Your Neotel experience

[Jaq]

Does anyone know if "via-telkom" internet access will be tapping into the new Seacom cable capacity too?

First, the SAIX (telkom) prices should in theory come down once there is real competition. Unfortunately their latest pricing that was submitted to ICASA (effective 1 August) in fact raises a lot of the prices.

Currently most ISPs resell SAIX (telkom) Internet access, or sometimes IS (Internet Sollutions) access that usually have a bit more latency. (more importent concern for gamers)

As far as I'm aware the bigger ISPs like WebAfrica and MWeb would in future be able to build their own infrastructure, and link directly into the SEACOM cable.

Since local-loop-unbundling is not yet a reality, I guess that most of the services based on SEACOM might be wireless and not over the copper line to your house.

Neotel have of course been very active with digging up pavements all over to lay fibre-optics lines in major cities.

Neotel and MTN (a fovorite of some on the forum! ) also embarked on a project to link the various major centra via fibre-optic cable.

There is of course iBurst to consider... but some of the posts about them on that forum may again discourage you a bit. A ray of hope is that the former Vodacom representative on the mybroadband forum was recenlty appointed the new head of iBurst, so he should have a good idea of what customers complain about.

News update on Neotel:
http://mybroadband.co.za/news/Broadband/8513.html

[irneb]

For a please explain article, that one's a bit lame: "Yes, we know about the problem, we're going to address it." and "It's going to get worse before it gets better". Sounds like a politician!

One thing where I could tell them to simply stop where they're heading: Bandwidth monitor via email ??????? So you may receive the thing a few days after the fact? You can also be certain it's not going to be real-time. Sounds a lot like Vodacom's contracts don't it?

BTW, I'm still trying to figure out the best solution at present. Disregarding any form of portability (so HSDPA / WIMax is not a must), I've simply compared the following: 1. Speed 2. Price 3. Capping ... as far as I can tell, ADSL from hellkom (or re-supplier like MWeb) is the worst possible choice (price & speed wise). NeoPrime 2.5 is not much different from Vodacom MyGig 2 (price within R10 / month) - speed's supposed to be similar at 3.1MB/s and 3.6MB/s respectively.

Now I've got a Vodacom Prepaid Data bundle. Not going with iBurst as there's no price difference and from friends experience (and my own) the Vodacom data gives the same (if not better) connectivity through the same network. From experiance the HSDPA 3.6 gives be on average about 90kbytes/sec, with some peaks running up to 200. From the comments on the MyBB forum (as per link) this sounds better than the NeoTel experience.

Even if you go for the 4MB/s ADSL, this is not giving any wonderful speed. Our office has a wireless connection to the ISP, with a double 4MB ADSL backup. When the wireless goes down, we cannot get more than about 150kbytes/s ... averaging at about 50 (more often than not it feels like a dial-up).

The ADSL from MWeb (bundled with line rental) for R560/month at 1GB cap. And then from my work experience ... I'd rather go with Vodacom then. That is "if" the NeoTel press release can't be believed (as they a press release usualy does) ... if they give us a pleasant surprise and actually fix the problems, then they're ever so slightly better than Vodacom IMHO.

Maybe my research ain't that great, but I did try to compare apples with apples. What I'd really want to see is an independent comparison with a user rating as well.