Hi KinsZA
This is from my experience with Axxess' express+(fibre) over the last 3 months. I have a 384k account from them, and initially had a 384k line (for just over a month), and then decided to upgrade just the LINE to 4mbps. I've given up on the rolling period, and have just resigned myself to throttled speeds during work hours.
To answer those questions that I can:
1) It appears to be unshaped for me, but I'm not a gamer so cannot speak to that experience (server latency, etc). P2P downloads run at full LINE speed between 8pm and 8am. (In my case, with a 384k account and 4096k line, I get an average of about 450k with p2p, http, ftp, streaming audio and video, etc)
2) Painful at best for one user. With 3 networked users, its dreadful. I tend to avoid being online during the day, but that works for me. Having said that, we do get by, or swop to a different prepaid account if anyone needs higher speeds. Over the last month, there seems to have been a marked slow down in IS surfing speeds which has made the experience slightly worse, but still very bearable.
3) Right now, 713ms.
4) My upload speeds during office hours are the same as after hours, so roughly 56k. Right now (11:43am), SpeedTest.net to a JHB server gives me: ping 75ms, avg. download: 22.9k, avg. upload: 52.9k. This result is consistent.
Speaking of Axxess not getting back to you, I've been experiencing authentication failures on the modem side over the last month (about 2 or 3 times a week the connection will drop and refuse to come back up for about an hour stating: authentication failure). Logging into another ISP is no problem, it's just axxess that wont authenticate. I've logged two issues/queries in the control panel 5 days ago - I'm still waiting for someone to get back to me or even acknowledge receipt of the ticket. I guess I'll have to call them the next time it happens - if calling works! The last instance may or may not be related to a billing error, as it happened on the last day of the month, and seemed to reconnect after I manually logged in and paid the new months invoice (which was meant to happen automatically!).
Just for interest sake: Over May, my combined upload and download = approximately 500GB.
I'm about 90% happy with the product. The lost 10% is due to SEEMINGLY non-existant customer service (will know more when I decide to call them!) and the very occasional disconnects. All of that is more than made up for by Axxess pioneering brilliant deals like this, and as long as they continue to quickly change with the telecoms scenario in SA and stay affordable, I'll stay with em!
Hope this helps.
). Note I have a 4mbit line