Mad fish and English men (ok so I didn't have a clue what to put here for once) (Madasafish)

Member Name: chele2002

Product:	Madasafish
Date:	13/05/02 (1400 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Stable, Reliable, Un-limited surfing

Disadvantages: 2 hour cut off

I am not sure how many of you are aware of the endless ISP's we have tried but up until stumbling across Madasafish we had in fact subscribed to none less than 7, some remained our ISP for quite a lengthy period whilst others we were annoyed at pretty soon after joining them.

You see we had become pretty unsatisfied with our former ISP (free24-7.net), so much so that connection in the evening became more and more unreliable, where daytime use I couldn't fault them in anyway, that was why we took it upon ourselves to search for something that could be used for evenings only and came across bluecarrots.com, which ended out to be a terrible service and a huge mistake on our part, worse than the problems we had with free24-7.net.

Which brings me to writing a review on Madasafish.com, after all the hassles with our other ISP's my husbands brother told us to check Madasafish out as he had always found there metered access really reliable and was sure that they had introduced un-metered access, which he thought was probably the type of service and reliability that we were looking for. So after the recommendation to investigate further, we decided to go for it, after all surely this service can't be anywhere near as bad as our other ISP?s.



Who are Madasafish?
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Madasafish are a company that is owned by Brightview Ltd. Brightview are a privately owned British company, an increasingly growing company that forms a large part of the UK's ISP?S (internet service providers) market. Not only do they play a large role in it's involvement in the market but they also currently own the following ISP's some that you may be familiar with, one of our former ISP?s Madasafish (the ISP being reviewed), ic24, Totalserve, Jings, Callnet, and are the internet connectivity of Totalise Plc.




What services do they provide?
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Madasafish offer two types of services that I am aware of, they have a metered serviced designed for the light users of surfers and an un-metered service which is more suitable if you tend to access the internet more than a couple of hours a day.

*Metered:

The metered service is a type of pay as you go gateway to the internet, the service is free to join, with no monthly subscriptions what so ever, but the call charges to the internet are your own responsibility, which will be included in your monthly or quarterly bills from your telecommunications provider.


*Un-metered:

With the un-metered access, rather then getting a slap in the face because of heavy phone bills for internet calls made, you are charged a flat rate of £14.99 per month, to use the service as often as you like, with out an internet call charge in sight.



Who can sign up to this service?
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Provided you live in the UK, have a BT phoneline and a credit or debit card, then you can take advantage of the un-metered service on offer.




Their Web Site:
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I actually quite like their home page, it is not too cluttered, which is a must for anyone wishing to navigate, freely and easily. I did find though that in regards to the information provided on the site in respect of their internets services available, was rather lacking and basic. The layout is fresh, funky and inviting, with a couple of interesting links to explore, like:

Competitions: They have regular competitions featured on their web site, with quite a few to enter each month. With prizes ranging from a joke book (for telling a good joke), money, music cds, to a Playstation 2.

Netlife: I actually find this page quite interesting, as I'm sure many of you good people will too. Netlife is a page that opens into a whole host of internet interest, l
ike chat, photo albums, news, sport, competitions, mobile, what's on, travel and so on, which I'm sure caters for many taste.

Games: This actually sends you to freeloader.com, but once there I was pretty impressed with the selection of games they had to play on the net, games like sport, strategy, puzzles, action and retro.



Signing up
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Signing up to either of the internet services is really easy and straight forward, it took us just a few minutes to complete the registration process before we were up and away, surfing using the Madasafish un-metered service. To sign up is pretty much like most of the other un-metered ISP's, choose which service (metered or un-metered), fill in your personal details, provided your credit/debit card details (for un-metered only), download the dialler, input desired username details, install and away you go. When you do sigh up, you will be given an id/subscription number, it is important that you keep this number safe, what we did was to save it has a text document, because should you at any point feel like you want to change your ISP from Madasafish to another, in order to cancel your account you will need to be able to provide this number in order to end your subscription.


What do you get for your £14.99 per month?
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For little over the average monthly subscription, you get a 24/7 service that allows you to dial the internet without the worry of a stonker of a phone bill at the end of every month or quarter depending who you telecommunications provider is, instead you have just one cost of £14.99 debited from your bank account each month. You get 10MB of web space to build with (although I never took advantage of this added feature), one email address that can be accessed with your email client such as outlook, and subscription to news groups (again another feature that we never took
advantage of).




Connection:
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I know this may sound odd, being a former customer of Madasafish to be pleased with the dial up attempts and connection rates, and if it wasn't for the curiosity of wanting to test out broad band, than I can honestly say that we would still be using this ISP (provided service was same as we left it). Never once in our few months of service did we ever have to try to dial more than one before we were successfully connected to the internet, apart from our current ISP (BT Openworld, Broadband) and that is the one thing I can honestly say about this service it that it connected every single time we dialled.

Once connected we found that the connection remained stable at all times during our 2 hour connection times, something impressive coming from a 56k dial up provider, our average connection to the internet was normally around the 44.0kbps, on the very rare occasion dropping slightly and quite often peaking above the average.

As far as download speeds go, they are pretty much like any other service of this type, sometimes low and sometimes high, it really depends too on how fast the server is where you are obtaining your downloads from, but I can say they did average out at around 4.53kbs, although sometimes we did manage to get a steady 6.00kbs.



Technical service:
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Should you for any reason have a technical problem, they do provided technical help at a national rate number, but be warned it does cost 50p per minute, and that sometimes you may be held in a queue before your call is dealt with, but you will not be charged until you are connected to one of the support team. Luckily we have never had to use the technical helpline, so I am unable to give an indication of how efficiently and customer friendly it is.




Bottom line:
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If it wasn't for the chang
e over to broadband and if the service remained as reliable and stable as it was when we left, than I can honestly say that we would still be using Madasafish. I keep trying really hard to find a fault with them, but in all honesty the only niggles I have is more with the basic info given about their services on their site, and absolutely none we the service they provided us with.

You know that shampoo advert, with the pun 'feels like the first time every time'? Well that's what we had every dial up session, never needed to try for a second time to connect in all the months that we used their un-metered service.

Summary: