Neotel Fibre 1:1 internet equivalent for Telkom Diginet?

The company I work for is looking at pricing from Neotel to provide our internet breakout. Currently we have a 2mb Telkom 1:1 Diginet internet link which costs us almost R30 000 a month. Neotel can provide a 2mb Fibre 1:1 breakout for around R20 000 a month.

Does anyone have any experience with the Neotel 1:1 internet links? How do they compare with Telkom's Diginet? Is it as stable as Diginet?

Any constructive feedback would be greatly appreciated.

I was just checking the date...no, it's not April 1st, so is your question for real?

I would consider scrapping 1:1 links and tossing up a few ADSL lines through someone like Fishbone who can bond them.

You could get 20mb down and 2mb up for under R5k /mo

Leaves you 25k to secure backup links for if the ADSL goes down. (Vodacom, 8ta, MTN, etc)

wizzball said:

The company I work for is looking at pricing from Neotel to provide our internet breakout. Currently we have a 2mb Telkom 1:1 Diginet internet link which costs us almost R30 000 a month. Neotel can provide a 2mb Fibre 1:1 breakout for around R20 000 a month.

Does anyone have any experience with the Neotel 1:1 internet links? How do they compare with Telkom's Diginet? Is it as stable as Diginet?

Any constructive feedback would be greatly appreciated.

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Fibre is way more stable than diginet. Don't go ADSL. Not really suitable for business purposes.

Thanks Qwikslver for having the only reply even remotely related to my post.

Unfortunately it seems like no one has any experience with Neotel 1:1 fibre vs Telkom 1:1 Diginet.

wizzball said:

Thanks Qwikslver for having the only reply even remotely related to my post.

Unfortunately it seems like no one has any experience with Neotel 1:1 fibre vs Telkom 1:1 Diginet.

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Does the Neotel fibre you are looking at come with an SLA? If so then you can give it a try. We have installed plenty of Fibre links at clients and they seem to work pretty well. We have had some downtime on occasion with the Fiber line but we have ADSL backup in place.

If I have to compare the 2 I would say Telkom's diginet is more stable. But with a 10K difference you can still have a backup plan in place and save money.

wizzball said:

Thanks Qwikslver for having the only reply even remotely related to my post.

Unfortunately it seems like no one has any experience with Neotel 1:1 fibre vs Telkom 1:1 Diginet.

Click to expand...

There are plenty people on this forum that do use NeoFibre and all have been extremely happy. I'd however suggest maybe look at getting 1:3, but then up the speed to 10meg. Should be same ballpark price and you'll get better performance.

NeoInternet 1:1 will be an enterprise service. Comes with SLA's, Guarantees, and Penalties. We use quite allot of them, no problems what so ever... The fiber makes a big difference vs. Diginet in terms of latency as well.

We use the 10Mb Neotel Fibre without SLA (replaced a 1MB diginet) and that is a hell of a lot better that the old telkom diginet. (apart from a few dropped packets every now and then but that's not a issue for us) So I suspect the 1:1 Fibre will be the best choice

Thanks Qwikslver, excellent suggestion. I'll run that by management.

Qwikslver said:

There are plenty people on this forum that do use NeoFibre and all have been extremely happy. I'd however suggest maybe look at getting 1:3, but then up the speed to 10meg. Should be same ballpark price and you'll get better performance.

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Since we're looking at the Neotel fibre to replace a 2mb Diginet internet link I'm not worried about dropped packets. But that raises some concerns if we ever wanted to use the Neotel fibre for MPLS provisioning. We run SAP and SAP is an absolute bastard with dropped packets. Just one packet dropped from a SAP connection causes the clients to be disconnected from their session. We're having this issue with one of our branches on our MPLS network that's connected via an iBurst Broadlink connection.

ShawnStar said:

We use the 10Mb Neotel Fibre without SLA (replaced a 1MB diginet) and that is a hell of a lot better that the old telkom diginet. (apart from a few dropped packets every now and then but that's not a issue for us) So I suspect the 1:1 Fibre will be the best choice

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From a Neotel & Telkom wholesaler perspective, having clients on both and clients moving between and seeing their case studies, here is my personal opinion:

First off, have you had your prices aligned for the service you have in the past year? are you a Telkom commercial client or do you go through a wholesaler/reseller?

Telkom:
* More expensive.
* Expensive client owned router, client normally needs to maintain this and replace it should it blow up. Not much peace of mind here.
* Less complaints & tickets logged due to latency & packet loss
* Slightly faster response times and dedicated escalation points

Neotel:
* Much cheaper, the 1:1 service is plus minus equal to Telkom diginet
* More devices between side A and side B? ... no client owned router, which makes everything Neotel's problem to fix.
* Maybe 2-5% more tickets logged, main subjects include latency for short periods and slight packet loss for short periods. Appears to be area related in most cases.
* Support response times are not bad, have only had 1 client ever claim against penalties, larger the link more weight we seem to have in escalating clients issues and the faster they resolved


If latency/reliability is your main concern go 1:1. If speed/bursting is your main concern go 1:3.