At last – a reliable and fast ISP?

Back in December Unspun asked readers what’s a good ISP – Internet Service Provider – in Jakarta. There were some useful suggestions and then Jeremy Wagstaff, whose knowledge of loose wires and connected ones surpasses mine by tons, suggested that I should chat with Andre O. Halim, the president director of netZap.

Initially Unspun was not keen because an initial brush with their customer service did not yeild the best of results. Plus Unspun’s office was now subscribing to a ISP with a microwave link, which was not too reliable. But considering the choice out there it was worth a shot.

So Unspun trooped over to Andre’s office sometime in December to have a chat with him. A good start was that he was not defensive about the bad service we had earlier but sid that he wantd to understand the problem so he could fix it. We then talked about matters technical (of which Unspun pretended to understand) and at the end of the talk Unspun, head spinning, decided to try our netZap.

We tried the Group Package on offer which is meant for “gamers, SMEs etc” and comes with a tag of Rp900,000 per month. You could set it up for up to eight people. So far, Unspun is happy to report, the service has been reliable and very fast.  How fast? According to the Indosat IM2 speedtest the Upload speed was 760kbps while the Dowload speed was 731kbps. Not too bad. This means you can actually watch YouTube without interruptions as the computer tries to buffer.

Unspun then tried to check the speed of our broadband with our Uninet connection. Uninet also uses microwave and what I got was an Upload speed of 622kbps and Download speed of 531kbps.

So netZap wins heands down for now. Unspun‘ll post in a couple of months to see if netZap will maintain its speed and quality. In the meantime, to be fair, not everyone is happy. My brother-in-law in Kebun Jeruk who’s also a netZap subscriber says that his speed has gone down in the past month or so and when he called them they said that this was because they were saturted with subscriptions for the area.

On a related matter, what gets Unspun’s goat is how S_L_O_W the HSDPA connection for IM2 has become in recent weeks. On bad days it is almost impossible to get a connection at all and on good days the internet is so slow that it takes you back to connection speed ala Suharto days.

What Unspun can’t understand is why doesn’t the YLKI or other consumers associations go after Indosat for failing to live up to their promise of a 3 Gigabytes/second speed. What’s happened to all those lawyer who are so quick at filing class action suits?