I spent 14 years running infrastructure — networks, hosting, industry associations. Every time I called my own providers for help, the experience was worse than the problem.
I'd ring in with something specific — a congested link, a BGP community not propagating, packet loss on a particular path. Level 1 would answer, read a script, ask if I'd tried rebooting the router. I'd be looking at a traceroute showing the problem three hops into their network and they'd be asking me to power-cycle.
Escalate. Wait 48 hours. Level 2 asks for the same information. Escalate again. By the time someone who understands the protocol looks at the ticket, a week has gone.
This isn't a support problem. It's a structural one. When a provider optimises for sales volume, support becomes a cost centre to minimise. The people answering phones have never configured the services they're answering for.
So I built the provider I always wanted to work with.
Warp is the ISP arm of The IT Dept — a small engineering shop on the NSW Central Coast. We run our own ASN (AS152590), our own Juniper edge, and our own routing. We buy aggregation and transit from Leaptel, and control everything downstream.
When you call, the person who answers can read a routing table, check link utilisation in real time, and tell you whether your issue is on our network, NBN's, or your premises — because they understand all three. There's no "Account Manager" between you and the technical team, because the technical team is the team.
Every call is answered by an engineer in Australia. No queues overseas, no Level-1 scripts, no escalations to nowhere. If it's broken, you talk to someone who knows why.
We have our own ASN, our own Juniper edge, our own routing. We buy aggregation and transit from Leaptel and control everything downstream. If a route's wrong, we can fix it today.
Provisioning, monitoring, alerting — automated. Not to cut headcount, to free engineers to work on your actual problem. Most of the time we know before you do.
We're small. We're not trying to be Telstra. We don't hide behind SLA credits. If we mess up, we say so and fix it. If we can't help, we'll tell you that too.
Everyone you speak to is in Australia and knows the network they're supporting.
You never have to go through a salesperson to get technical help.
We fix the actual problem and tell you what happened. Credits don't buy us out of honesty.
Good support is the baseline. Every customer gets the same access to the team.
Month-to-month. No exit fees. If we're not good enough, leaving is easy.
We quote typical evening speeds, because that's what you actually get.
We're not trying to be Telstra. We're not trying to be the cheapest. We're not trying to acquire a million subs and flip to a PE firm.
We're trying to be the best ISP for people and businesses that actually care about their connection. Companies run by people who've felt the same frustration we have.
We keep our customer base at a size where we can know your setup, understand your needs, and give you the kind of support that made you choose a smaller provider in the first place.