Debating moving to Web Africa.

[nihilist]

I'm debating moving from OW to Web Africa, and porting my ADSL line to them. It's cheaper, I've heard good things about WA uncapped and I wanna save a bit of dosh.

Got some questions.

1) What is your experience like on WA in terms of Youtube, downloading, ftp/http (what I use the most)
2) When you go into the 'throttled' pool of users, what is your experience like?
3) If I port my line to WA but then wanna get it back with Telkom, are there issues? Am I guaranteed to get my line back?

 

[Crowley]

1. My personal experience has been good overall. Youtube buffers faster than I can watch, downloads run full speed most of the time
2. I only noticed that I got throttled a few times on SABNZB even though I am pretty much in the throttled pool all the time for now.
3. Yes you can although I think there is a charge for moving your line back to Telkom.

This is my personal experience. I know a few other guys had less fun than I had but overall it is a very good package.

 

[plugandplay]

i am going to do that also, but heard a lot of complaint recently for WA. currently i got a mweb 7 days trial. so far so good.

anyone who can report what's normal download speed between 12pm and 6 am?

 

[nihilist]

i am going to do that also, but heard a lot of complaint recently for WA. currently i got a mweb 7 days trial. so far so good.

anyone who can report what's normal download speed between 12pm and 6 am?

AFAIK, WA don't throttle during those times, so in theory you should get full speed, although I can't tell, just reporting what I've heard from some friends.

I considered MWEB but I have a hard time thinking they deserve my money.

 

[Gtx Gaming]

00:00 - 01:00 1 075 068 484 bytes 1.00 GB
01:00 - 02:00 1 154 584 255 bytes 1.08 GB
02:00 - 03:00 1 209 873 125 bytes 1.13 GB
03:00 - 04:00 1 175 238 473 bytes 1.09 GB
04:00 - 05:00 1 237 822 928 bytes 1.15 GB
05:00 - 06:00 1 286 861 042 bytes 1.20 GB
06:00 - 07:00 1 316 259 027 bytes 1.23 GB

Bussiness hours
14:00 - 15:00 805 966 698 bytes 768.63 MB

 

[Chewbacca]

There is no charge for moving your line back AFAIK but it’s a real ball ache and you will have to wait for quite some time for it to be completed.
Can’t speak for their uncapped, but their Capped accounts on 4meg, YouTube and torrents were fine. Just don’t expect to stream 720p without buffering. Lastly, they have been plagued with allot of international connectivity over the last 4 months or so and that is why I am moving.

Good luck! – personally I would avoid them.

 

[nihilist]

There is no charge for moving your line back AFAIK but it’s a real ball ache and you will have to wait for quite some time for it to be completed.
Can’t speak for their uncapped, but their Capped accounts on 4meg, YouTube and torrents were fine. Just don’t expect to stream 720p without buffering. Lastly, they have been plagued with allot of international connectivity over the last 4 months or so and that is why I am moving.

Good luck! – personally I would avoid them.

Yeah I'm not sold on them entirely. The main thing I love about OW is that I can flip from backbone to backbone when one goes belly up.

 

[plugandplay]

i've been with Openweb gold uncapped for more than half year, the experience is weird, they could be very fast especially during the weekends and after hour downloading but not always. sometimes, especially daytime, they could be very slow even for http surfing even you swap between VB and IS account, i have to admit that, Mr Keoma is the one of reason for my stay, always be helpful even during the weekend. but i am kind of tired of keeping writing to him asking for another account to swap. now i am just looking for a uncapped account with stable speed during the daytime and i still can download with my news server during the after hour. i didnot decide between WA and Mweb now, i got a Mweb 7 days trial account, so far no complaint, i hope i can get a WA trial account to compare.

 

[nihilist]

i've been with Openweb gold uncapped for more than half year, the experience is weird, they could be very fast especially during the weekends and after hour downloading but not always. sometimes, especially daytime, they could be very slow even for http surfing even you swap between VB and IS account, i have to admit that, Mr Keoma is the one of reason for my stay, always be helpful even during the weekend. but i am kind of tired of keeping writing to him asking for another account to swap. now i am just looking for a uncapped account with stable speed during the daytime and i still can download with my news server during the after hour. i didnot decide between WA and Mweb now, i got a Mweb 7 days trial account, so far no complaint, i hope i can get a WA trial account to compare.

I hear you, and that's pretty much the same situation I am in.

The thing that gets me on (so far) all the OW backbones is that, single threaded downloads are usually always slow on international servers (remember some are transparently cached locally in SA) but if I use a multi connection downloaded manager I get max out my line, which I think is the reason I have such a crap Youtube experience.

 

[DeadPool]

I am still on WA uncapped at the moment but I'm considering moving away. 2 months into WA uncapped and there has been problems cropping up a lot. Not enough capacity in Dec. WA news server not working. Even now I'm not getting full speed. Max out 1Mb line at 90Kb/s under the threshold.

Choose wisely, try get a trial uncapped account from WA. The home capped accounts work differently,much better than uncapped

 

[Chewbacca]

Why not try mweb trail account? 7 days to try. Dont know if WA offer the same but i think you will be better of.

 

[nihilist]

Well I'm now on DSL Heaven, it's one of the Open Web backbones I think it's just a resold WA account according to Speedtest.net and other info.

I'm generally happy with Altec/DSL Heaven/Vodacom Business accounts - it's just the Youtube thing that bugs the kark out of me and the single-connection download speed.

ie: ftp something from ftp.debian.org and I'll get maybe 100KB/s
if I use 4 connections to the server, to get 4 files at once, 400KB/s

This happens on many servers, http/ftp etc; and it's a PITA when you're doing something like a Steam download which, afaik, only uses one 'thread'.

I guess one can't expect too much from consumer/home uncapped accounts in SA.

 

[Tinuva]

Steam actually uses more than 1 thread if it can find more than 1 server to connect to. If you set it to Cape Town Web Africa, there will be 2 steam servers serving content, so you should be able to get up to 2 threads if both have the content. Sadly the content on them is controlled by Steam themselves, so there are times the 1 server has something that other one doesn't.

 

[nihilist]

Steam actually uses more than 1 thread if it can find more than 1 server to connect to. If you set it to Cape Town Web Africa, there will be 2 steam servers serving content, so you should be able to get up to 2 threads if both have the content. Sadly the content on them is controlled by Steam themselves, so there are times the 1 server has something that other one doesn't.

hehe, yeah it was prob not the best example And if you d/l more than one game at the same time that's even more threads etc; But my point is still valid I feel, single threads seem to be throttled/shaped on a lot of uncapped accounts. I hardly ever see 400KB/s on any single download, but multiple connections using a download manager etc; all good. It's just a freaking chore when you're doing an update, streaming video, other things that only do one connection and so on.