iburst makes the wake-up call for Sentech !

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Gooku

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After comparing the latest offering from WBS, there is No doubt that Sentech will need to restructure its product line to compete or fade away ! (at the moment iburst is 10 times better than mywireless128 !)

Mywireless128 is performing like "Mywireless64or32" ..

Sentech must provide what the consumer paid for or rename Mywireless 128 to "Mywireless64or32"
failing to do that will mislead the consumer !and be prepared for mass action !(cancellation !)
 
Mywireless 128/256/512 were developed when there was only telkom's adsl-512 as main rival.at the time it was sound competition.But Telkom has since answered with homeADSL 384.Sentech has not respond to this new threat !
Now i-go-everywhere &3 G are even more formidsble as competition! Sentech has to box itself out of the corner !
 
I think the major problem now is the cost and availability of international bandwidth which is still mostly controlled by Telkom.

Satellite bandwidth might be the only Messiah in sight,Telkom will not easily lower wholesale bandwidth price.
Can any Satellite Guru point out what satellites are readily available to provide SA international bandwidth ?
 
I am all for competition, and also for sentech giving us a better deal, but in all fairness, the system is stable, and if you compare it to iburst based on what I have been reading on this forum then sentech are clearly a winner. I cannot think when I was last disconnected.

As for download speeds (locally and some international) are up in the 14KB/sec range for a 128 package. The balance of the international download speeds (for large files) are somewhere around the low 5.5KB/sec (this is where we are being screwed), and for files less than 500K they are up in the 40KB/sec range.

For browsing, the speeds are also up in the 40KB/sec range. Sure, maybe with cached sites, but who cares.

I really only have one gripe and that is I trade with this service and sometimes my trades don't get through. The reason as I understand it is that if there is an error on a trade, it only sends it once and does not resend it. So I need a service with zero packet loss. Last I looked, it was around the 4% range, so I have a 4% chance that a trade won't go through.

Anyway, have you noticed how quite the mywireless forum is compared to the other forums. Either they are all happy, or all have given up and accepted what they are getting, or all have left mywireless and moved to ADSL or iburst, or all are on holiday.
 
ic you have misinterpreted me.

I mean wholesale satellite international bandwidth,from satellite to Sentech,WBS,MTN,SNO...........
 
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The point is We need International bandwidth which Telkom does not have control on it.Latency may not compare to submarine cable,It is not an ideal replacement for some applications(eg. games) ,need fast latency.but for most of us it will do.
most importantly it creates competition on the cost of international bandwidth. Satellite vs cable (on wholesale level).
 
Robone said:
<snip>... and for files less than 500K they are up in the 40KB/sec range.

For browsing, the speeds are also up in the 40KB/sec range. Sure, maybe with cached sites, but who cares.
Click to expand...

Robone,

Is this 40KB/s figure as reported by your download manager (like Firefox Download screen), or is it graphed by a bandwidth manager/firewall?

If Sentech is allowing bursting, it is a huge breakthrough, but why only for the first 500KB?
 
I think right now Vodacom 3g is laughable. 1Gb for R600.00 what a joke.
iBurst at R700.00 (450.00) with a 3Gb cap another joke and I cant wait to see what happens when they do open to public properly.
Telkom (price???) who cares I cant get them.

Sentech R650.00 10GB cap and damn fine local speeds and fast browsing speeds and so far my monthly tally is 6.2GB.

Sentech have improved and right now the best of a bad bunch. I think all the proces of all the competitors should drop to about R400.00 The goverment should make Telkom drop their prices on International Bandwidth to support this.

But hey... I forgot... sorry its late and to all of you have a great new years.
 
arf9999.............I use either getright or the firefox download screen to tell me. What I find if I download small files through firefox, say 100k-200k, by the time I have clicked download, its on my PC. I do however seem to get better downloads with firefox than with getright. I think they may have put a limiter on the getright downloads:)
 
ic said:
Robone, it is good that MW appears stable right now, but to be realistic: how long was it unstable for (measured in days) vs how long it has been stable (in days)?

What I am saying is this:
  • has enough of a stable patch (i.e. 0 techie tweaking) passed for MW to be considered a viable option?
  • has the coverage improved where MW basestations/towers already exist?
  • has the orcdesk been upgraded to a helpdesk that doesn't lie to its customers & try hooking them into upgrading from 128 to 256 or 512 on the pretense of getting a better service?
  • I can understand that you need something reliable for trading, one of my friends does that, but he had ADSL512 (now downgraded to HomeDSL384), IMO, both MW & iBurst are not stable enough (yet) for widespread realtime reliability dependent applications, but if you have it going then great.
Click to expand...

Responding to your points:
1. I find the service, now, very stable.
2. The coverage doesn't concern me as I do not need a mobile unit. Nice to have but not required. As to why I don't get ADSL. Telephone line goes down at least a few times a year and takes from a few days to a week to get going again.
3. Haven't had a need to phone the ORC desk for a long time. Say 3 months, and when I did phone they were helpfull
4. This is one area that I seem to have a problem as mentioned previously, but for me to catch that 4% packet loss should only happen say 4% of the time, but sods law makes it happen probably 10% of the time.
 
Robone,

I think you maybe are being fooled by Firefox to an extent. Firefox seems to "pre-fetch" downloads. From the time you click on the link to download, and before you confirm how you would like to save the link, Firefox seems to start the download in the background. Thus when you "start" it has already downloaded a portion of the file....hence the artificially high throughput at the beginning of a download (I get this on ADSL as well, but when I check my bw graph, there is no spike). This could explain why only the beginning a a file or a small file seems fast.
 
Okay, that's interesting. Wonder how it knows which file I am going to download, when there are a number of files. Must have a built in fuzzy logic:)

Where is the setting on Firefox? so I can see how it operates.
 
arf9999 said:
Robone,

I think you maybe are being fooled by Firefox to an extent. Firefox seems to "pre-fetch" downloads. From the time you click on the link to download, and before you confirm how you would like to save the link, Firefox seems to start the download in the background. Thus when you "start" it has already downloaded a portion of the file....hence the artificially high throughput at the beginning of a download (I get this on ADSL as well, but when I check my bw graph, there is no spike). This could explain why only the beginning a a file or a small file seems fast.
Click to expand...

Nope, it definately the case. Even a wget download from intl sites will start off at 50KB/s for the first 500KB, then (on my 256K package) drop to 8KB/s solid.
 
kinda sorta OT but seeing as speeding up Firefox HAS been mentioned, I stumbled across the following--:

1.Type "about:config" into the address bar and hit return. Scroll down and look for the following entries:

network.http.pipelining network.http.proxy.pipelining network.http.pipelining.maxrequests

Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.

2. Alter the entries as follows:

Set "network.http.pipelining" to "true"

Set "network.http.proxy.pipelining" to "true"

Set "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once.

3. Lastly right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it "nglayout.initialpaint.delay" and set its value to "0". This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives.

If you're using a broadband connection you'll load pages MUCH faster now!

:-- how about y'all mod yr copies and see if it does, in fact, speed things up? Heh, hope this helps (muddy!) the situation... *efg*
 
nonroker said:
Nope, it definately the case. Even a wget download from intl sites will start off at 50KB/s for the first 500KB, then (on my 256K package) drop to 8KB/s solid.
Click to expand...

I fail to see why Sentech does this. 50KB/s is effectively the speed that you would expect to get on a 512K package, why allow all on MyWi to browse at the same speed (cos there are few web pages that are bigger than 500K), but then limit the speed of downloads. It just makes no sense to me. Surely it would be better to give everyone the speed that they've paid for *all* the time?

Just my ex-Sentech 2 cents.

PS. If you use a download manager like leechget and maximise the number of threads so that each thread is downloading less than 500KB, can you max out the connection all the time?
 
bdt...I have made the changes as suggested and now I am waiting....... waiting....... waiting........ for the speed to increase:)

No seriously, I have made the changes and will report back in a few days.

Now tell me where is the tweak for the downloading portion so that the download speeds stay at the high end.

arf9999 ...... I will download leechget now and try.
 
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