Fibre options in Cape Town - how to get it?

[lukewd]

hi all, i have a business based in cape town and am looking to get my office connected with a fibre internet connection, as i am just fed up with the unreliability and poor speed of ADSL (have tried many different providers). however, there seems to be very little information on the options of getting fibre installed at this stage. there isn't even a forum branch dedicated to fibre on this MyBroadband forum.

So my questions are:

1. What are the options for getting fibre internet installed to a business office in Cape Town.
2. Generally what are the average costs? Install, and ongoing...
3. What ISP's offer this as a service?
4. What speeds can be expected?
5. What is the reliability like?

Any other comments, suggestions, things to look out for, or reviews would be welcome.

[Dan C]

Maybe contact ATEC ?

http://www.atec.co.za/

[Tinuva]

1. For this:
a. Neotel, can do both the fibre and internet transit
b. Telkom, can do both, probably very expensive
c. DFA, but then you need to light it up yourself, and still get it going to somewhere where you can connect to an ISP, so probably easier to ask some of the smaller ISPs who are flexible if they can maybe do it

I think option a will probably be the best to go with.

2. I'd say they start around 5-10g / month, but I don't honestly know, it just aint cheap

3. see 1

4. anything from 2-10000mbit/sec and is usually full duplex, same speed up and down, latency is like 0-1ms to next hops.

5. Generally very reliable, we currently have a few links with Neotel, never have any problems.

[Pavan]

hi all, i have a business based in cape town and am looking to get my office connected with a fibre internet connection, as i am just fed up with the unreliability and poor speed of ADSL (have tried many different providers). however, there seems to be very little information on the options of getting fibre installed at this stage. there isn't even a forum branch dedicated to fibre on this MyBroadband forum.

So my questions are:

1. What are the options for getting fibre internet installed to a business office in Cape Town.
2. Generally what are the average costs? Install, and ongoing...
3. What ISP's offer this as a service?
4. What speeds can be expected?
5. What is the reliability like?

Any other comments, suggestions, things to look out for, or reviews would be welcome.

1) Neotel - have the biggest fibre footprint
2) NeoBroadband - uncapped,unshaped: 1 - 15Mbps ranging from R1,600 - R11,250 per month
3) Neotel or through a reseller?
4) 1-15Mbps, little to no contention.
5) Highly reliable, and redundant fibre pairs

Good luck.

[lukewd]

Great, thanks for all your feedback. It looks like Neotel is currently the most mature and only really accessible option. No one else really seems to have a fully end to end service?

I'm actually looking to move offices, and am looking to find an office where Fibre or equivalent high speed connection is either already available, or where it is an option. So I guess being closer to the ISP makes things cheaper and easier.

Does anyone know where the Neotel endpoint is? Where the fibre connection would have to be connected to?

Or does anyone know of any office blocks in Cape Town CBD where high speed internet connectivity is already in place?

[Tinuva]

If you can get yourself space in the Boulevard Faircape offices next to click (there still space open looking at the empty offices) then you should be able to easily get either Neotel or another option there.

[MickeyD]

1) Neotel - have the biggest fibre footprint

Say what????

[Big Bean]

Say what????

Biggest fibre footprint to the END user

[MickeyD]

Biggest fibre footprint to the END user

Again... say what???

[Tinuva]

Call it biggest footprint where the fibre options are semi affordable.

[MickeyD]

Call it the more affordable option available.

Agreed

[lukewd]

Does anyone know how much fibre from Neotel actually costs? And how the pricing is structured?

[ColinR]

Does anyone know how much fibre from Neotel actually costs? And how the pricing is structured?

Neotel Fibre

[Pada]

The latencies on Neotel Fibre terrific, but we've had some pretty bad experience with Neotel with regards to Internet uptime.
Our leased line with them from our office to their data center has never given us any issues though.

We're going to have a pretty big discussion with Neotel this coming week regarding their network issues, because we can't tolerate downtime any more, since we recently started changed from development/QA phase over to production phase.

You might also be able to find pretty good point-to-point wireless service providers that can provide very good latencies and high throughput for prices similar/less than Neotel's NeoBroadBand.