Diginet Questions

[bawrak]

Hi,

I've read the threads on the forum concerning Diginet but I'm still a bit confused

When you consider the contention ration on ADSL - which some say is 20:1 - does that mean that the minimum speed you will get on a 4Mbps line is 200kbps?

If a 2Mbps Diginet line guarantees 2Mbps does that mean that you will get the same speed of ten contended 4Mbps ADSL lines?

As you can see confusion is at the order of the day

TIA

 

[Conradl]

Contention ratio is the maximum number of connections sharing a particular slice of bandwidth. So if Telkom has 1000 ADSL users, each with a 1 mbps line, and a 1:10 contention ratio, then they would have to provision a guaranteed 100mbps to meet all the users collective bandwidth requirements requirements (1000 users * 1mbps / 10). You would thus not be guaranteed of getting your full bandwidth. Theoretically the lowest possible speed would be the bandwidth / contention ratio - best case, if nobody else is online, would the full bandwidth.

Diginet on the other hand is point-to-point, i.e. not shared. So if you had a diginet line between two offices for example, then you would get the full bandwidth. However, if you had a diginet connection to an ISP for internet access, your ISP would have its own contention ration for connecting to the internet.

YOU >Full speed connection<ISP>Contention Ratio<Internet.

Also remember that diginet is speed up and down, ADSL has a faster download rate when compared to upload.

 

[server-admins.net]

caution must be taken when looking at speeds on diginet lines, as no ISP in SA would ever guarantee 2Mbps.
You may find that the line is capable of this but you definitely wont ever see that.

My experiences with diginet lines are : for every 128KB line, expect roughly 12.5kbps on a good day

 

[guest2013-1]

Diginet lines are also extremely expensive for what you get. The uptime guarantee is nothing compared to its price and I've seen many a diginet line fail for more than 24 hours.

On a 64k diginet line your international speed would be less than a 28.8k modem. And comes in at a nice R6000-9000 price tag. This is unlimited bandwidth (however, downloading at full rate for an entire month won't justify it's cost)

If you're concerned with redundancy and/or uptime and speed. (throwing out your contention ratio for a second). I'd get a 4mbps ADSL line and a 512k Telkom Wimax. With Telkom Wimax you can use a normal ADSL account (with Web Africa for example) to dialup and have internet.

You can then have a router that bonds these two lines or just load share. (Once off cost)

The price tag including an uncapped express account from Web Africa would set you back around R2500, but then you're assured that if the line goes down you still have internet access, plus it's uncapped. Friend of mine pulls around 400gig a month using the uncapped account.