Diginet alternative, any recommendations?

[Elvis007]

We currently have a 786k diginet line, and was wondering what we could replace it with.

We use this line for the following:
Inbound and Outbound mail
Website publishing for 40 users
VPN acccess
Inbound ftp

Currently we pay R14 000 a month for the line. I see Neotel has fibre offerings for half that price and double the bandwidth, but I think no SLA's are included with their offerings.

Anyone out there that is using this service from Neotel, or any other provider?

We have two 10mb adsl lines for browsing, so that is sorted, just need to find something cheaper to replace the diginet line with...

 

[Bosvark@]

What area you in?

 

[Elvis007]

I'm a network/systems admin at the head office of a retail company in Cape Town CBD with 90 stores. 60 of the stores are on a MPLS network(2MB link from our office to the MPLS cloud), 40 of them still on adsl, busy converting the adsl stores to the MPLS/VOIP network, but with telkom we can only do one store every 2 weeks....
We have about 650 pc's on the network...

The 786k diginet line has never gone down (except for scheduled network cut-over tests) in 4 years that I have been here, and we would like to keep it that way... so we don't really want to use something that does not have a SLA.

 

[The_Unbeliever]

Suggestion - downgrade the diginet to 256k, and keep it for emails only.

Install a 4Mb (or 10Mb) adsl line for ftp, web publishing etc. (Of course you'll downgrade your diginet once after the adsl line goes live )

It can be done - at one stage my company had a 64k diginet line (for emails only) and a 1Mb uncapped adsl line (general web browsing and downloads). Was cheaper than upgrading the diginet line to a faster speed.

 

[TheGuy]

Suggestion - downgrade the diginet to 256k, and keep it for emails only.

Install a 4Mb (or 10Mb) adsl line for ftp, web publishing etc. (Of course you'll downgrade your diginet once after the adsl line goes live )

It can be done - at one stage my company had a 64k diginet line (for emails only) and a 1Mb uncapped adsl line (general web browsing and downloads). Was cheaper than upgrading the diginet line to a faster speed.

that's a bad idea to trust ADSL if your company is dependent on internet for productivity.

 

[Safrica]

Hi,
We currently have a telkom 4mb line with uncapped internet,
Between the area (stolen cables) and service provider (seacom or similar) we looking at a more stable connection.
Is Diginet the solution,
quote from IS
A 512k connection about R6.5k complete

or is there something similarly stable at a reduced cost....

 

[Bosvark@]

Diginet cables will also get stolen - we had that problem. Uses the same copper pairs...

 

[TheGuy]

Hi,
We currently have a telkom 4mb line with uncapped internet,
Between the area (stolen cables) and service provider (seacom or similar) we looking at a more stable connection.
Is Diginet the solution,
quote from IS
A 512k connection about R6.5k complete

or is there something similarly stable at a reduced cost....

Try Mweb they dropped there prices massively over the last while

Diginet cables will also get stolen - we had that problem. Uses the same copper pairs...

Yes but you have an SLA on diginet line

 

[The_Unbeliever]

Nope, SLA's will not help - once the cable get stolen enough, the customer is left dry as Telkom will then not replace the stolen cables.

Alternatives will be VSAT (horrible 2000ms lag) or 3G...

 

[UnUnOctium]

Hmm, does anyone offer low-cost microwave links (or even low-rate wireless connections from the speeds you guys need) with any SLAs (granted the inherently increased downtime probability of a wireless link itself)?

 

[Hummercellc]

what about mweb's uncapped bonded adsl with 3G fail over? i would say that you should get the same uptime as a Diginet line..... copper gone 3G steps in....