High speed access

[Thole]

First of all, I'm sorry if this is the wrong forum section; if it is, I'd like to kindly request a mod to move the post to the appropriate section.

I'm currently living in Gordon's Bay for another 1.5 months and have been living here since January. I chose not to take out ADSL because of the long installation times Telkom offered on installing the line and as such have been working on vodacom 3G because my home owner's assocation here does not allow for external antennae to be mounted (ruling out WISP). As I need to download about 15 GB of data now for a university project - and my university's internet being incredibly slow (maxing at 30 KB/s at the moment - I'm looking for a way to do this through an internet cafe/another option.

Does anyone know a fast yet affordable (sub R1000) option to download said amount? Thanks in advance.

 

[who.is.michael]

Welcome to the Forum & Africa - can't help sorry, write to the minister of the DOC....

 

[VioAdmin]

If all else fails...If you have paypal or a bank account, pay someone to help you out: Maybe someone(maybe me) with a 4Mbps+ Line can download your 15Gigs, put it on USB Drive and mail it to you? I feel for you, your options here are limited without the ADSL line.

I would say try Cell-C's internet plans but 15 gigs is going to cost you more than R1000. Hopefully the other forum members have other options.

 

[j4sk]

If it is for a legitimate university project you might be able to speak to your lecturer and get something sorted out with the university's ICT department, something like premium proxy access which is faster. The other alternative is to spend a few nights or weekends on campus, usually things should speed up after hours.
I'm not sure what you have at your uni but at UKZN we have a download scheduler. We queue up large files and they download overnight and we can download them from the uni server the next morning

The internet cafe might be a good idea, go there explain your situation and find out if you can make a deal with them.
What files are they? This also makes a difference.

 

[Chevron]

First of all, I'm sorry if this is the wrong forum section; if it is, I'd like to kindly request a mod to move the post to the appropriate section.

I'm currently living in Gordon's Bay for another 1.5 months and have been living here since January. I chose not to take out ADSL because of the long installation times Telkom offered on installing the line and as such have been working on vodacom 3G because my home owner's assocation here does not allow for external antennae to be mounted (ruling out WISP). As I need to download about 15 GB of data now for a university project - and my university's internet being incredibly slow (maxing at 30 KB/s at the moment - I'm looking for a way to do this through an internet cafe/another option.

Does anyone know a fast yet affordable (sub R1000) option to download said amount? Thanks in advance.

You should have gotten ADSL. Took only two weeks for me to get mine. On 4meg would take a day.

 

[Thole]

If it is for a legitimate university project you might be able to speak to your lecturer and get something sorted out with the university's ICT department, something like premium proxy access which is faster. The other alternative is to spend a few nights or weekends on campus, usually things should speed up after hours.
I'm not sure what you have at your uni but at UKZN we have a download scheduler. We queue up large files and they download overnight and we can download them from the uni server the next morning

It's research data which originates from a lab in Sweden which has been processed by an external party. I'm going to try and reach the IT-dept today, who knows.. it might work - thanks for the tip For local sites/mirrors the connection at university works perfect (2MB/s), international is a different story though. But who knows, maybe it does indeed work better after-hours. I'll check that out as well.

The internet cafe might be a good idea, go there explain your situation and find out if you can make a deal with them.
What files are they? This also makes a difference.

I went to an internet cafe yesterday, they were open to the suggestion however I got about 10 KB/s there, even worse than at the university. When I switch to my Vodacom 3G, I get about 250 KB/s steadily.. so it's not the server I'm downloading from but the actual connection/backbone being used.

 

[Thole]

You should have gotten ADSL. Took only two weeks for me to get mine. On 4meg would take a day.

Telkom estimated about 6-8 weeks for the install here. Seeing as I'm only here for 6 months, that seems a bit excessive.. especially because I spend half my time in the WC and the rest in the EC.