Guarantees: Telkom ADSL vs MyWireless

[kaspaas]

Under the MyWireless threads there is quite a bit on the radio talk TheRodent had.

During the talk, Marcel Raats of MyWireless, indicated that no ISP guarantees the speeds on a dial-up type service.

It most probably is true in South Africa.

BUT: With Telkom ADSL and their "best effort service" SLA, I usually manage to download more than 100 MBytes per hour if required. This is during office hours, and from local as well as international servers. This is also a contended service, just as MyWireless.

So, I'm happy without a black-and-white guarantee as Telkom delivers what I was made to believe from their marketing materials. On a technical level, Telkom ADSL delivers. As long as I'm not capped. Telkom did however deceive me on capped speeds: They brought me under the impression that there would be workable international bandwidth after being capped. This is not the case! Their marketing material creates false impressions.

Obviously, MyWireless does not deliver what users are expecting. Therefore the problems.

This said, Telkom ADSL does deliver value for money compared with other products available in the country, but Telkom is beyond extremely expensive when compared to the rest of the world.




South Africa needs World Class Broadband at World Competitive Prices.

 

[rpm]

Hi Kaspaas

I agree that Telkom’s ADSL service has improved over the last few months and I can not complain about speeds. In my correspondence and conversations with Telkom I have congratulated them on this part of the service. The problem now is the cap and the high cost. Let us see how/if they will address that problem…

Regards,

RPM
rpm@myadsl.co.za

 

[celeborn]

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by rpm</i>
<br />Hi Kaspaas

I agree that Telkom’s ADSL service has improved over the last few months and I can not complain about speeds. In my correspondence and conversations with Telkom I have congratulated them on this part of the service. The problem now is the cap and the high cost. Let us see how/if they will address that problem…
<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

This was one of my points (way back when). To be perfectly honest, so far Telkom's ADSL service has left me satisfied. Plenty of bandwidth when I need it and the latency has ALWAYS been great. The biggest gripe has and always will be cost:cap. I'm not sure we (the greater "we") will ever win that battle, but I have to say that judging by what I had read re MyAbortion I'm not about to start slashing my wrists if we don't.

Celery

 

[neobyte]

I agree, Not many ADSL users have ever really complained about the speeds as the Sentech guys have done. Both services have their own faults, namely, the cap and cost of adsl, and the poor service given by Sentech. I'm sure if adsl were to drop dramaticly in price, a lot of the Sentech users would switch over (coverage permitting) and visa versa.

With the exception of the ADSL cap and cost, I am a satisfied user. READ, not happy, satisfied.

 

[caroper]

I agree, but don't forget the Port Shaping issue. There was no mention of that until I had been using the service for nearly a year, then suddenly (nonP2P)applications started failing.

We are still not getting what we signed up for, but what we do get is at least reliable.