iBurst & Load Shedding

Grimspoon

Grimspoon

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Hi Guys,

The past few weeks have been pretty frustrating with dam load shedding at work and home etc etc. But every night i get home i can do a couple of hours on the net and then bang my iBurst drops, and is down for what can be hours. Every time i phone iBurst its load shedding that is to blame. This will / is going to KILL iBurst im sure. Im sure people would rather move to ADSL and know that when the load is shed they still have a connection.

How does load shedding affect ADSL? Does it drop when telkom is load shed?

I have to say i think i am going to can my iBurst and go for ADSL rather. Not only the load shedding but in general i am a bit tired of the up and down performance in general with iBurst.

Anyone else share in my frustrations?

Thanks

Grim
 
iBurst was also off by us last night 9:00 to 10:30. One would assume that this company would invest in backup power. But if you look at this forum it is obvious that they consider their customers as necessary nuisances.
 
Well when i spoke to the service support last night i was told that they do have generators on their base stations, but they keep getting stolen. . . What use it that though? Surely a company of iBursts magnitude needs to make a plan and ensure that if an area is load shed they can still provide a service? I only use my iBurst at night, and most nights it doesn’t work. . . so the obvious conclusion is what am i paying for?
 
What do you guys think of the new Telkom do broadband offers?

R258 for a 384kb line + 2gb data (20gb local)

R554 for a 4mb line + 3gb data (30gb local)

This obviously excludes line rental, which i have no idea how much that is. Plus you need to sign a 24month contract to get the wifi modem free....else it’s about R1000.

Both seem like pretty good deals to me. . .


Grim
 
Imaginet has a new fibre offering... give them a call... and you'll be surprised what you can get ;)
 
Load shedding - brownouts

For those in the Cape Town area concerned about load shedding “brownouts”, I've received the response below from the Cape Town iBurst Management:

Q

"Could you please advise which of the following towers will remain active during a “brownout” and for how long and if throughput would be affected?

Gardens, Sea Point, Cape Town CBD, Pinelands, Plumstead, Kenilworth, Century City, Airport."


A

"All our base stations have battery backup and this can power the base station for between 3 and 3.5 hours.

We monitor the sites during the load shedding periods and thus far all sites have operated correctly without disruption.

If we are aware of an extended power outage due to council maintenance, we have back up generators in place.

This contingency is however not possible on all sites due to noise and access constraints."
 
Last edited:
Load shedding - the realities

When you consider the PRACTICALITIES of iBurst's situation, you HAVE to have some sympathy. Firstly, let's look at costs. UPS/GENERATORS/Inverters that can power something like a basestation are going to cost a FORTUNE - I estimate between R20k and R50k each! When you consider that they have something like 200 base stations - if 80% of these need a UPS, and they cost R30K each, that is R4.8million. If the average user is paying R450 per month, then about 18% of their gross income in a month is going to pay that off. How would your business cope with paying about a fifth of it's gross income to pay off a cost that was not foreseen? If you run your own business you know you would be in k%k if you had to spend 1 fifth of gross income on something like that. When you add in complexities like installing, maintaining etc these devices, you quickly start to see that power outages are a MAJOR MAJOR cash drain.

Then there is the matter of landlords. Many towers are on top of buildings etc, and when you start to put backup power, particularly generators, on the roof, with petrol and other hazardous substances, landlords/tenants start to make a fuss. Would you want to live under a generator and a 50l can of petrol?! Probably not. So I guess iBurst has to manually carry a generator to a tower if/when they go off in some cases. So power goes out, guys get in cars and drive to basestations where they know that power will only last for 30mins for example. They then lug that generator up 15 flights of stairs, start it and the rush off to the next one. When power comes back on, remove all those generators again! What a logistical nightmare. Oh and by the way, this is whilst all the traffic lights are off! Lovely!

It is not just iBurst, the cellular providers are in a similar boat. Vodacom has had several outages due to load shedding and I am sure the others are the same. Even the cellular guys who are printing money (they have been through the initial phase that iBurst is still in where income was low and expenditure high whilst installing infrastructure) are struggling.

Before all the wise guys start asking if I work for iBurst, the answer is no - we sell their services. And I don't worship everything iBurst does but sometimes it feels like guys take shots without thinking the whole thing through. I guess I have seen and heard some of the hassles that this kind of thing introduces and I have sympathy. The image painted is that there are a bunch of fat cats sitting their grinning like Cheshire cats whilst customers suffer just isn't true. They are doing their best, and whilst I will be the first to agree that they can certainly improve, particularly in some areas, you have to also grant that this load shedding is messing businesses up something bad.
 
Regardless of the "realities" people are going to go for the company that provides them with the best service, at the moment that's clearly not iBurst.
 
So, "They are doing their best", well it's not good enough and they should employ people who can do things right in the first place, theres been no improvement within that company ever since they went public with this system a few years back, all thats happened is that they are going backwards and have managed to pee off and lose quite a few customers in the process.

I have no sympathy for that useless company, hopefully in the near future all their UPS batteries fail at the same time during the extended power blackouts.:rolleyes:
 
Syndyre said:
Regardless of the "realities" people are going to go for the company that provides them with the best service, at the moment that's clearly not iBurst.
Click to expand...
So which loadshedding proof network would you suggest?
 
Connection said:
They are doing their best, and whilst I will be the first to agree that they can certainly improve, particularly in some areas, you have to also grant that this load shedding is messing businesses up something bad.
Click to expand...

Funny though that they have no problem to bill me for the period when they did not provide a service.

In fact they are actually scoring as they don’t provide a service (no bandwidth usage) and don’t pay electricity for the period (reduced costs) but still receive the same income.
 
The ADSL network is also havign problems with load shedding. My mother has a lot of load sheding and when she does have power her line is down because the network is down. She gets a connection about 1/3 of the time.
Telkom just tell her to wait and she cant get iBurst in her area.

I have iBurst and it dc's every 5 mins, my signal strength is allways 4 or 5. But I don't have load shedding.. so I shouldn't complain.
 
What Nonsense

I’ve not had any connectivity issue via the iBurst Gardens tower, due to brownouts...

However the argument Connection puts forth as “the reality” makes very little sense – best to get the facts before making such unsubstantiated claims on this forum, can be my only advice.

Regards

M
 
UPS and digital generator on my side so no problems with my ADSL connection or UPS batteries going flat.:D
 
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