GWISA=SCREAMER

[murray654]

No most of those still "blessed" are commenting on the screamer thread
http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthread.php/150126-Screamer-WiMax?p=6218953#post6218953

Previously had very few issued, but this last month was horrible.
Hoping they can improve

I thought with Icasa shutting down some towers, there would be more custormers who are on wirelss and not wimax...

surely by now there must be some other form or comms that is better?
Im going to read your older posts and see if I can think of something to suggest.

The only options are GPRS(Edge), ISDN and VSAT. Somebody once mentioned diginet and I laughed when i saw what that would cost.

Even though this wireless is annoying and slow, it remains the only viable option. Until some competition arrives.

ISDN far too slow
GPRS(Edge) also slow, and costly
VSAT Extremely costly and high latency makes it unusable for some applications.

The biggest problem with screamer this month is the downtime. We had 177 hours offline in May. This is unacceptable. Luckily most the hours were at night. Screamer was offline for at least 12 nights from 17h00 until about 07h30. This is due to power issues - batteries or solar panels not working. Only about 10 hours of the downtime was between 07h30 & 17h00

Even with these problems, I am greatful that they exist, I just wish there was competition for them, because then they would have to fix these issues, or lose business.

We are 70km by road from Harrismith and I appreaciate the effort in keeping this wireless network up and running. But I believe that Screamer's bad service means that there will be an immediate loss of customers if someone will set up a competing network.

They keep changing the IP address, so I have to save my post in case mybb wants me to log in again!! very annoying

 

[RockOn]

Murray, I have sent you a PM, maybe we can help...

 

[murray654]

Hi,

We have not had any problems with the Screamer accounts department until this month. Normally when we request a credit due to being offline, they credit our account. In May we recorded 138 hours offline, so we requested credit.

They sent us a fax yesterday disputing our claim:

Lets see heres the fax:

They claim we were online for the whole of May. Notice their fax says for May we were online 23 days. In our calendar May has 31 days. There are 8 days missing. Our claim of 138 hours offline does not seem unreasonable to us.

Well, the whole report looks like junk. There are 35 days online in March.

Lets see what happens...

Meanwhile back at the ranch, we are offline again...

 

[Slayeruser]

Yip that reporting is crap.

I did a 94 day connection Jan2011
Date------Online time
2011-01 94d 05:34:06

 

[murray654]

Finally another network is running in my area. Several neighbours are already on it. I have been waiting for them to come and install here. In the meantime, I had to upload over 100 photos to picasa web albums.

On the screamer connection it took over 30 minutes to upload 5 photos (photos are 2.5 - 3 MB each)

Since this is not working, I decided to visit neighbours on the alternate wifi network. Sure enough, 5 photos uploaded in 5 minutes. So I did another 5 just to check it was not a fluke, again they uploaded in 5 minutes.

So the conlusion I draw from my test of uploading to 5 photos to the web, the alternate network is 6 times faster. It does cost more. But if I can get 6 times as much done, I will be better off by a long margin...

On that note, I am canceling today in the hope that the alternate network technicians will switch me over in the next 30 days...