Says who? The person who says so seriously hasn’t been to India. Or maybe he just never had to deal with Exatt (read: evil ISP). These guys are the bane of my existence. If it weren’t for them, life would seriously be a lot easier. I have 7 points to this post.

1) The guys at Exatt can read minds
No other way to explain it. Got to submit an important project? Need to do some research for a subject? Need to write an assignment? Want to learn something? Got a customer/competition deadline to meet? Want to audio chat with a family member?
If any of these are true for you, you can guarantee Exatt will be down. 9/10 if you have something important to do, they seem to be down. You could say its bad luck if it happens a few times but when it happens for 4 straight years, you know something is fucked.

2) They can redefine what ping stats are supposed to be!
Here is my current ping stats to google.
Ping statistics for 64.233.167.99:
Packets: Sent = 592, Received = 139, Lost = 453 (76% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 300ms, Maximum = 320ms, Average = 303ms
In case you’re wondering how I’m here, its because I am typing this out in scite now. May be when Exatt deems I haven’t got anything important to do on the internet (refer #1) it will allow me to come online.

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Tags: exatt, internet, rant

I usually keep ranting about my ISP because [a] I deserve to [b] They suck ass [c] They have pathetic service [d] They have awful uptimes.
Well, all of the above still stand true but for the past 5 days, I have had almost an uncapped (or maybe a 2-5MBit) upload connection. Max speed so far? Try 462 KB/s. Yes KiloBytes, not KiloBits. I’m as shocked as you are! This isn’t a one time spike. My connection has almost died and come back a million times. It still randomly dies. Yet I get uncapped uploads.
What about the download speed? Well on a 64kbps line, I would expect 7.5~8 KB/s but for the past 8 months, I’ve had only about 5~5.5 KB/s and the tech support even tried to pass that off as normal (until I told them who I was and I knew how the connections worked..). The current status is that when this crazy upload speed bonanza started off, my download speed came back to 7.5~8 KB/s but now its down to 6~6.5 KB/s. May be the decrease is because its also uploading at 30+ KB/s simultaneously where as the 7.5~8 KB/s was clocked on a line which wasn’t uploading.

This did start off as a 8 KB/s down + 8 KB/s up thing which felt nice. Now it just seems crazy. Needless to say that my ratios which were already through the roof are improving (not that I needed it :P). I just wish that the same would happen to my download cap and that they don’t have a bandwidth cap for the month

Overall, I do hate Exatt. I know that I’m using a pretty powerful word but I’ve earned it over 3 and a half years of shitty service. Everything that can go wrong, has gone wrong with them. Changing plans without notification, adding bandwidth caps without notification, changing prices without notification, substandard service plans and even lower speeds (128k line costing 1K INR; 64k line working at 40k). And this is just the tip of the iceberg. When you need your internet the most like for an important email, project submission or research work you can be sure its not working and even if it is, it will have 40% packet loss. Waiting 10 minutes for a page to load is unacceptable. Having to wait 3 days for them to start your connection when a cable has broken near your house and you stay 40 feet from their office is equally unacceptable, if not more so. I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy. I just hope I can change ISPs soon. So in case any random Google user comes across this, you know you should not, under any circumstance, opt for Exatt. This whole upload thing was seriously one time.

Tags: exatt, internet