Almost forgot, I briefly mentioned it yesterday though, but there's an important event that took place in the Romanian communication market which is consolidating: Liberty Global (the UPC mother company) purchased 100% of Astral shares. UPC was the smaller of the 3 players in the industry, the heavy fight for country coverage was between Astral and RDS - turns out the Americans knew what they wanted: they wanted it all and they wanted it now. :) It's just a matter of the OK given by the State's body in charge of regulating the market competition.
This will likely lead to two things: more competition on price and services reflecting on the benefit of the consumers and an easier way for new incumbents to speculate niches as the big guys will be more preoccupied on competing against each other.
For more context and substance on the local industry, as covered on this blog in time: 1, 2, 3, 4.
Let's hope their services will improve, although I strongly doubt that (see other Romanian companies that were taken over by TNCs and behave exactly the same as before).
Astral has been fantastic for me for the past 4-5 months. I get 240 kbps out of 256 kbps internal, external, whether it's day or night, it doesn't matter, I get that and with hardly any downtime (maybe 5 minutes for three or four times a month). I'd just like more bandwidth, that's all. And make it metropolitan with RDS as well.
That is because Astral upgraded to 384Kbps best effort for home users sometimes in spring. On the other hand the similar RDS offer is 768Kbps best effort for $10 less.
The problem is that in most cases Astral has complementary area coverage with RDS, whereas one is not available if wanting to switch from the other - and this duopoly play is really pissing me off. Oh well, in some cases there are the local networks you can subscribe to, but most of them are simply resellers of RDS/Astral.
Astral has yet to upgrade to 384 kbps. It should happen in the following weeks, while it has already happened for some customers in the past 2 weeks as far as I know. They have only launched the TriPlay offer at CERF. As for RDS, that 768 kbps is only metropolitan, while the external is lagging behind. Plus, their downtime and reliability is far worse than Astral's. I'm speaking from the expieriences my freinds are having with it. I'm one of the lucky ones that can switch to whatever cable operator I want - there's 3 of them in my area. And I did; I've switched between 4 companies for the past couple of years (including RDS and a company that got bought by them) for about 7 times and I've finally stuck with Astral.
And is Astral's 384kbps internet or just metropolitan either?
384 kbps everywhere.
I hope Astral will grow metropolitan speed at around 2MB, that will be a real upgrade and a perfect way for them to keep 99% of us as clients. It is very strange when we see friends with local connections and metropolitan speed in tranfers with over 1MB/s, that's a dream. Anyway, from last over 2 years with Astral as provider, I can say only this: they has real constant services.
A friend of mine just switched from RDS to Romtelecom's DSL line (clicknet.ro) -- he got some sort of a discount and he's paying monthly $35 plus $4 for the modem for which he gets 2Mb metroplitan and 1 Mb internet. Pretty neat, huh?
I don't think traffic should be devided into metropolitan and international traffic anymore. As far as I know this is a Romanian invetion. Prestigious ISPs like wanadoo don't have such terms as "metropolitan". They just offer the connection at the advertized speeds, no matter where the destination host is.
I don't think traffic should be divided into metropolitan and international traffic anymore. As far as I know this is a Romanian invetion. Prestigious ISPs like wanadoo don't have such terms as "metropolitan". They just offer the connection at the advertized speeds, no matter where the destination host is.
PLS...I need advice! Ca telefonie fixa care e mai bun, Astralul sau RDS?