet

Orcon used to have good service. Up until last year I would have recommended them, but not any more. Their service is now the pits.

Here is just one example. I’m still trying to resolve a phone issue that was first reported to them 13 Oct 2009. Got feed up waiting for a solution, so asked them to instead remove the service on 3 Dec 2009. Its now March and I’m still waiting for them to stop charging me for service I’m not receiving. Sent them a reminder 5 days ago via a new support call. Also backed it up by sending the same message via their website feedback form. Am now playing the waiting game yet again.

If anyone from Orcon would like to shock me with some service the call id is #IIJ-607030 – but based on the last 6 months I think I’ve got more chance of winning Lotto.

I used to have issues like this with Woosh, since being with Orcon I have never had any connection drop outs. I do however suffer from “as fast as the line will go” syndrom. Once 4pm comes around I might as well go to the pub as the connection drops from reasonably fast to pathetically slow most of the time just as school kids come home.

Since requesting Orcon to increase my upload speed from 128kbps to 1mb my internet experience has got much better

Overall though Orcons customer service has been amazing

@ Phil – More than happy to shock you. Working on sorting it now, you should hear from one of the team soon.

@Justin – Speed shouldn’t grind to a halt like that. If you can get some evidence of this happening (comparative speedtests etc) send it through to the team and they will take a look at it – support@orcon.net.nz

And Ben, still waiting to hear back from Chorus about getting you an exchange visit.

Duncan Blair
Head of Brand and Communications
Orcon

Hurray! Just got a response on my support call. Now I’ll have to wait and see if the execution is as good as the promises.

I’d like to be more positive but the comedy of errors experienced over the last 6 months does not permit this.

Thank you Duncan for moving this along.

Have had broadband with Orcon and phone with Telecom for some time now. Moved phone to Orcon unbundled service last week and nothing but problems since.
1) ADSL router drops connection at random and reconnects after a few seconds. Sometimes hours apart, one cluster two days ago where it dropped the connection every couple of minutes. Behaving itself today but line speeds well down on what we were getting before we went unbundled.
2) Phone line fine at first, increasing static over a couple of days now all dead. No dial tone. No nothing. Have been trying to get Orcon to look at it for several days now but support@orcon.net.nz seems to be an empty hole. Now had no phone for 40 hours and they just aren’t taking me seriously. XT has never been out for thls long, and at least you only have to wait a cfouple of hours for 1-2-3. Moving the phone line was a BAD move.

Managed after 47 hours to get Orcon to “hear me”. Problem fixed shortly thereafter. Turned out to be a corroded junction up a pole on the local loop, that finally packed up in Wednesday’s rain. The VisionStream PoleMonkey said he was surprised we had any ADSL at all; couldn’t work out how we managed to get a circuit through it. The issue for Orcon isn’t the fault (stuff breaks and shit happens); it is the contortions I had to go to to be “heard”, and get some feeling the fault was being investigated.