I think I finally have broadband Internet at home that I’m reasonably satisified with!

This afternoon, thanks to the excellent team at WorldXChange my DSL line was upgraded to 2M/512k. Despite the fact that we always want more than we can have I think this combination will actually be very useful and worthwhile for me. 2Mbps is more than adequate for the amount of downloading I do and increasing the upstream to 512k means that I can have an outgoing file transfer running without my SSH sessions locking up every few seconds. There is still a 10G international traffic cap, but I don’t do more than about 6-7GB of International traffic a month so that doesn’t bother me, and I’m really pleased that WorldXChange offer free national traffic.

There is no question that the threat of regulation has done wonders for the state of broadband in New Zealand over the last 18 months. It’s still a pretty tough market for the ISPs and Telecom’s wholesale bitstream product (UBS) is nowhere near the equivalent to unbundling that they promised it would be, however for the average consumer things are certainly a lot better they were. Which is good, because I think whatever the Government decides to do in June (assuming its not nothing) is going to set the Industry back a fair bit as everybody readjusts to the new landscape and works out where they fit. Having a semi-decent set of plans to tide us through that period is going to be great.

If you’re looking for a DSL provider I highly recommend that you use WorldXChange. I’ve not yet found an aspect of their product or service that is below par. They answer the phone on the first ring, the customer service reps are friendly, helpful and always know what they’re doing and best of all they give you free national internet traffic! So don’t delay, swap today to WorldXChange and put mkbrown down as your reference so that I get some credits on my account.