Depending on who posts, they are the ISP of hell, or best value for money. Both cannot be right. I would be inclined to listen to people who actually use Axxess, rather than those who like to post a negative comment for its own sake.
Just saying ""useless" educates nobody. How was this opinion arrived at? Is it personal experience, a word from a friend (who might not properly understand what he is paying for)?
I have had several people tell me they did not know there were different speeds for ADSL, let alone a "cap". One fellow is an attorney, another runs a restaurant. They have no inkling of to them, complex computing terms and tell me that they are not IT experts. If some of these read these 13 comments here posted, all they will ascertain is that there is serious disagreement, and back to Telkom they go, as they feel Telkom runs the show anyway, so let them do it
My question: Do Axxess shape or otherwise limit data throughput on certain protocols? Does this vary during the day? And how do you find this out, as a layman? There is nothing in the terms and conditions that hints of this practice
Very good questions.
I have used both IS based accounts and MTN based accounts, and they both excel at different things.
IS based accounts are great after hours, because they get completely unshaped after hours, regardless of your star rating or whatever. Pure bliss if you don't care about business hours usage. If you need business hours usage, pay more for the business accounts, worth it if you are a business and need it. That said, if you on the consumer account during business hours on 1 star...well most things are almost non-existent, ie. you can't do anything during the day, not even play games, because you can't authenticate to the global login servers of most games.
The MTN based accounts are different. Once you hit the point where they throttle you, its throttled 24/7 until the next month, when you can do 30GB and get throttled again. However where these accounts excel at is, any non-downloading protocol goes full speed after the throttling (they will call it shaping) point. So you get 30KByte/sec on downloads on a 10Mbit/sec account, BUT browsing and streaming and games go full account speed which is great. There is a single work around as hinted by a few to keep on downloading full speed after being throttled. I like these accounts, but now that I am throttled, when I need to do legit downloads, ie. learning and building automated deployment vps's on my mini-server at home...well it goes slow, where as it would have been full speed after hours on the IS based accounts.
So to answer your questions:
1. I am on Axxess 10Mbit data only for R375 / month (very affordable imho)
2. Axxess do shape and limit data throughput on all P2P and download protocols 24/7 once you reach "managed" state.
3. This doesn't vary at all during the day, my experience is it is solid slow throughout the day and night once in "managed" state.
4. You will only find this out after trying out the account, then complain to their support your account is slow, and then they will explain to you, you downloaded too much for the month.
