MTN For i-net

[Methias]

Okay,

Due to my utter contempt for telkom I no longer use the land line (I haven't for the last year and 7 months) for voice calls. I now want to try expand my anti telkom feelings towards the inet and connect via other means. I can't use any of the wireless packages, as none seem to be able to get signal where I stay . ADSL is an opion but that means paying money to telkom, which I want to avoid as much as possible. I currently sit with a 56k modem and no call more special R9.60 call (aka R7 call...) Would the MTN data services be a viable option to use from a desktop machine, I do the occasional download, browsing, email, and most importantly online gaming (mostly guildwars and CS:Source).

Costs, latencies, service quality? Please can anyone help me decide what to do.

 

[Goobie]

I live on a farm and uses GPRS-MTN via a USB bluetooth dongle on my desktop. At best I get dial-up speeds, sometimes much slower. Apparently network congestion and distance from the tower is something to consider. Otherwise, it is fine for email. Too expensive for downloads IMO.

 

[Methias]

I stay in the westvill area, Im pretty sure there is a tower close to me (within a km), so distance to the tower shouldn't be a problem.

 

[Alacrity]

Since MTN launched their broadband services and reduced there tariffs I cancelled my R85/pm dial-up and spend that money on the 100MB bundle and that is my Internet for 2 months now.

And I’m happy!

The speed is also good! Much better than Telkom!

I do not use it for gaming but you might have a problem. I don’t know how much data is being sent and received during a gaming session but that could be more than what you expect!

 

[ajax]

If you live near an EDGE tower and you have an EDGE phone or modem you can get more than 100 kbps average.
But I don't think 3G/EDGE/GPRS is an option for online gaming, especially those that require low pings. I get pings around 1 second whether its local or international.

I think MTNbb is the best person to answer, but from what I've read here the high pings are because the connection is not constantly active. As soon as data stops flowing it disconnects although the phone still shows that it is "connected". When data is requested again the phone/modem sends a request and a new time slot is allocated thru which data is sent/received.

 

[MTNBroadband]

Okay,

Due to my utter contempt for telkom I no longer use the land line (I haven't for the last year and 7 months) for voice calls. I now want to try expand my anti telkom feelings towards the inet and connect via other means. I can't use any of the wireless packages, as none seem to be able to get signal where I stay . ADSL is an opion but that means paying money to telkom, which I want to avoid as much as possible. I currently sit with a 56k modem and no call more special R9.60 call (aka R7 call...) Would the MTN data services be a viable option to use from a desktop machine, I do the occasional download, browsing, email, and most importantly online gaming (mostly guildwars and CS:Source).

Costs, latencies, service quality? Please can anyone help me decide what to do.

To add to what the others have said the service is effective for browsing and most e-mails. Big downloads are not great (eg 1-2 megabytes is fine but 10 or more might be taxing). I know CS and it will probably not work well as the latencies are too long to be competitive. Shooting requires around 100ms and EDGE won't come down this much in the near future.