Best ISP with IS backbone?

aggressiveGrey

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So as much as I would like to go with AH the MTN thing and capacity worries me..

Never liked MTN international pings.

So what ISP is the best to go for (performance and stableness)

I am currently on OpenWeb home uncapped - shaping is terrible, takes 4mins to open a site even on weekends. Have put in cancellation notice.

Just want a stable isp :(
 
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I'm with Webafrica at the moment. Really stable and have had no issues so far! Also from 12 - 6AM you can download as much as you want without it affecting your shaping
 
WebAfrica capped if you want stable 24/7 speeds or Incredible Connection ISP uncapped if you are looking to save a few bucks and only use the internet after work and on weekends.
 
Is there any uncapped awesomeness? (WA or other companies)

Or is webafrica only really good as capped
 
You have quite a few picks of ISPs for the IS backbone:

Plugg (IS's consumer arm) - star rating applies, direct line of support to IS techs
Web Africa - star rating applies on home uncapped, business uncapped uses different model, capped has loads of midnight data
Connection *(by Incredible Connection) - star rating applies
VOX/Atlantic - only their uncapped accounts run on the IS backbone, capped on their on backbone, has setup fee, star rating applies

Open Web - they say star rating doesn't apply, who knows with all the lies and shared accounts they came up with, dodgy isp
ITNT - I don't know whether they do uncapped, but they do capped on IS network
Imagine - small isp, support is hit and miss, they do resell IS accounts however

You will see I grouped the above. The 1st set of ISPs are ones I would choose from. The second set I would avoid or is just too unknown to me.

The biggest problem with IS uncapped accounts, is that you have to contend with the star rating system.
5 stars = unshaped
4 stars = shaped, you hit this really fast
3 stars = shaped more, downloads slow down quite a bit here
2 stars = very shaped, don't try downloads, streaming and gaming is affected too now, browsing and email should work
1 star = abuser category or some such, you can expect 0 access during business hours, or at best 56k dial-up speeds. On the more premium accounts however you can get faster speeds after hours, although you should get full download speed midnight to 6am.

So that makes the Web Africa business accounts stand out.

What you can probably expect from the star rated accounts is, you will get similar usage out of them as a capped account at the same price, just slower than the capped account. Then after that you will have super slow access, just to say you are not capped, to stay true to the uncapped account type, but really it is almost as bad as capped.
 
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So as much as I would like to go with AH the MTN thing and capacity worries me..

Never liked MTN international pings.

So what ISP is the best to go for (performance and stableness)

I am currently on OpenWeb home uncapped - shaping is terrible, takes 4mins to open a site even on weekends. Have put in cancellation notice.

Just want a stable isp :(

What's your monthly usage like?

What are your usage paterns like? Do you stream, use torrents or download steam games?
 
Is there any uncapped awesomeness? (WA or other companies)

Or is webafrica only really good as capped

Web Africa is awesome.

As for uncapped it's all about how much you download and what your line speed is like.
 
Web Africa is awesome.

As for uncapped it's all about how much you download and what your line speed is like.


I have 2mb line speed

the problem is i only recently got adsl again after having Openweb Gold Uncapped many many months back and that worked until they screwed everyone.

But i cannot tell you what my monthly usage is like because I have only had internet for 4 days (took me 4days to cancel my OW account as they are ****e slow)

I can generally track my own usage, but there is more than just me using the internet, phones, gf's laptop.

But i think surely 100GB should cover it if i avoid torrents and rather do that at work.


Gaming and Steam updates i think will would be the majority of the data.
 
I have 2mb line speed

the problem is i only recently got adsl again after having Openweb Gold Uncapped many many months back and that worked until they screwed everyone.

But i cannot tell you what my monthly usage is like because I have only had internet for 4 days (took me 4days to cancel my OW account as they are ****e slow)

I can generally track my own usage, but there is more than just me using the internet, phones, gf's laptop.

But i think surely 100GB should cover it if i avoid torrents and rather do that at work.


Gaming and Steam updates i think will would be the majority of the data.

One good thing about Web Africa's uncapped is that if you download at night(00:00) it doesn't count towards your usage thresholds.

You could try home then upgrade to Business uncapped if you're having issues if you wanna save cash. Business uncapped is so cheap on 2Meg though that I'd rather say go for that straight away.
 
After this thread in a couple months Web Africa is going to be oversubscribed :whistle:
 
Which scares me to death

nah. IS is one of the biggest backbones in the country(if not the biggest). And unlike AH they don't wait for people to complain before they do upgrades.

It just works.

Get the 2meg business and you'll see what I mean.
 
What about cybersmart? are they IS? are they bad?

Cybersmart run their own backbone. Crystal Web's ADSL accounts run on the Cybersmart backbone and I can say it has been great for me. In 2008/2009 I had a Cybersmart capped account that really was a good account, otherwise haven't had much from Cybersmart themselves, except for some hosting of some small websites.
 
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