Sign up with GoogleWhile I don't condone Sentech's strong-arm tactics against sentechsucks.co.za and mywirelesssucks.co.za I was blissfully unaware of the whole brouhaha until I read the article in the Sunday Times (This Sunday past).
I’ve been completely happy with the performance of my 128k connection – even though Sentech had me fuming over contractual issues which delayed delivery of my modem by more than six weeks. When it finally arrived it turned out to be a USB device and not the PCMCIA I ordered – for which I’m patiently waiting to this day.
After about 5 weeks the modem packed up (wouldn’t stay turned on for more than a minute), but I got that replaced on the same day – less than eight hours down-time!
After Sunday’s article I wondered whether I missed something, and started looking around for software that could create logs and graphs of network traffic. On Monday I installed a package called MRTG (http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/mrtg/) - which I finally got working by Wednesday. (I’m not stupid, just busy.)
I know that it’s early days yet, I’ve only been logging data for two days, but the results seem nowhere near as grim as the picture that’s painted in this, and other forums. Yes, the throughput drops during peak hours (9-5): yesterday (Thursday) it dropped below 30kbps on three separate occasions – each lasting less than half an hour. How often do you even peak at 30kbps using a 56k modem with *elkom?!
Further, when I correlate the graphs of these ‘dips’ with the traffic data from other devices on my network, it seems that at least some of the ‘dips’ were caused not by the Sentech IPWireless link but by a lack of data requests from my side.
Today looks much better than yesterday. The link has not yet (it is noon now), dropped below 60 kbps (once, for all of 15 minutes). From the graph, I would say that the link has been doing better than 100kbps for 8 of the last 12 hours.
OK, so I’ve been logging network throughput at 5 minute intervals for the past two days, but what about before that? Since installing the Sentech modem sometime in late March I’ve regularly been doing downloads of about 1GB per day. That’s better than 75% of capacity – not even counting overhead!
In conclusion I would like to say that, yes, Sentech’s sales- and technical support mostly sucks most of the time (and sometimes they surprise you); but in my experience this is typical of all such services everywhere. Generally it seems that the bigger the company, the worse the service. (My 11-month ordeal with our beloved communications monopoly is a whole other story.)
I’m not married to Sentech. This is not an add. If their service goes south, so will my opinion of them. I’ll also have the logs to prove it...
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Monad
128k
tower 22 – Kingsley Centre – 19%
standard antenna - on the coffee table most of the time
I’ve been completely happy with the performance of my 128k connection – even though Sentech had me fuming over contractual issues which delayed delivery of my modem by more than six weeks. When it finally arrived it turned out to be a USB device and not the PCMCIA I ordered – for which I’m patiently waiting to this day.
After about 5 weeks the modem packed up (wouldn’t stay turned on for more than a minute), but I got that replaced on the same day – less than eight hours down-time!
After Sunday’s article I wondered whether I missed something, and started looking around for software that could create logs and graphs of network traffic. On Monday I installed a package called MRTG (http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/mrtg/) - which I finally got working by Wednesday. (I’m not stupid, just busy.)
I know that it’s early days yet, I’ve only been logging data for two days, but the results seem nowhere near as grim as the picture that’s painted in this, and other forums. Yes, the throughput drops during peak hours (9-5): yesterday (Thursday) it dropped below 30kbps on three separate occasions – each lasting less than half an hour. How often do you even peak at 30kbps using a 56k modem with *elkom?!
Further, when I correlate the graphs of these ‘dips’ with the traffic data from other devices on my network, it seems that at least some of the ‘dips’ were caused not by the Sentech IPWireless link but by a lack of data requests from my side.
Today looks much better than yesterday. The link has not yet (it is noon now), dropped below 60 kbps (once, for all of 15 minutes). From the graph, I would say that the link has been doing better than 100kbps for 8 of the last 12 hours.
OK, so I’ve been logging network throughput at 5 minute intervals for the past two days, but what about before that? Since installing the Sentech modem sometime in late March I’ve regularly been doing downloads of about 1GB per day. That’s better than 75% of capacity – not even counting overhead!
In conclusion I would like to say that, yes, Sentech’s sales- and technical support mostly sucks most of the time (and sometimes they surprise you); but in my experience this is typical of all such services everywhere. Generally it seems that the bigger the company, the worse the service. (My 11-month ordeal with our beloved communications monopoly is a whole other story.)
I’m not married to Sentech. This is not an add. If their service goes south, so will my opinion of them. I’ll also have the logs to prove it...
--
Monad
128k
tower 22 – Kingsley Centre – 19%
standard antenna - on the coffee table most of the time
) TREMENDOUSLY!
