Let me add some additional insight:
We host multiple servers in their Midrand datacenter and we also have an 8Mbit Neotel WiMAX link to our offices to serve as a backup to our Telkom 100Mbit fibre link. The WiMAX links works well and there is technically no issues with the technology.
On the datacenter side, things are much much worse. Their billing system is in a shambles and we get billed for different products each month. Sometimes half-cabinets, sometimes full cabinets, sometimes nothing with a surprise bill for the next month. The data billing for the datacenter-hosted servers is insanely expensive (we're being billing R950/month for every 50GB that we use).
Once you become a Neotel client, you are assigned an account manager. However, in the past 7 years that we've been with Neotel, we've had like 10 account managers. So each time you spend half a day getting them up to speed on your issues and before you know it they've left the company and you get a fresh newbie to try and come sort out the billing mess.
They've been promising IPv6 connectivity for years, but still their billing system is unable to accommodate it. They appear to have a number of routing issues as well - mostly due to the fact that they selectively peer at the INXes. If you report a routing issue, they fix only that one issue instead of the underlying bigger problem, leading to multiple reports and cherry-picked routing solutions.
We require direct links to the MNOs and they've also been promising this for years, but every time we move into implementation phase, things grind to a halt and the links (for some political reason?) cannot be installed.
If I was looking for a new hosting location I would go for Hetzner. Their systems look awesome and their service, from what I understand, is seriously good.
As it stands, I am seriously considering fork-lifting our entire operation at Neotel and plonking it down at Hetzner. It will be painful (a huge amount of VPN peers need to be updated - the rest can be done with DNS), but the pain of dealing with Neotel's account managers is becoming more than the pain of moving to a new hosting center.
I'm holding out just a few more months to see if the Liquid Telecom buyout makes any difference (I doubt it will, but you never know).
--deckert
