An analytical view on IS

Global|

New Member
Joined
Aug 3, 2005
Messages
9
This takes a look at the various things IS offer.
1 - International Speeds
Generally slow international speeds during the day and faster speeds after business hours and occasional times when international is broken.

2 - Local bandwidth
IS used to have uncapped local which was a big plus in my view but they wanted more $$$$ some they decided to cap local.Well it looks like they will be forced to uncap local with the regulations anyway.IS could have looked like the good guys and had Uncapped local the whole time and had a better image but they decided 3months more profits is more important than the image.

3 - News server
I swear they just have the news servers to tease the users.Sometimes for a few days it will run at full speeds and give you this false sense of getting what you paid for while most times it will be down or you will get really slow speeds even with lots of connections.
The reliability is non existent.

The only thing you can expect from IS is problems with either the first , second or third thing.
 
Last edited:

pip

Senior Member
Joined
Mar 6, 2006
Messages
553
Well I have an uncapped IS connection and am pretty happy with it.

Regarding point 1 - yes, true. I will live with a 25% daytime speed reduction because they never start quoting "terms-of-service" with regard to the uncapped nature of the connection. ALL other suppliers also have occasional outages too.

Point 2 - I suppose, but does not affect their uncapped offering. Apart from the odd supa-leet torrent tracker and the IS news server, there is approx stuff all interesting to download locally anyway.

Point 3. Up until a few years back the IS news server was as crap as Telkom's. If you want decent news access pay for it from one of the big servers in the USA. R75 for 20Gb ain't too bad.

Sadly there is no cheap internet in SA and it all comes back to tttTelkom ( bastards ).
 

Turbo_Aspiration

Expert Member
Joined
Aug 11, 2005
Messages
1,435
Point 3. Up until a few years back the IS news server was as crap as Telkom's. If you want decent news access pay for it from one of the big servers in the USA. R75 for 20Gb ain't too bad.

If we had 20gb international bandwidth to start off with, few would bother with news
 

TelkomUseless

Honorary Master
Joined
Mar 13, 2006
Messages
14,792
Fair enough. I am intrigued though - what would you be getting that is not available via news servers?
If you visit overseas forums, example... people post links to videos they created etc or even gaming demos etc.Now I can't download it... because of caps.
 

Turbo_Aspiration

Expert Member
Joined
Aug 11, 2005
Messages
1,435
Fair enough. I am intrigued though - what would you be getting that is not available via news servers?

  • Older stuff
  • proper mp3 releases
  • open source and freeware
  • random videos (youtube)
  • streaming radio
  • ebooks
  • journal articles
  • updates (windows, apps, security)

Theres so many things we're resticted from. I often find myself making a note of stuff thats freely available (if u hav the bandwidth) that i want to download then coming and getting it at varsity. right now, im getting anti-virus updates and JFreeChart for a project im working on. After this ill need to get tutorials for JFreeChart and some large pdfs. All of this i cant do right now with my "broadband" at home because im capped
 

daysleeper

Senior Member
Joined
Mar 16, 2005
Messages
677
Today on my DSL384:

Your current bandwidth reading is:

93.80kbps

which means you can download at 11.72 KB/sec. from our servers


That means IS can only supply me with 94/384 = ~24% of my line speed. So i should pay them 1/4 of what they charge!
 

icyrus

Executive Member
Joined
Oct 5, 2005
Messages
8,600
If anyone thinks that IS wouldn't behave exactly like telkom do if they were in their position they are very much mistaken.

IS are just as bad as telkom, they just don't have as much power.
 
Top