That is very very interesting you say that. What area are you in?

Hi,

I have been with Orcon for about 3 years and had great internet speeds and good value for money and had recommended them to a few of my friends, about 4 in total had joined up.

About 2 years ago I began experiencing issues.
My internet would drop to below dialup speeds and randomly disconnect. While I’m on the phone the phone line would randomly disconnect.
The internet would usually be unusable during the day sometime getting 30kbps. I restart of the modem would sometimes get it to 1.8mbps on the ADSL2+ Network.
At times the internet speed would slow down only when I’m on a call.
I had called up Orcon who gave me these bunch of tests 2 routers, new , but they had no solution for it.
They had the call open for ages and threatened me with charges if they sent some one over and it was my fault, but no one came.

I had moved house twice in that time with exactly the same issue. My friends in other suburbs were also experiencing the exact issue. I have since moved to Telecom a month ago and a few of my friends have decided to do the same. Funny thing now that I’m with Telecom my internet speed is about 16mbps and internet never drops.

I have been an Orcon customer for many years, and for the years that were lived in Ponsonby Auckland, a very happy customer.

However I moved to Sandringham in Feb, and continued with Orcon.
Since then, and till now, 6 months later, I have been experiencing connection speed drops from 11,000kbps, to 1,200kbps, around 3 times a month. And the only way ive been able to solve this is by phoning Orcon and having them do a line reset.

Every time i call them, i have to explain that:
YES ive tried with and without a filter,
YES ive tried 4 different routers
YES those 4 different routers work perfect at other peoples houses
YES ive tried all the phone jacks in my house
YES ive tried different cables, RJ44′s and RJ45′s

Each time I have to call up about this i end up sitting on hold for 20 mins, and then having to explain to someone totally different the entire story again and again.

Im paying for ADSL2+ speeds, and not even getting ADSL1 speeds.
TWISE now a “tech” has been sent to “investigate” the problem at exchange/lines/my house and neither time have i ever even been contacted about it. And the problem still continues…

Pretty ive got some rights to dispute my bill over this.
Not happy at all….
Come on ORCON! What happened to no ques on the customer service, what happened to fast stable speeds???

Very VERY disappointed customer.

Well we switched from Vodafone to Orcon naked dsl on the promise of higher down and upload speeds.

So far our experience is that page loads in particular from US sites (and our own servers on slicehost (dallas)) is way slower with a lot of latency.

Not sure what’s going on – is the international bandwidth throttled for or by Orcon vs Vodafone ??

I would go for Orcon if you are in Auckland, check if you are on their own lines / servers no Telecoms first in your area.

If there are issues on the line like static it will be your phone line / Telecom / NZ Archaic phone system. I sometimes think that when I push in google.co.nz some dude sitting in a warehouse moves a line to that site.

Basically whats wrong is the NZ government put a whole lot of regulations / laws on Telecom to upgrade the existing copper wire, before they knew about fiber. So if Telecom starts laying fiber they are actually breaking the law! How freaking crazy and backwards. so the 1.5 billion a year is to upgrade the copper. They said it would take double that to do the fiber, but hey I am willing to wait for fiber and stick out with the shitty copper for a while.

NOTE TO this forum for other comments, after complaining lots about line speed my line has nearly tripped.. magically.. still 9 dropouts yesterday though…but that will be my line (hopefully) although I did see the Telescam guys stuffing around with the exchange.. Yes Duncan I know conspiracy theories… You might say we are all talking conspiracies on here but the other day when my line was down for 5 hours, and I saw the Telecom vans parked outside my exchange you said you knew nothing about an upgrade… surely Telecom would have told you about a 5 hour down time? Well actual I can imagine they didn’t… Please tell me I am wrong and Telescam doesn’t tell you when they are doing maintenance on exchanges.

Whatever you do, don’t go to Telstraclear. You will be swapping one set of problems for a raft of new ones, not least their terrible customer service. The reason I am on this site now is because I’m looking for a better isp. I have been put off from using Orcon after reading many of the negative comments. Consumer Mag put out a poll and Actrix (97% rating) & Inspire came out top. Actrix are a bit more expensive than a similar Orcon(84% rating) plan but if their customer satisfaction is as good as stated then the extra cost is worth it. I’ve spent probably 8hrs in the past 9mths waiting for TClr to answer the phone so it’s cost me a lot in wasted work hours.
There is something very wrong with Telecommunications in this country for there to be so much dissatisfaction. We have had Chorus out 3x in the last year to fix our terribly static phoneline. They go up the pole, do something up there, then 4mths later the line is bad again. They say it’s moisture. If that’s the case then why don’t they just fix the problem for good and waterproof the connection? It’s just lazy, short term thinking. Which is why our network is so 3rd world at times. The sooner they roll out fibre the better.

Haha, you guys and your conspiracy theories!

As much as I do love reading Ben’s blog I am not watching it that closely. Glad you got a response though. Let me know if there is anything I can do to help out.

Duncan Blair
Head of Brand and Communications
Orcon

Murphy strikes… just as I pressed submit I got a response from the Help Desk! Support must be watching this page closely!!! lol

Email = lost in transit. Ring Ring Ring.. It goes onto your account and if you ring enough, they will start listening.

I generally start the conversation like this.

Yes checked the router, changed the filter, tried a different jack and yet I did try and turn it off and on again .

Why don’t you email him. duncan.blair (at) team.orcon.net.nz, they do want to keep everyone happy – Future goals though if Telecom is still running the show.

If everyone at Orcon was as dedicated as Duncan it might be a good company.

However I emailed support over a week ago and have still not seen any acknowledgment of the email/request.

Sigh.

Hey Everyone / Duncan.

Yes do what he says:

Got this message today from Orcon out of the blue.

“HI KYLE,

We’ve made the plan changes that you asked for.

So now you can jump back online. Happy surfing!

The Orcon Team”

And now have this: wow over double the speed, how interesting! http://www.speedtest.net/result/833598237.png

Thanks, happy Kyle now

Hey Duncan,

Its not really a dig at Orcon, its all telco in NZ is rubbish. I know Orcon is probably the one and only company in NZ actually doing something about it.

I figure I will just pay for a technician to come out here to check if there is any noise on the line. I know dropouts are caused by that. They are turning on interleaving in the next few days, so hopefully that fixes most of the dropouts. 1-2 a day no problem I understand the technical world of getting the DSL to the door. I am not going to like the small speed lost by that, but hey its a start.

Yeah 18000 sync speed, however it was sitting at 3500 for the last while and after the exchange upgrade it went up to 18000. I saw the line speed go up to 7/8 mbs for a whole day which was great but now back to 3.5.

It must be terrible the amount of crap you get for telecom issues, but hey thats comes with the territory.

Kyle

Hi guys,

Apologies I have been a little slow getting to some of these comments.

Just a quick reminder: if you have an issue with your Orcon broadband (or any other product) please make sure you log a fault with us directly so that we are aware of it and are able to find a solution. You can log a fault by email (support@orcon.net.nz) or call 0800 13 14 15.

More than happy to answer any questions or comments here, but I just want to make sure that we are fixing whatever issues you have.

Thanks,
Duncan Blair
Head of Brand and Communications
Orcon

Hi Tony,

We have had a couple of minor outages this month with Webmail, perhaps this has been what has affected your email account?

If there is anything I can do to help out please feel free to get in touch with me directly: duncan.blair (at) team.orcon.net.nz

Duncan Blair
Head of Brand and Communications
Orcon

Just to clarify some issues. I’ve experienced the same dropouts as Ben did for pretty much 1 year with Orcon in North Shore. Always suspected the modem (Dynalink RTA1320) of overheating and rebooting if I did over 1GB in traffic in one session. I have one day recorded with over 130 disconnects in the space of 24 hours.

Replaced it last Thursday night with a DrayTek Vigor DV120 which, although not cheap ($140), made my connection more stable by an order of magnitude.

It didn’t occur before (I’ve been with Orcon for almost 3 years) because I never had great wiring. After a service from Chorus last year the speeds went up, and so went the disconnects.

As Ben posted in the original article: the higher speeds may be causing your modem to ‘give up’ after some traffic’s been through.