BitCo Consumer Review

[garthvs]

Pretty much describes exactly how my connection is acting while gaming.
Playing arena in wow has been aweful when you suddenly have a 5 second spike.

this is unlike bitco...

Hi Murmaider

Can you please PM me your email address so we can get all the details. I am chatting to Wikkels88 as well.

 

[jg_puk]

I'll see if I can find out this week.

Any luck?

 

[No-Rules]

Garth,
Do you have any UNSHAPE services for home users.

 

[bizkuit]

Hi Garth
Sent you a PM about my LOS test. Any feedback?

 

[Wikkels88]

Just have to add this here, Garth sat with me on Skype twice during this week in the evenings (First night till past 8pm, and last night till after 10pm) to monitor my connection while I'm online and determine what exactly the problem is with all the packet loss issues I've been having lately... Really outstanding customer service, this guy goes out of his way to help out his customers

 

[moosag]

Got the BitCo Installer coming out today for a LOS test and hopefully subsequent installation (Actually waiting for his call lol

Just judging by the service I can't wait to get onboard!

 

[JohnJuniorV3]

Just have to add this here, Garth sat with me on Skype twice during this week in the evenings (First night till past 8pm, and last night till after 10pm) to monitor my connection while I'm online and determine what exactly the problem is with all the packet loss issues I've been having lately... Really outstanding customer service, this guy goes out of his way to help out his customers

Did you manage to solve any of the issues?
Thanks Garth!

 

[Azimuth]

Just have to add this here, Garth sat with me on Skype twice during this week in the evenings (First night till past 8pm, and last night till after 10pm) to monitor my connection while I'm online and determine what exactly the problem is with all the packet loss issues I've been having lately... Really outstanding customer service, this guy goes out of his way to help out his customers

Outstanding. Here's hoping you lot are all sorted now. There are quite a few of us waiting in the shadows to join up. We're all watching this thread.

 

[Wikkels88]

Did you manage to solve any of the issues?
Thanks Garth!

Well for the half an hour I played after he was finished last night, I had no issues, will give it some proper testing over the weekend

 

[Wikkels88]

Meh after a couple of hours spend on CSGO and D3 tonight, the problem is still there, doesn't happen as often, and if I monitor the packet loss percentage when the desync occurs, it only goes up to about 15% (previously would shoot up to 30-40%) but getting more and more frustrated as the time goes by, especially since I saw with my own eyes how smooth everything ran those first few weeks

 

[Azimuth]

Damn, that is a great pity. I'd love to see BitCo putting this one out to pasture.

 

[No-Rules]

My Experience haven't been so good so far on a 5mb line
Line flapping all over the East rand, ping's in the high 300's and download in the low 1mb jumping to 234 mb for the last week.
Today will be a week, Support ticket still open; The only response i got was the core tech's are still investigating.
Line is unstable.

 

[moosag]

@Garth -> I am just passing on a thanks to Niel and Werner. Guys came in late, did a superb quality install and catered to my every requirement.

Really awesome team of installers and customer service. 2 Thumbs Up From me

Now Please Activate The Net Damn You !! JJ..

 

[moosag]

Can existing BitCo users PM me the default router username and password... i haven't yet received it but the net is up...
need to set some DNS settings... hint hint ...

 

[Wikkels88]

Can existing BitCo users PM me the default router username and password... i haven't yet received it but the net is up...
need to set some DNS settings... hint hint ...

Sent you a pm

 

[JohnJuniorV3]

Some initial thoughts:

The connection is excellent! I already managed to halve the speed for a couple of hours but back at 10mb now.

The speedtests below are being run while I am streaming Athene on Twitch.tv at source settings and while my wife is streaming series in another room, that said, enjoy:

Johannesburg: http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/3677202818
Cape Town: http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/3677206242
London: http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/3677194136
New York City: http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/3677199351

If there are any other tests you would like to see, just let me know.

I have had the opportunity to sit on a couple local ISP backbones and while the speed of this connection is no match, the user experience has so far surpassed anything I've experienced thus far.

Comparing to my previous experience with Neotel WiMax:

The connections are very similar, but I will have to give this again to BitCo, both on user experience and pricing where Neotel charges R2299 for a 5mb/2mb(enterprise) option that has speed halved after 1.5TB and BitCo charging R1499 for 10mb/2mb(home) and only halving speed on continuous high usage, returning to normal after an hour or 2. - I know it is probably not fair to compare these products, but in my case the intended use is the same.

The FUP on BitCo is the most fair I have seen so far especially on a home product and I could not recommend this more highly with my experience so far.

Well done BitCo, you are sitting on a goldmine if you can keep this up.

Hi Fluke,

I asked you quite a while back, do you think you could run some speedtests and traceroutes to local and international for me (when you're not battering the line )
I'd really appreciate it

 

[cavman]

Hi Garth,

Quite awhile back I wrote a review on my experience with Bitco even though we had no LoS with any High-Sites. Well now its time to cut some trees!(my neighbour's trees that is, to clear the tree covering to a High-Site 700m away) but before I go ahead trimming I need to confirm 2 things.

1. I’m going to Cut/trim 2 of my neighbour’s trees in half to reveal the tower. Now is it essential to clear the Fresnel zone? Or will the technicians install with certain Fresnel zone obstruction or nLoS? Or is Fresnel zone obstruction or nLoS acceptable so long as there’s LoS?

So yesterday I took a drive to the High-Site to take a closer look.

2. Iv marked 3 Red arrows on the photo of the tree covering, those 3 arrows are the position of 3 specific dishes on the same level on the tower pointing and covering a full 360 degrees. I presume that those are Bitcos as there the only 3 dishes on that tower in that configuration, there’s not a lot of other dishes on the tower at that let alone covering 360. Now if those dishes are Bitcos do you think I'll clear the Fresnel zone from the trim line?

 

[agel]

Heya guys, any news on this? I'm considering signing up myself so have been waiting and watching haha. (Don't think I can get the service anyway though as I'm on the ground floor in my block of flats and there's nowhere to run cable really =/)


And then just regarding the bad pings and the like, if it's to WoW and other games, I found this:

FYI, I know Lizard Squad’s been hitting Arenanet quite a bit, especially last week (probably been 2 weeks now - Agel). They mostly affected the login servers but they didn’t really manage to bring anything down, just caused serious lag. They also brought down Twitch and demanded that people post vlogs of themselves with stuff written on their foreheads before they let it go back up. People complied to their demands, DDOS was stopped.

Other DDOSs they’ve taken credit for:
Arenanet Login Servers
Eve Online
LoL servers
Twitch
NSA Mail Server
Vatican website
Sony’s Playstation network
Battle.net

They’re pretty just doing it “for the lulz” and when they do get caught it’s going to be beautiful. (Lol, can't wait! If it's for an actual cause I'd be ok, but don't f**k with my leisure time for your liesure! - Agel)

 

[Sparky_za]

Not sure if it will help anyone, but I have always used the following link to test connections.

http://netalyzr.icsi.berkeley.edu/index.html

One common thing I have noticed on the connection is the upload buffering is very high, which could potentially cause some of the issues you guys are seeing with gaming. All other tests for my connection are within acceptable limits.

Garth, can you comment on the upload buffering?

We estimate your uplink as having 980 ms of buffering. This is quite high, and you may experience substantial disruption to your network performance when performing interactive tasks such as web-surfing while simultaneously conducting large uploads. With such a buffer, real-time applications such as games or audio chat can work quite poorly when conducting large uploads at the same time.

 

[Skippie]

Hi Garth:

My Netflix isn't working anymore, and after some research I have discovered it has to do that Netflix changed the way it looks up your location. It uses Google Look-ups. How can I reroute these look ups on the Tomato router interface?