When a good ISP goes really bad

Last year I signed up with Orcon, I had been with Xtra for over 10 years and could not fault their service but I wanted faster speeds and more affordable overage charges. I asked around and at the time Orcon seemed to be the best.Switching was painless and I got two months credit, my speeds went from an average 4.5Mbit to 6Mbit+. So far so good.Things went smoothly till about June when I started experiencing dropouts so bad I could not get a connection, I thought it was my modem but the same thing happened to two others. Weeks of harassing Orcon helpdesk and thousands of disconnection later and it was finally sorted, but they never would tell me what the problem was.My speeds were back up, now pushing over 7Mbit and I couldn’t be happier, forward to three weeks ago and suddenly the dropouts have started again and the horror story really begins.I ring the helpdesk, average wait is now an hour, three times I got through only to be hung up on. When I do get through I get told they cannot see any issues with my connection. It will lose ADSL sync or will stay connected but there is no data flow.During the day it isn’t too bad but at night (this is what makes me believe it is a network problem) I don’t usually have a connection for more than 10 minutes and downloading a file will often cause it to drop out.So here I am with a connection that is useless to me and an ISP that flat out refuses to acknowledge there is a problem.To makes matters worse it appears that Orcon are blocking torrent traffic; more info can be found here: http://www.geekzone.co.nz/forums.asp?ForumId=49&TopicId=17209. I have edited uTorrent and now get around 5Mbit on my torrents (if I can get a steady connection for more than 30 seconds).I spent a long time singing the praises of Orcon, now their service is utter rubbish, I wholeheartedly recommend people to stay away from them. This episode and news of equally bad treatment of Slingshot customers is making me stay away from the wholesale ISPsI will be switching back to Xtra at the end of my billing month. I don’t mind paying for more for a stable connection, which I had for years before I switched to Orcon.
Source: geekzone.co.nz , By Bradley Stewart