New grapevine plans on TransACT

To address ogrex’s original query about off-peak times though, if GV’s making daylight hours as their off-peak, it’s probably because their pipes are empty then. Probably coz their customer base is all residential users and not business customers.
That’s just speculation though.

Whatsup said :

Can say we use Velocity and its been good. Not sure on the latest plans or cost comparison however I can say that Grapevine had loads of outages and problems and they were telling us that it was our equipment at fault. Other Grapevine customers were having similar problems at the same times. We switched to Velocity and have have very few glitches in the past 18 months, they are a friendly bunch to talk to as well.

I don’t work for anyone to do with either company, just thought I would add my 2c.

and harry K actually takes an interest in the complaints, where he can help, he does. Very good operator. I remember the Dynamite BBS fondly…

Can say we use Velocity and its been good. Not sure on the latest plans or cost comparison however I can say that Grapevine had loads of outages and problems and they were telling us that it was our equipment at fault. Other Grapevine customers were having similar problems at the same times. We switched to Velocity and have have very few glitches in the past 18 months, they are a friendly bunch to talk to as well.

I don’t work for anyone to do with either company, just thought I would add my 2c.

Interesting. My resellers also like grapevine, and the other Transact isp’s. allows us to sell wireless broadband without much competition from that quarter… just have to deal with Optus & voda.

(I work for a Distie)

Peterh, One of them, yes.

Aurelius said :

caf, Interesting you’d mention GV’s retention. In the ISP I work for, we call GV our “marketing team”, because they do far more for our sales than anything we do ourselves.

so, you work for a transact isp, then?

caf, Interesting you’d mention GV’s retention. In the ISP I work for, we call GV our “marketing team”, because they do far more for our sales than anything we do ourselves.

Interestingly with Grapevine’s offpeak being inverted compared to the other ISPs – it seems to me that truly supersize downloaders would be best off getting two accounts, and switching their logon twice a day so they remain in offpeak time as much as possible.

Ogrex if we didn’t think it was a suitable topic for conversation we wouldn’t have run it.

Aurelius – I appreciate your comments and your insight. I also welcome the effort to keep this forum ‘honest’.

For me, it comes down to this: what I currently have works fine, and I’ve had no issues with it since starting it in 2005. I download heaps, all off peak, and not P2P.

The new plans are $3/month cheaper (who-hoo!), give me 5 more hours of off-peak download and give me the ability to bundle therefore saving $25+ more a month (I’ve down the whole spreadsheet to see what bundling would actually save me based on current usage).

But, suspicion is warranted. I can’t find any major loopholes in the current T&C… but perhaps others know better.

Cheers all.

Auerlius: It looks like Grapevine have now put a monthly cap on their shaped plans, so the issue of being up for hundreds in overrun charges before the shaping kicks in isn’t there anymore. I imagine they found that pricing structure had a pretty negative impact on their signup and retention rates…

However, their pricing structures are now insanely complicated, with the one plan having three different download limits, a shaping speed, a price per megabyte and two different flat prices (yes, one plan). I find it hard to believe that this is what customers were crying out for.

Thanks so much for the links Peter, much appreciated. I don’t peruse whirlpool enough, but I did come across the post you just quoted. I’ve been considering Velocity for a while now, as the $35/35 plans appealed to my sense of simplicity. 35 is fine for most of my needs, but there are rare occasions (this month for example) where I’ve exceeded 50GB of off-peak (only 3GB peak, take that!).

ogrex,
Understandable, the only way you could be better off is if your existing ISP was worse – ie, ANOTHER Grapevine plan 🙂
It’s natural to be suspicious of their new plans. In fact, it’s natural to be suspicious of anything an ISP says – I’ve worked for enough.

C+P from whirlpool:

“Grapevine’s website says unlimited offpeak on their 10,20,40 and 60 gig plans – their offpeak is inverted against velocity and netspeed of course.”

“The grapevine plans are more expensive and have overrun charges at 10c per megabyte. Plus the overrun warning comes at 110%, once you have already got a extra $100 in charges for the extra 1 gig you downloaded (based on the 10GIG plan). If you can manage this then give them a shot.”

10/mb isn’t too bad, but over run at 110% is a bit of a bugger.

perhaps speak to velocity – I cannot force myself to recommend netspeed…..

Clarification: I’m already with Grapevine, so it’s not a matter of going over to them, it’s just a matter of switching to a new plan vs. the old plan I’m on. The new plans ARE cheaper than my current one, therefore I am saving money. Ditto with the fact that I’m already paying TransACT for my connection, so there’s no change there. I’m just suspicious and was looking for opinions.

Yeah, maybe not the most appropriate forum, but posts come and go… that’s life.

Disclaimer: I work for an academic institution and therefore I’ve likely got my head up my own a*se.

check out the transact forum page….

http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-threads.cfm?f=67&g=46

10 cents a mb for excess could be a killer if you go over in a month and 24 month contracts are always a annoying for me given how fast things can change in the broadband world. And just checking you are aware that these prices do not include connection to the transact broadband network – a minimum additional $56 a month by a quick glance of this page http://www.transact.com.au/packages/default.aspx#cable

Disclaimer: I work for an ISP that I shant identify because I don’t want to be labelled a marketer.

The plans Grapevine offer are obscenely expensive. To become shaped with them, you first have to clock up hundreds of dollars in excess usage fees. And working at an ISP, I can assure you that there’s nothing customers hate more than finding the $20 a month plan they signed up for has cost them $100 because they didn’t keep a close eye on their net usage.
Plus, Grapevine lock customers in for long term contracts. And customers like that almost as much as they like excess usage fees.

I call ‘marketing’ on ogrex’s original post because he neglects to mention the above, and claims he can reduce his costs by going to them. And having worked for 3 ISPs, I’d be hard pressed finding one with pricing structures worse than Grapevine.

After re-reading my own post, I too agree that it seemed suspicious, my apologies. I can assure that I’m just a regular ol’ punter looking after my own interests.

My current concern is whether I’m going to regret this whole bundling thing 6 months from now if network performance goes to sh*t. It’s just looking sooo tempting right now.

Aurelius said :

This smells like a marketing post….

Interesting you say that, i thought the same thing, but decided i was being paranoid.

This smells like a marketing post….

The catch is that Grapevine are oversubscribed, they don’t have the external bandwidth to support their customer load.

I think the new peak/offpeak times are probably due to large chunks of TransACT’s small/medium business customers shifting to cheaper and faster ADSL2 connections, thus dropping the traffic during business hours.

as a lark, I posted on whirlpool a query of “How does TransACT work?” the responses were amazing – over 200 pm’s and maybe 12 posts.

great fun, my clients loved it too.

If you want to see the catch, check out whirlpool at http://www.whirlpool.net.au/ and enter your phone number in to find the best selections of ISP’s for canberra.

additionally, if you post this article on whirlpool, after rego’ing, you will receive untold advice from grapevine, netspeed, velocity (actual ISP reps) and users.

whilst i am not saying that the people who frequent RiotACT cannot help you, there are other sites that may provide additional info….