Diginet

D

dufrenchie

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South Africa.
Can anyone give me more info on Diginet? We're looking for an aletrnative to ADSL in Oudtshoorn (Sentech won't be coming here for a while..)and need some opinions from those using it at the moment.

Thanks
 
It's very expensive, about R4500 per month for 64k, but the ping times are great although that probably depends on where you are.

I myself don't have it but used to deal with customers that did.

It all depends on what you want to do with your connection I suppose. As it's Telkoms sullution for business, the service is good and contention ratios probably the best of any in the country.

Plus you get a static IP so you can host on the connection as well.

What exactly do you want to know ?
 
A guy from Telkom was telling me that you can get a shaped service at a slightly lower rental now. I guess what I want to know is what's going to be best for my company - we want to host a site that runs on php with a mysql database that is used for a whole range of business purposes, so the traffic will be heavy. Also of course browsing and a mail server, and p2p downloads. Will it be worth it or should I wait for Sentech. At the moment I reach my cap by the 15th of ech month and that is just regular traffic - no major downloading.
 
8KB * 60s * 60m * 24h * 30d = 20736000 / 20Gb/m
Does this look correct, 20 GB/month

With all you plan to do with the connection it will probably run at 100% capacity 24 hours a day. I mean p2p software would take just about all the bandwidth it can, leaving none for other applications, unless you limit it. Other than that there won't be a cap so that wouldn't be a problem.

The question then is how much "shaping' will Telkom do on this reduced cost package?

Knowing them they'd probably rape the connection so bad you wouldn't reach 64k capacity during the day, or not constantly anyway... translating to even more strain on the connection.

What are the costs you got from Telkom, both for the standard & reduced packages ?

I don't think I'm in a position to tell you whether it's worth it, maybe someone out there can shed some more light.
 
Geesh, Telkom's coverage appears to be better than I originally thought - didn't realise that ADSL was available in a place like Oudtshoorn (no derogation intended - personally, I love the place!) - nevertheless, given your traffic volume and the facilities offered by ADSL versus Diginet, you would be doing yourself a disservice by not switching over to Diginet. Of course, you will have to be prepared to pay for it, and as noted by QUIK, it's a business solution - up go your operating costs, I'm afraid...
 
Our company is based in Kyalami in Midrand, and their is no ADSL nor any MyWireless signal. So we opted for the 64K Diginet line from Telkom with IS as our ISP. The download throughput is about 7.2KBytes per sec. (25% guaranteed international bandwidth - so a sharing rate of 1:4)

We are not hosting a mail server on our segment, and all mail is downloaded by the employees with POP3 during the day. Sometimes the response is terrible.

I am under a lot of pressure from the techies in the company to upgrade, and their suggestion is to go for the 512K VSAT offering from Sentech. However, the sharing rate is 1:50 so, if everybody on the same satelite bundle is busy to full capacity, the effective bandwidth will be less than what is theoretically offered by the 1:4 sharing on the diginet line. (This is how I understand it - 64 * 8 = 512 so IS sharing rate converted to a 512K line is then 1:4*8 = 1:32)

BUT, if no one else is busy, then you can have the full 512K where as the 64K can only go max 64K. So, bottom line is that the VSAT option is the best option. The VSAT will cost you about R3500 per month where the 64K is costing us +- R6000 per month (R4000 for the ISP and R2000 for Telkom's Diginet line).

Only disadvantage is that with Sentech VSAT offering you will have to sign a 36 month contract.

The reason why we have not switched to Sentench is that I am still bargaining with IS to get them to drop their cost.
 
You could try contacting these people:

http://www.satellite-adsl.co.uk/home/section3.asp?cat=3&Id=22

I can't vouch for what the service is like though.
 
For FANUSJ - would be interesting to know the connectivity habits of your people. Do you get complaints centred around slowness of mail receipt, downloads/uploads, browsing, other interations, etc.? It's not unreasonable to host your own mail server, if slow mail transfer/receipt is the primary cause for complaints, for example. I'm of the opinion that a straight-forward calculation on the technical capabilities of the various facilities offered, only partially addresses the issue - you should do a business review/assessment as well...
 
Fanusj

I imagine most of your mail is international as local bandwidth is not normally contended being so cheap. If most of your mail is local though, the 512k line would definately be worth it as your problem would then be shear volume of mail sent, and the higher capacity would compensate.
 
Last time I spoke to Ron at www.is.co.za he quoted
me R2000 / 64k line, with parabolic on the peering point and a
minimum of R10 000

Find just 4 more people to share the R10 000.
 
<blockquote id="quote"><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by Andre</i>
<br />You could try contacting these people:

http://www.satellite-adsl.co.uk/home/section3.asp?cat=3&Id=22

I can't vouch for what the service is like though.
<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

Can we get this in SA?
 
Our mail is hosted locally (in SA) but not internally (in our network). The reason for this is that most of the guys work from home or is at a customer and there is about 25% passing through the office, therefor they use other ISP's to download their POP3 mail. I dont want to create a RAS service and I am under the impression that giving them their own ISP account so that they can browse from home is actually better and more cost effective.
 
I think your situation would be ideal for the VSAT package. I don't think IS would reduce their cost anywhere near to what you are going to get from VSAT.

Anyone here use VSAT, please post your experiences with the service..
 
<blockquote id="quote"><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by poweruser</i>
<br /><blockquote id="quote"><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by Andre</i>
<br />You could try contacting these people:

http://www.satellite-adsl.co.uk/home/section3.asp?cat=3&Id=22

I can't vouch for what the service is like though.
<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

Can we get this in SA?
<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

It sounds like it - they do say that they cover SA.
 
For FANUSJ - aah, now I see the difficulty: wasn't aware that most of your people are field staff. Anyway, sure looks like the VSAT option is the best, though this would depend on your costings...

Another thought - instead of downloading mail via POP3, why not instead host a mail facility with a web-based interface? You could do this either on your own server with secure access to the Internet, or on the ISP's facilities. Something like Postfix with Squirrelmail comes to mind (Open Source and no license costs), which would preclude the necessity for RAS, and also obviate all the hassles associated with mail clients, virii, etc. You should perhaps give this a bash first, then checkout the traffic - you may find that all of a sudden, there is no need to incur extra expense on an upgraded or new facility...
 
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