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chewiesw
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You can keep your telkom email address for about R15 a month. As to choosing an ISP it is the same as choosing mobile provider, look for the best deal and go with your gut.
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Fibre in Edgemead/Bothasig
- Thread starter techead
- Start date
You can keep your telkom email address for about R15 a month. As to choosing an ISP it is the same as choosing mobile provider, look for the best deal and go with your gut.
So Bothasig folks.... seems like the Vumatel goal was reached... nice
anyone aware of next steps or dates?
Vumatel:
WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?
- We get final approvals of our wayleaves from the City Council, which provides us with the permission needed to start trenching in the sidewalk
- We'll update you on the planned build schedule, which will usually start around 6 weeks after we've received approval, but we'll let you know in good time before this begins
- You'll be invited to attend a town hall meeting before we start building to answer all of your questions about the roll-out of fibre to your suburb
Town hall meeting scheduled for 6th of March 2018. Hoërskool Bosmansdam High School, Adam Tas Ave, 7441 Bothasig, Western Cape, South Africa.
https://www.facebook.com/events/1758773627518348/
https://www.facebook.com/events/1758773627518348/
PseudZ
Expert Member
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- May 28, 2008
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- 1,235
Out of curiosity, are all houses in Edgemead supposed to have the grey boxes on their walls or only if fibre has been installed? I don't have a grey box on the wall, only the black box in the ground but the rest of my street does.
When they were doing the cabling I looked in the black box and there seems to be a pipe going towards the house already. Does this mean they don't need to use the grey box? Did they use Telkom's existing pipes into the house?
When they were doing the cabling I looked in the black box and there seems to be a pipe going towards the house already. Does this mean they don't need to use the grey box? Did they use Telkom's existing pipes into the house?
My experience getting Vumatel fibre installed in Edgemead
I recently had Vumatel Fibre installed in Edgemead. I went with Afrihost's "Home 20Mbps+ Vumatel Fibre" - 20Mbps up and down as I'm often uploading large files. R837.00 per month - more expensive than quite a few competitors: https://shop.vumatel.co.za/packages/all. I decided to go with Afrihost as they cover the cost of the installation (R1710.00) and provide one with a free (to keep) D-Link DIR-825 WiFi router with a WAN Ethernet input port. I was coming from ADSL so I needed some hardware like this. There seem to be ways to get an ADSL router to act as a switch which I managed to get right but I could not get internet traffic flowing over WiFi. I think my networking knowledge is the limitation here. I am still waiting for the router to be delivered but it should hopefully arrive in the next day or two. In the mean time I am using https://github.com/oblique/create_ap on a Linux laptop to provide a WiFi access point. The tool shares the internet coming in via Ethernet on the laptop.
The Afrihost cancellation policy seems to be if you cancel within 6 months of installation, you need to cover the cost of the Wifi router (R999). Not a big deal in my mind if the service quality degrades significantly.
I only waited about 2 days from day I ordered to when Vumatel came around to do the installation. I was expecting a much longer wait. I was phoned prior to the installation and book an appointment (an actual time of day!). The Vumatel employees arrived promptly and the installation too about an hour.
The speed has been very good thus far although I am wary of shaping/throttling down the line with Afrihost... Time will tell.
1.11ms ping to mybroadband.co.za
18.4ms ping to google.com
163ms ping to facebook.com
For those maybe not in the know, Vumatel comes around to your place and pulls the fibre line from the box out in the street into a Wired Fibre Modem (CPE) box (that they install and provide). You can have this CPE box wherever you would like in your place as long as it's feasible. It looks like you get up to 180m worth of cabling from the box in the street to the CPE box for free. Major kinks in the line are a no go. In my instance they went neatly up the side of the house, into the roof and back down into a room. The CPE box routes the fibre connection to Ethernet. Apparently only the first of 6 Ethernet ports is functional. You can connect your computer/laptop directly to this port and it will be provided an IP address and can connect to the internet after you have set up your ISP. With Afrihost, I provided them with my order number or CPE box number or Vumatel number (idk what the correct name for it is). Before setting up your ISP you can only visit the vumatel sites such as https://shop.vumatel.co.za/. Connecting to a non HTTPS site will redirect you to this page.
My thinking was that an upgrade to fibre from ADSL wouldn't be such a noticeable difference - I was wrong. Here's hoping that anyone else doing an installation has as smooth an experience as I had.
Update:
10 days later and I'm still waiting for my router to be delivered by Afrihost. They say there has been a delay and I was meant to get it early this week (it's now Thursday).
In terms of speed/throttling/shaping, I have noticed a slow down between roughly 8pm and 9pm where download speeds can come down to a crawl of ~25KiB/s. Services such as Google, YouTube seem unaffected at these times though. I also at one stage had a DNS issue - the Afrihost DNS servers appeared to be down. I resolved this temporarily by changing my DNS lookup IP's to Google's 8.8.8.8.
If the slowdowns keep up, I'm probably going to jump ship as there are other cheaper offers with potentially better service on the market.
I recently had Vumatel Fibre installed in Edgemead. I went with Afrihost's "Home 20Mbps+ Vumatel Fibre" - 20Mbps up and down as I'm often uploading large files. R837.00 per month - more expensive than quite a few competitors: https://shop.vumatel.co.za/packages/all. I decided to go with Afrihost as they cover the cost of the installation (R1710.00) and provide one with a free (to keep) D-Link DIR-825 WiFi router with a WAN Ethernet input port. I was coming from ADSL so I needed some hardware like this. There seem to be ways to get an ADSL router to act as a switch which I managed to get right but I could not get internet traffic flowing over WiFi. I think my networking knowledge is the limitation here. I am still waiting for the router to be delivered but it should hopefully arrive in the next day or two. In the mean time I am using https://github.com/oblique/create_ap on a Linux laptop to provide a WiFi access point. The tool shares the internet coming in via Ethernet on the laptop.
The Afrihost cancellation policy seems to be if you cancel within 6 months of installation, you need to cover the cost of the Wifi router (R999). Not a big deal in my mind if the service quality degrades significantly.
I only waited about 2 days from day I ordered to when Vumatel came around to do the installation. I was expecting a much longer wait. I was phoned prior to the installation and book an appointment (an actual time of day!). The Vumatel employees arrived promptly and the installation too about an hour.
The speed has been very good thus far although I am wary of shaping/throttling down the line with Afrihost... Time will tell.
1.11ms ping to mybroadband.co.za
18.4ms ping to google.com
163ms ping to facebook.com
For those maybe not in the know, Vumatel comes around to your place and pulls the fibre line from the box out in the street into a Wired Fibre Modem (CPE) box (that they install and provide). You can have this CPE box wherever you would like in your place as long as it's feasible. It looks like you get up to 180m worth of cabling from the box in the street to the CPE box for free. Major kinks in the line are a no go. In my instance they went neatly up the side of the house, into the roof and back down into a room. The CPE box routes the fibre connection to Ethernet. Apparently only the first of 6 Ethernet ports is functional. You can connect your computer/laptop directly to this port and it will be provided an IP address and can connect to the internet after you have set up your ISP. With Afrihost, I provided them with my order number or CPE box number or Vumatel number (idk what the correct name for it is). Before setting up your ISP you can only visit the vumatel sites such as https://shop.vumatel.co.za/. Connecting to a non HTTPS site will redirect you to this page.
My thinking was that an upgrade to fibre from ADSL wouldn't be such a noticeable difference - I was wrong. Here's hoping that anyone else doing an installation has as smooth an experience as I had.
Update:
10 days later and I'm still waiting for my router to be delivered by Afrihost. They say there has been a delay and I was meant to get it early this week (it's now Thursday).
In terms of speed/throttling/shaping, I have noticed a slow down between roughly 8pm and 9pm where download speeds can come down to a crawl of ~25KiB/s. Services such as Google, YouTube seem unaffected at these times though. I also at one stage had a DNS issue - the Afrihost DNS servers appeared to be down. I resolved this temporarily by changing my DNS lookup IP's to Google's 8.8.8.8.
If the slowdowns keep up, I'm probably going to jump ship as there are other cheaper offers with potentially better service on the market.
Last edited:
What street are you in?
Progress Tracking Map for Bothasig:
https://vumatel.us8.list-manage.com...f71e66506bd8eb4580&id=04cb71bbd3&e=c1bbbb3e03
https://vumatel.us8.list-manage.com...f71e66506bd8eb4580&id=04cb71bbd3&e=c1bbbb3e03
I agree! I did not believe the 2 month timeframe for a second, but looking at the progress I can see it happening. It seems that it was worth the wait to let them trial in the other areas first!
Haha maybe a blessing in disguise. Think timeframe has bit of if complications come forward. But this is early days. But at the rate the worked today think they’ll make the deadlines easily.
Happy with my fiber in Edgemead.
Which ISP did you go with?
SeRpEnT
Executive Member
- Joined
- Feb 15, 2008
- Messages
- 6,550
Telkom
Stay away from Telkom if you dont want to get screwed like I did. There are better and cheaper alternatives.
Check here for different options.
https://www.fibretiger.co.za/
Check here for different options.
https://www.fibretiger.co.za/
SeRpEnT
Executive Member
- Joined
- Feb 15, 2008
- Messages
- 6,550
What happened to you?