 Review by LordMalak 
UPDATED: 2 years ago
member for 6.3 years, 485 visits, last login: 33 days ago
 Brazil
 $120 per month (12 month contract)
 about 5 days
 "Very reliable and consistent speeds"
 "Atrocious customer service - Update: TRAFFIC SHAPING!!"
 "Great, just prey you'll never need to talk to Cust. Serv."
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I'm in RJ, Brazil, and the options we have down here for broadband are Velox (DSL from our friendly neighborhood ILEC) and NET Virtua (cable). There's also radio and satellite for rural areas.
The highest speeds we get in Brazil are 8 Mbps down / 512 kbps up. I have now the 4 Mbps package. Pretty good.
Installation was pretty clean, although the installer was a dumbass who insisted the service wouldn't work with my onboard NIC, despite my telling him otherwise. Notice I have used this NIC just fine before.
Speed is consistent, and the serevice has never gone down!! Kudos to them on that!! I've heard horror stories about other people around here, but it's been fine here.
Customer service, however, is awful. Upgrading from 2Mbps to 4Mbps was a NIGHTMARE. Upgrading to the TV+broadband option was simply a no-go for me. I heard all kinds of excuses, from the system being down to "a high probability of lightining striking my house" if I had a set top box.
As far as price goes, I pay R$120 (about US$60) for my 4Mbps. Other packages are R$100 for 2Mbps and R$220 for 8Mbps. It's rather expensive by US standards, but it's good value here. Oh yeah, and this industry is a regional monopoly here, like in the US.
Overall, I recommend it.
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UPDATE Nov. 07, 2007: Net Virtua now practices the much loathed traffic shaping on p2p connections. Knock off some points! Everything else (including games -- and some latency which's expected given we're out here in Brazil) works fine. But after 2+ years with them, it's been a smooth ride. Just make sure to use SSH or something for your torrentz fix.
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Net Virtua
NetVirtua SUCKS ! - Just to prove, see this!