Sorry to necro this thread, but I think its important that the truth be told about Comtel:
I have been with Wireless Online for quite a while now, but I have not exactly had a great experience at all. I'll paste my complaint I made at hellopeter a while back below (skip if you don't want to read a wall of text):
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Wireless Online has an authoritarian policy whereby they do not by default provide users with login accounts to their own routers because they do not want users to "tamper" with the settings (on their own property...) - this also despite the fact that the company advertises a static IP that would be practically useless when you don't have administrative rights to set up routing tables.
When I requested a username, I was told (with a bit of condescending attitude) that once provided with a username, I would not be entitled to support which I agreed to since I am more than capable of setting up a router.
However after a couple of months, the connection became unacceptably unstable (without me having touched the router or its default settings) at which point I contacted the technical support center and told them that I had changed nothing on the board and asked that they please get their act together on their side at the high-site.
I was then told that they had been trying some new settings etc. (without having given notice of expected downtime) but the service would be restored.
After a week of terrible connection levels I contacted them again at which point the person (Jason) told me that he did not know what was wrong and that they would have to send someone out to fix the problem. At no point was I told that I would be charged for this and as far as I was concerned this was their fault (which it was) and the company would accept responsibility for it..
After waiting 3 days for assistance, I was then told on a Friday that I would only be helped on the Monday. Obviously an entire weekend without internet service is unacceptable (yet South African standards don't seem to be what they should be and this is deemed to be OK).
In desperation I then thought I would be able to fix the connection myself. It is after all just a router? Wrong.
After logging in I found that they had not provided me with their closely guarded (entrapment?) default setting scripts...
Annoyed, but OK. Perhaps it would be on the ftp flash (as it should be). Lo and behold, I did not have access, also I then found that I had not been given access to change policies, edit users (they kept their account on my board). Or set up firewall rules to utilize my static IP.
Perhaps I can simply manually enter settings which I had written down before starting? Nope. Can't add PPP accounts. :wtf:
So after some time and finding out that all I basically could do was only delete routing tables (not recreate them) I was left without internet for the remainder of the weekend or even the ability to map the IP address back to the router since I had no rights.
On the Monday, the technician came to my flat, simply logged in and ran the default settings script and created the local and remote routing tables. With the settings restored to what they had originally been when the trouble started, it worked fine - obviously they had sorted their high-site in the mean time.
This would not have been necessary if they had done their job right initially. R513 bill for 10 minutes' worth of work...
After obviously being upset at being charged such an exorbitant price for something that I was not responsible for, I phoned the company and was told that the technician reported that I had changed settings on the router and it was thus my fault. The manager also basically ignored the fact that I had reported the problem BEFORE I even logged in and simply "confirmed" with the technical support person that I had login access - he did not even bother finding out what level of access I had, or when I accessed the router or even whether it, in fact, was me that changed something that broke the connection initially.
I understand that a company cannot afford to constantly cart technicians up and down for free in situations where users break their own routers - but when the company itself is responsible for the initial problem then it needs to take responsibility. With lack of permissions and inability to help yourself aside, it is simply not good enough to assume that simply because somebody had the potential to break something that they did. They only bother to investigate a matter so far up until they see fit to use this as a scapegoat.
Their attitude is "if you log in, you'll pay if we break something".
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That was a while ago; I never got a response from their management. Since then I asked their tech guy on the support line to remove my login details so that if my connection goes down again I cannot be blamed.
Since then I've had countless numbers of times where I've lost connectivity or had terrible bandwidth. They also love quoting connection speeds from Cape Town to Joburg - as though anyone cares about local bandwidth. (what, do they think i'm sitting on watkykjy.co.za all day??)
I use this connection purely for online gaming (WoW) - it may seem like an overreaction for just a gaming connection but I'm in our server's 1st ranked PvP battleground team so its pretty competative. And, yes, I have actually dc'd thanks to them while in a game (we obviously lost because of that and everybody lost rating - I was very, very unpopular).
Also, with topups, I'm paying around R2000 a month; I guess I download no more than 8-10Gb a month... (Adsl 10Mbps uncapped with line rental is less than R1000 from someone like Axxess) They are definitely heavily overpriced and when you call them with a problem they're pretty flippant about the fact that you're having issues; kind of a "having problems comes with the turf" attitude. You'd expect premium service for that sort of price...
On the plus side though, when they're not breaking something, I do get an OK ping (around 210ms on most days, very good days dropping to 180ms) which makes competitive online play possible (not great, but playable). And their tech guys are very helpful.
tl;dr
They suck quite badly, but since Telkom and most other providers are so wildly incompetent, Wireless Online is sort of the lesser of the other evils; if you can get a decent price for a slower package that doesn't need constant connectivity then go ahead - but don't rely too much on them for business connections or competitive gaming because they will drop you often and make up excuses why it's not their fault. If I could find a different service provider that could offer the same connectivity withoug going through Telkom I would definitely switch. In fact, I'd appreciate it if anybody can recommend an ISP that can give me similar or better pings.
Fyi, upload speed this morning was 0.09Mbps ...during MoP release week... thanks Comtel!
