Iburst in Roodekrans - Heilderkrain (sp?)

A

Adelante

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South Africa.
anyways according to Iburst, and their map, i have 0% coverage, anyhow, i decided to go for it, turns out i sit at around 4 Bar's on the modem. and this thing is frighteningly fast :D

(I got 600KB on the myadsl international test)

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That is great, if you don't mind my asking, did you ask WBS about your chances of getting a signal, or did you just decide 'what the heck'[?]
 
Well i checked on the Maps on the website, and i saw Roodepoort was live, but it didnt come anywhere near me, and i saw little falls was up, but that also isnt to close, so i asked a buddy of mine (paul) to come bring his modem to my house.

he brought it round, there was 4 lights on, so i thought, what the heck, i might aswell get it, sooner or later they will more than likely come cover the roodekrans area.

so yeah, it was a bit of a shot in the dark, but it paid off..


also what got me thinking was...

According to Sentech, i should how no signal what so ever where i stay, and for those with sentech will know, that its near impossible to get your signal strengh over 25%, but when i brought sentech home, my signal strengh (without any additional antenna's) was 53%, I even had a guy from sentech come out and test it, the max he got was 57%, he couldn't believe it, since there is no antenna pointed in my direction, and according to their maps, i shouldn't have signal.

Same thing i guess with Iburst, what the map says, and what I get are two totally different things. Since according to the map, i am slap bang in the middle of a white area on the map.

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So did you sign up?

Adelante
Did you sign up for the pre-comm service? How are you finding it now? UTC or UTD? And how's the water-cooled rig doing?

I have a UTD, connecting to the Rosebank tower. 5 bar signal, but performance is disappointing so far. Sometimes things hang for 2-3 seconds before the bits come trickling through ... a few mins later everything bursts at full rate.

Also, uploads to my website are impossible. 8 out of 10 times the upload bombs out, and 1 out of 10 it takes a minute to save a 50kB file to my remote server (http connection).

I've decided to stick through the pre-commercial phase to see if they iron out the issues. Sure hope they do. I love the technology, and want them to succeed. But in the end I need stability, realiability, predictability and performance.
 
I sincerely hope iBurst is going to offer a more consistant service than MyWireless. Reading about some people getting super speeds while others crawl sounds rather omennous.

:(
 
Arthur, you still getting upload problems, I noticed a major improvement around Tuesday evening, haven't tried ftp uploads since then, but DUMeter shows that it peaks when it needs to.

I think the problem here is: we aren't used to an internet connection that bursts from time to time (aside from all the techie tweaking on the network lately).

It would be great if iBurst succeeded, and didn't go the way of that quasi-government dodo most love to hate aka Senteck.
 
Big improvement in uploads and stability

Hi IC

Yes, sometime over the weekend things improved dramatically. Uploads are fast and reliable. I can very comfortably live with this service ... though 2Mb/s would be marvellous ;)

As an indication that things are settling down, I've taken the plunge and changed everyone's SMTP from the Telkom DSL server. It seems we can now send properly, so no need to fall back to ADSL for sending & uploading.
 
Sadly stability is very much awol...

Arthur,

In terms of stability I have noticed that I am getting more frequent problems, and the connection is actually dropping way too often - I think just to annoy me :mad: - conspiracy theory taking shape :rolleyes: ...

BTW, I'm in Bryanston - so slightly o/t.

I don't know what techie tweaking is taking place but I do wish WBS were more forthcoming in this respect - at least in terms of scheduled downtime, but I've given up asking.

Other than that, I'm relatively happy with iBurst, I cannot say the same for WBS Management - very much the bad boys of the day!
 
I do wish WBS were more forthcoming in this respect - at least in terms of scheduled downtime
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Yes, but let's wait till the full commercial service before insisting. It's really hard to schedule downtime when you're still setting up.
 
I don't expect WBS to notify me everytime they reboot a server, but atleast if they plan to build one from sand up they should let me know. Extended outages can be extremely frustrating. However I agree that most problems are most likely unforseen at this stage. So I won't worry about it until launch.
 
Hi Everyone

I am in the the Heldekruin/Wilro Park area. I got my UTD on Friday and signed up etc. Yesterday afternoon (9/1/05) i plugged my UTD in the area where I was told I could get signal. (only in lounge area, pretty strong) There was between 1 and 3 lights on which is fine. Last night I wanted to connect so took the UTD back there (moving it until I have a permanent cable) and there was no signal. No matter what I did. This was about 11 last night. Did anyone else have the same problem in the area. Was the base station out last night or something? The signal seemed steady in the afternoon.
 
Ok
Diary of yesterday's problems:
Got home 5pm - layed out temporary cable (till I've layed through roof) Switched UTD on - Full signal; Connected and started playing around, downloading, playing DOD, everything was working 100 percent. Very impressed with speed!; Left a download running for a while - watched signal strength - Didn't drop below 4, mostly staying at 5. This was excellent! Big smiles. Switched off at 7:20 pm and rolled cables etc. (people trip over them) Went out. Came home at 11pm; Rolled out cables and switched UTD on. - No signal. (No matter where I moved the modem or anything. Antenna light on modem just stayed orange) Left it for an hour - nothing. Ok - set machine to try and connect every 5 minutes and went to bed. Woke up at 5:30 this morning and checked - FULL Signal!!!! mmmmm - $ cat /var/log/messages - Connection happened at 5 am this morning exactly!

Now this leads me to conclude a few things: Obviously there is nothing wrong with my signal strength - I got full most of the time. This leads me to believe that there was either maintenance from around 11pm last night to 5am this morning (or they don't allow the modems to connect in this time.) Other possiblity is that perhaps my UTD has only been set to look for signal at certain times. Quick look around and I couldn't find such settings.
Has anyone else seen this (this would mean that it is a maintanence/base station issue) or has anyone seen where there is a setting for set times on the UTD.
This is very frustrating as most times I will be using this at night. Suggestions please!!!
 
Mayh3m said:
...Other possiblity is that perhaps my UTD has only been set to look for signal at certain times...
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As you suspect, there is no such setting, if I'm wrong call me Sally & I'll need to be punished as well.

Mayh3m, the Status led - was it only orange, or did it go red as well?
 
Hi ic

I'm sure that it stayed orange, but I may be wrong. What does that mean?
 
Red means total signal loss, Orange means weak signal, were there none of the 5 green signal strength leds on?
 
Hi ic

I think it was red then. None of the 5 signal strength led's were on or came on at all, no matter where I moved the UTD. I don't see how you can go from having full signal strength at one time to absolutely nothing the whole night and then full signal at exactly 5am. The helpdesk is currently doing some checks on the base station i connect to and what might have happened, but it doesn't look promising.
 
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The Status led has three colours:
Code: 
[B][COLOR=DarkGreen]Green[/COLOR][/B]  == Usable signal
[B][COLOR=Orange]Orange[/COLOR][/B] == Weak Signal
[B][COLOR=Red]Red[/COLOR][/B]    == 0 Signal
Note that when the Status led flashes, the UTD is sending/receiving (or at least attempting to do so)
 
Hi ic

Am I correct in saying that if the status Led were orange, you would still get a connection but not be able to do anything or get slow response? There was no connection at all. From nothing to full at 5. I dunno
 
....even if the LED was orange. I don't see how the signal can go from full steady signal to weak the entire night and then all of a sudden full again at 5? Am i wrong?
 
Mayh3m said:
Am I correct in saying that if the status Led were orange, you would still get a connection but not be able to do anything or get slow response? There was no connection at all. From nothing to full at 5. I dunno
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Depends, I would say that 1 greenish/yellow-green signal strength led is going to give problems & be fairly unusable, but 2 signal strength leds is sort of usable (in my experience that is), note that the Status led on my UTD is orange when there are 1 or 2 signal strength leds, 3 or more signal strength leds lit & the status led is green, when all signal strength leds are off my UTD's status led is always red.

Another thing to be aware of, you cannot judge your signal strength until a connection has actually been established - when there is no connection the UTD only seems to light-up 1 or 2 signal strength leds. Also when your connection is idle with no traffic you will probably notice that the signal drops off, at least that's what happens with my UTD.

I'm sure there is a technical explanation that WBS / Kyocera could give, more than likely something about carrier waves & such & such & such...
 
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