Data, speed upgrades from Smart Village

The pricing is actually decent now. Competitive with ADSL.
 
Woohoooo!!! Great news! Happy smartvillage customer :D
 
Im actually moving to a apartment which has both ADSL and SmartVillage Fibre available. Can anyone comment on the uncapped performance on the 10mb/s line. My usage is around 200-300 gig a month.
 
Performance for me is as advertised. I have gotten full line speed 99% of the time and whats great is that it is both up and down. Would take smartvillage over adsl any day.
 
Still wary of Smart Village because of their history, but must say that 10Mb/s UP AND DOWN speeds with 2ms ping is not too shabby.

Had a chance to test it recently at Midlands Estates.
 
So in other words they are finally passing on the faster line speeds Telkom offered everyone else (who isn't locked into SmartVillage) a year ago. Until recently they continued to offer 1Mbit ("SuperSpeed") lines at the prices everyone else who wasn't locked in could get a 2Mbit line for. Until recently a 2Mbit line was R369 per month (excluding data).

A quick google yields someone else complaining about this exact same issue:
http://hellopeter.com/smart-village-pty-ltd/complaints/no-price-decreases-1367635

If you're in a complex where SmartVillage is the only source of wired internet / adsl you don't really have a choice (Telkom landline not permitted). It's either 3G(or LTE if you're lucky) or SmartVillage.

A few months ago they were forever sending out sms notifications that that internet services were down for various reasons.
 
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thatshowiroll said:
So in other words they are finally passing on the faster line speeds Telkom offered everyone else (who isn't locked into SmartVillage) a year ago. Until recently they continued to offer 1Mbit ("SuperSpeed") lines at the prices everyone else who wasn't locked in could get a 2Mbit line for. Until recently a 2Mbit line was R369 per month (excluding data).

If you're in a complex where SmartVillage is the only source of wired internet / adsl you don't really have a choice (Telkom landline not permitted). It's either 3G(or LTE if you're lucky) or SmartVillage.

A few months ago they were forever sending out sms notifications that that internet services were down for various reasons.
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How does Telkom pass on discount to them? They are seperate operator outside of Telkom.
 
qwertydudeza said:
How does Telkom pass on discount to them? They are seperate operator outside of Telkom.
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Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they have until now been unable to compete with the price/performance offered by a Telkom ADSL line. Telkom offered double the speed for the same price. Basically we end up paying double because SmartVillage is the only option permitted for wired internet at many complexes. I don't know if there is any connection to Telkom, but they are the only option for landline phone and wired internet in the complex (despite there being a big shiny box with "Telkom" painted on it just outside the main gate).

At least they've finally done something about their pricing :)
 
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This is good for us all, shows how competitive the market has become
 
Totempole said:
They usually operate in secure complexes where Telkom lines aren't allowed. Not available to the general public, but at those prices, who cares? ;)
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I know people in a few complexes with Smartvillage - For them, Smartvillage is so crap, all my mates in those places have Telkom ADSL lines anyway!

But it looks like SV is responding to competition, which is great. Not being able to compete against Telkom on price or service in an upmarket, high-density, secure complex is just shameful!

Just an FYI - Multichoice owns a controlling stake in Smartvillage
 
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"Free of charge" upgrade and yet it basically only almost makes them comparable with available DSL offerings.

Smart village:
R649 for 4MBit uncapped
or
R649 for capped (R280 for only 50GB + R369 for 4MBit line)

Afrihost:
R597 for 4MBit uncapped
or
R458 for capped (100GB + 4Mbit line)


Smart Village is not comparable to DSL.

Getting the same speed up and down is dependent on whether they've messed up their router settings (they're incompetent that way). I also got equal up/down when I first started. Then it changed to 1/4 up, phoned to ask about it and they said that equal up and down was a mistake. Subsequent to that it's changed backwards and forwards a few times.

Their reliability is terrible. When the service works it's fine but when they have an outage it's weeks of a mixture of downtime, unusably high packet loss and pitiful international throughput.

I'm in Century City - your mileage may vary depending where you are. As far as I know, it's impossible to get away from SV - Telkom won't install a line into this apartment complex. I don't know how they managed to organise this, but a few of the complexes in Century City have the same thing, a captive market that's forced to either use SV or 3G.
 
Why should Smart Village be compared to adsl? Its a different product and as far as I'm concerned paying R50 a month more for fibre than adsl is well worth it. Hell when i was on adsl (only 8 months or so ago) I was lucky if I got half my line speed due to congestion etc. etc. etc.
 
kdub said:
Why should Smart Village be compared to adsl? Its a different product and as far as I'm concerned paying R50 a month more for fibre than adsl is well worth it. Hell when i was on adsl (only 8 months or so ago) I was lucky if I got half my line speed due to congestion etc. etc. etc.
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At least on ADSL you have an Internet connection that actually works. I've got pages and pages of sms notifications of downtime on my phone from SmartVillage over the course of a few months ago. Everybody I have spoken to in Century City *hates* SmartVillage with the fire of a thousand suns.
 
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I've been living in one of the security complexes that only has Smart Village as a wired internet connection option. I can't count the hours I've spent e-mailing or phoning them, or complaining about them, but I have to admit things have improved a lot the last couple of months... excluding the downtime thatshowiroll mentioned.

Apparently my complex is one of the more bandwidth-hungry ones, and our speeds do drop sometimes (eg: early evening and end of month). They also mentioned some time back that they were implementing shaping for higher uncapped users, not sure if that is still in effect or how it compares to this announcement. I'm on 4meg uncapped and when I notice my speeds slow down I disconnect for a few minutes, reconnect and usually get a new IP and full speeds again :) WoW EU latency isn't bad either 150-250ms, for whatever that's worth.

Last I checked 4meg was the maximum speed our complex could offer (even when they announced their 10meg pricing) so will be interesting to see if I get 8meg.
 
Good news for those using the service, I suppose...
 
elvis_presley said:
I know people in a few complexes with Smartvillage - For them, Smartvillage is so crap, all my mates in those places have Telkom ADSL lines anyway!

But it looks like SV is responding to competition, which is great. Not being able to compete against Telkom on price or service in an upmarket, high-density, secure complex is just shameful!

Just an FYI - Multichoice owns a controlling stake in Smartvillage
Click to expand...

So it's effectively MWEB then. :erm:
 
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