Supa is just not the right word! (SupaNet)

Member Name: alirigby

Product:	SupaNet
Date:	11/06/02 (404 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: None

Disadvantages: Bad support, Forced upon TIME PC owners

I’m not a very technical person, so I apologise in advance if my review doesn’t go into enough detail about speeds and techie things for the liking of some!

I never made a conscious decision to use Supanet as my Internet Service Provider; it was forced upon me when I purchased my TIME PC a couple of year ago.
Supanet is TIME’s own ISP and everyone who buys one of their PC’s gets a free Supanet account whether you like it or not!

You are forced to set this up as it’s the only way that you can register for your 12 month warranty and be eligible for technical support (of which very little exists anyway, and any that there is comes at an exorbitant cost!).

When you first get your PC, you can press cancel to stop setting up the account, but if you do this you will be prompted to register every time that you switch your computer on. The software is ready installed on the machine and you cannot get rid of it (at least I’ve not been able to so far, I’m sure some of you techie people could!).

They give you a password, which strangely I found always had sexual connotations !?! My first password was blowj08 and then I needed to get another password when I changed my PC which was more than a little eyebrow raising!!!

Anyway, seeing as I had it I thought that I may as well try it out; it works much the same as any other standard dial-up connection and I never had a problem connecting. Supanet recommends that you use Internet Explorer as your browser although you can use Netscape if you like. I think that the connection speed is standard for a 56k modem although according to www.ispreview.co.uk, Supanet’s strength lies in its fast speed, so perhaps it’s better than I first thought.

There is 24hour support offered and they aim to respond to any emails within 48 hours although I’ve not had very good service when I’ve needed support and the phone line co
sts something like £1 per minute.

Although there is no fee to use Supanet there aren’t any special offers or deals on call charges either and there are certainly cheaper alternatives around.

Ok so I wasn’t happy for being forced to use it, but you can use other ISPs if you want to and I now have BT Openworld ADSL (now don’t get me started on how weak their support is, I’m soon changing to cable!).

Overall it’s pretty average and pretty expensive when you take into account call charges and the cost of support and I reckon that there are many better ISPs out there, I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.

Don’t be forced into anything!

For more info:
Visit www.supanet.com or speak to TIME computers.

Summary: