FTTH with Web Africa

[TimTDP]

I would be pleased to hear user experiences from anyone using WebAfrica as their FTTH ISP
In a nutshell, should I use them?
Do they throttle capped users?
Do they throttle torrents?
Both tales of good and bad experiences welcome!

 

[AK1407]

I registered for FTTH with WebAfrica at first, but after 1 day it was evident that my usage was being shaped, I had a 50mbps line and was unable to stream anything above 720p on Netflix SA, and Torrents maxed out at 1mbps download speed. They made all sorts of excuses and never admitted to the shaping. I moved to Vox Telecom and could not be happier with the performance. Same line speed, but now I can stream 4k on Netflix SA, and my torrents are 4 to 5 times faster. Go with Vox if you can.

 

[halfmoonforever]

Whatever service you usually get through their ADSL portion, you should get on their FTTH offering. So our questions using the normal ADSL package, have answers you can apply to their FTTH product

Do they throttle capped users? No. Uncapped they use a star rating system, and usually you'd only feel it during business hours.
Do they throttle torrents? Yes. Any ISP in the world every throttles P2P traffic because it can't be cached or proxied to save on bandwidth, which means if all 15 people (1:15 contention ratio) downloads at full speed at the same time, you would only get a 15th of the speed you paid for. This is why ISP's will always throttle torrents. however will you see that often enough and will they throttle you into the ground? Not necessarily. And with a 24/7 connection, do you really care?

To mitigate getting crappy DCMA notices for downloading torrents, I use a seedbox overseas where I download via HTTP. Torrents are also not the preferred method these days, look into NZB

Having said that, Web Africa, as an ISP has been great. Their billing department sucks ass, but hopefully you won't have billing issues.

 

[halfmoonforever]

I registered for FTTH with WebAfrica at first, but after 1 day it was evident that my usage was being shaped, I had a 50mbps line and was unable to stream anything above 720p on Netflix SA, and Torrents maxed out at 1mbps download speed. They made all sorts of excuses and never admitted to the shaping. I moved to Vox Telecom and could not be happier with the performance. Same line speed, but now I can stream 4k on Netflix SA, and my torrents are 4 to 5 times faster. Go with Vox if you can.

Netflix doesn't have 4k in South Africa... do they? On their site they only say HD and 4K in the US?

Did you torrent and stream at once?

 

[AK1407]

Netflix doesn't have 4k in South Africa... do they? On their site they only say HD and 4K in the US?

Did you torrent and stream at once?

They do have 4k, it depends on the content, there aren't many shows but some are available in 4k. I watched the whole season 2 of Daredevil in 4k. I am actually able to watch a 4k Netflix stream and download Torrents at around 3-4 mbps at the same time. Also, when I stream a football match on supersport online, my wife can easily watch Netflix in 4k depending on the content selected. I also recently downloaded Uncharted 4 off the PS store in just 5 hours, it was 50GB. Whatever the official policies of the different ISPs, I can tell you that from my personal experience, Vox has been far better than WebAfrica.

 

[Insint]

If you require service within 24 hours then look at other ISPs. The average response time is between 28 hours and never.

I have a capped 10Mbps line and cannot complain it's great.