Rainboy's Lair

Never trust a SEO company which is not #1 on the keyword SEO themselves.

Zoals lezers in het vorige artikel al konden lezen ben ik niet al te chameerd van de praktijken van XS4ALL als het gaat om het opzeggen van een ADSL lijn; is niet zo gek want als iets je 3 maanden abonnements geld kost loopt het bedrag aardig op. XS4ALL zelf denkt nog altijd dat ze het goed doen, want immers de onderzoeken (mij is nooit iets gevraagd trouwens, en met horte en stoten meer dan 10 jaar klant geweest bij deze club, dus hoe goed zijn die onderzoeken nu eenmaal?) blijken anders uit te wijzen:

XS4ALL is het nieuwe jaar uitstekend begonnen met opnieuw een eerste plaats in de Providermonitor van de Consumentenbond. Het is XS4ALL gelukt om voor de achtste keer op rij de beste te zijn in deze maandelijkse test van de Consumentenbond.

Op de volgende onderdelen scoorde XS4ALL het hoogst van alle geteste providers: kwaliteit internet (8,2), stabiliteit internetverbinding (8,4), percentage storingsvrij (85%) en algemene tevredenheid (8).

De Consumentenbond test maandelijks aanbieders van internet en telefonie. De uitslag van de Providermonitor is gebaseerd op meningen en ervaringen van consumenten. Centraal staan de kwaliteit van diensten (internet en bellen), storingen, service en de manier waarop telefonie- en internetproviders met problemen omgaan.

Kwaliteit internet, ja dat is waar, ik heb nooit mogen klagen over de kwaliteit; en dat doe ik dan ook zeker niet.
Stabiliteit, dat heeft volgensmij heel veel met het eerste te maken; geen kwaliteit ook geen stabiliteit dus ook hier hoor je me niet over klagen.
Storings vrij, 85% maar; ik zou het hoger schatten, maar ook dat heeft weer met de eerste 2 te maken.
Algemene tevredenheid: sinds deze week een dikke NUL! (0)

Want een provider die je na 10 jaar als een baksteen laat vallen is het echt niet waard; het is tijd dat consumenten zich realizeren dat dit soort bedrijven alleen uit zijn op je centen en geloven dat ze zelf geen fouten maken. Als er een ding is waar ik HEEL slecht tegen kan is dat onrecht. Ik leg me er bij neer; goed ik betaal die 3 maanden wel (sterker nog; al gedaan!) maar zal nooit meer iemand aanraden om naar xs4all over te stappen. Sterker nog; 2 klanten zijn nu al aan het kijken om ook over te stappen, en waarom ? simpel weg omdat ze niet willen toegeven dat ze een foutje hebben gemaakt. Les 1 in business: Iedereen maakt fouten; ook ik. Je bent pas een vent als je dat ook durft toe te geven.

Bedankt voor de wijze les XS4ALL

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Tienduizenden ambtenaren van de Europese Commissie krijgen 3,7 procent meer loon, fors meer dan de inflatie.

En U ?

Smartphones are the new way to go, with the Iphone and Androids but also Microsoft mobiles the market gets larger and more and more people own a smartphone. But what exactly is the issue with Europe ? why is a smartphone bought in i.e. the Netherlands not used in Belgium, France or Germany ?

Data Roaming is the problem we have in Europe, it is simply unafordable to use your smartphone in other countries as the one where you bought the product, crossing the boarder will change your smartphone into a zombie, a useless brick of electronics where you can only call with at a price nobody can afford, but even worse, data-roaming will cost you a small fortune.

5 years ago i already asked myself the question why a mobile operator like T-Mobile, which is active in multiple European countries just doesnt open up the network and lets callers from any European country call and use data for the same amount or simply add a small fee for roaming but keep the prices for calling and data-transfer the same.

At this moment mobile operators are just ripping off their customers by being customer unfriendly and holding technology development back by their pricing plans. This is not only bad for their business but also for Europe.

While the European union is making new laws about the voice services, they are awfully quiet about the data services, except they warn for the high prices.

I would say: T-Mobile, Vodaphone and other, unite and help Europe forward in time of an economic crisis and let us communicate within Europe for one price so that business can truly feel what Europe means !

I’m ashamed by the big corporations who try to steal the money from their customers for no good reason.

update: 17-06-2009 It seems i am not the only one in the netherlands who worries about this behavior of the telecom sector in Europe.

The Imperial March played on the hard disk .. farewell to all those lovely bytes..

So we got complains from malaysia that our US servers where slow; well here are the hard facts, we did fly to Kuala Lumpur, did get us a TM.NET.MY ADSL line and started testing. What we discovered is absolutely traceable for all parties and can be done by each malaysian to show tm.net.my that they make a big mess of things. Malaysia, your broadband does not need to be slow, this is clearly bad management from your provider.

We start with some speedtest.net results; including some very funny and strange speeds; lets start with Kuala Lumpur.

First of all, the download speed is LOW, second of all the ping gets 93ms (and that is decent if we compare with some other test we did before where pings where even getting above 200ms).. Truth is, this should not be more as 15 to 20ms for the distance traveled.

Let’s go on… Some international testing …

What about Singapore, we know that a lot of Malay connection go over Singapore.

ahhhh that looks more like it ? 79ms, hey thats faster as the local server, maybe local peering is bad, or the test server is stressed to much, or tm.net.my doesnt want us to use it for tests. It doesn’t matter, we have more locations to test from.

Going in the other Direction, we check Hong Kong, still Asia, so expect still relative good connections.

Okay, speed drops a bit, but the pings are still reasonable, lets move outside to the US, as we know the USA has about the most servers most of us want to visit, so that should be fast right ?  Let mewith Clifton, New Jersey.

Uh, say what ? 979ms ? 116 kb/s ? what’s this dail up ? anyways, this server is not overloaded, we know

Ok, move to dallas, TX see what is happening there.

Hmmm Ping gets better, speed still slow, but hey it has about the same speed as the local server.  Lets move to West coast USA. What about San Jose, CA ?

Okay, Terrible speed as well, what is we move to Germany ? twice as far as the US from here. Let’s test Frankfurt.

Okay, i admit, i am a bit jet-lagged took a cold shower, washed my face, cleaned my eyes, did wonder if i needed glasses, but now, what i saw was right, a ping which is half of the USA servers, and a speed faster as to Singapore. What is going on here ? Did our earth change when i was in the plane and is Germany now located next to Malaysia ? Must be our lucky shot, let’s try some more European locations.  What about Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Okay the ping did go up, but watch the speed, yeah, thats what they sold me when i bought the tm.net.my package, thats what i expect to get to servers in the USA as well. How come that a location twice as far as the US is receiving these speeds, okay i hear you, you say the distance on speedtest.net is lower, well, i will help you out of that dream that is the shortest route between point A and point B geographicly, not the actual millage of submarine cables, most connections to Europe will go over the US (some exceptions are there) but then they need to move through the middle east towards Europe and thats not a straight line as the speedtest.net indicator is showing.

One more, Paris, France… France is not known for very good international bandwidth so lets see.

Okay as expected the speed is slower, but still far better as any US location. I start wondering about the UK, most POPs of international carriers are located in the UK to make the dive over the big pond towards the US.

Ah better again, so … what is the deal with Germany, why are speeds on its best towards that location, and why does tm.net.my seem to boycott USA servers, has this political reasons, or is tm.net.my not able to set up international peering with the bigger parties ? or are there other reasons ?

If you work for TM please let us know, we are willing to listen to your side of the story, but the facts are there. The truth has been told, now it is up to Telekom Malaysia to fix their issues.

p/s if you are a Malaysian reading this, we are very sorry for the slow loads, please complain to your hosting provider, it is really only their fault.

Watch the video, it says it all, have fun watching it

Ja hoor, los maar eerst even deze Rubiks kubus op.

News broke late yesterday that Google was preparing to launch a new site call Knol that will combine parts of Wikipedia and Squidoo to create a new user generated authoritative online knowledgebase of everything.All the details aren’t fully clear yet. What we do know is that Google will offer a revenue share from each page: “If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with substantial revenue share from the proceeds of those ads,” although we don’t know at this stage how much. We know that unlike Squidoo or other sites who offer a percentage share of advertising revenue, Knol cuts out the middle man. Think of it this way; presuming Google normally splits 50% (no one knows the exact number, at it changes at different levels) of revenue from an Adsense unit with a normal publisher, in the case of someone like Squidoo or even a blog with writers writing on a rev share model they then get a percentage of the 50%; Knol on the other hand could offer a proper 50% of the actual original cost of the ad, not a percentage of the percentage: that is not only a great big advantage, it’s also verging on unfair competition.

Okay fine, want to call it knol? guess google is also going into Industrial Cleaning Systems  ? http://www.knol.com seems to be such a company and is hosted at 040 Hosting.