Is there any Affordable FTTH in Midrand?

J

Jackie Paper

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Mar 6, 2013
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Midrand
We run an SME, called Teracore, from home developing mobile apps for business, website development, and marketing support services for large brands. We have been running off an ADSL line for the past few years, but it has deteriorated to unusable now - it has been trashed. We current run the business off LTE iPad hotspot with Afrihost 20GB + 20GB data, which is awesome but not enough data, and when we start hitting 70% usage of thet 40GB, Afrihost start "fake capping us" and I need to restart the hotspot nearly every hour to get us back online - highly frustrating.

We need a better solution!

I had BitCo over here to try setup a rooftop dish uncapped wireless solution, but we are at the very bottom of Le Roux Street in Vorna Valley, #235, with a lot of trees around us - so they told us "sorry for you!". Is there any alternative? The fiber solution from BitCo is like R8236 to install, and then R8892 per month thereafter for a 5mbps line. Aslo, we do have fiber trenches right outside the property in the street.

Need an uncapped (or min 100GB per month) solution ASAP. Any ideas?
 
I still find Afrihost LTE to be most cost effective. I get 10mbps download (as well as upload insanely enough) and I pay about R1 100.00 for every 40GB. Just not uncapped, so got to watch that. Plus no contracts! It's not worth it in this game. The price drops to fast to sign a 24 month (or even 12 month) contract - that's for suckers!
 
znh said:
http://www.neotel.co.za/wps/portal/neotel/SmallMediumBusiness/Internet/NeoBroadbandFibre
Click to expand...

3 years ago, in a Eskomish move, Telkom decided to *downgrade* the New Road exchange's DSLAM from 10 to 4 Mbps. This while everyone else in the country were receiving upgrades (so if any of you received an upgrade from 4 to 10 Mbps, now you know where the DSLAM came from).

FTTH is therefore looking very attractive to me in Midrand, so I went to Neotel's website and clicked on "Check your coverage". Firefox refused to open the page, reporting that they are using weak SSL keys, so no go:

"An error occurred during a connection to covcheck.neotel.co.za:8443. SSL received a weak ephemeral Diffie-Hellman key in Server Key Exchange handshake message. (Error code: ssl_error_weak_server_ephemeral_dh_key)

The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because the authenticity of the received data could not be verified.
Please contact the website owners to inform them of this problem."

So I decided to use Chrome, and I actually got to the page where I had to enter my location. I typed in "Midrand", "Midrand, Johannesburg" and "Johannesburg" -- and the form simply returned "Not found". I kid you not:



I haven't ever been impressed with Neotel's offering, and this just affirmed why. The fact that they have failed to make any significant inroads in the market (despite having Telkom as a competitor) tells me that whatever limited success they had in gaining critical mass was only due to consumer anger. I have also never seen a Telco where the service is better than the marketing, so I decided that I would rather not bother them.

I then went to check out Greencom and left them a message: http://greencom.co.za/fibre-to-the-home/
and Posix also looks interesting, so I filled out their survey: https://ftth.posix.co.za/FTTH-Flyer.pdf

Let's see what happens.
 
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