Neotel POOR SERVICE

[Firecorp]

I have re-located from an ADSL area to an area where there is no ADSL. The complex was built without making provision for telephone lines.

I was forced to go wireless and I opted for Neotel.

I at first during April signed a contract for the 36 months 4m R 699.00 per month. It was not approved. I went to see them again with a different sales person and the Neotel was installed.

I never signed another contract, but I have the service. During June I was down for a week and I got credited for the week.

Now on 13.07.2016 It went down again and only came on again after the techies came out on 18.07.2016 in other words no internet for 6 days including the weekend.

Now since the internet is on again I am getting very slow speeds as follow: -



I suspect due to all my complaints I am being throttled.

I am in discussion with some Senior managers, but they responded by saying " No worries. This service is a contended service with a contention ration of 25:1. I.e. you share bandwidth with other customers therefore 4 Mbps is not guaranteed. As and when the base station gets busy, these speeds will fluctuate depending on other users’ usage."

Any advice?

 

[SideWinder]

Firecorp,

Please login to your outdoor router and take a snapshot of your signal strength etc. That should give you an idea of whether the installation was done properly. I've heard of antennas not been "calibrated" correctly, either installer was in a hurry, or doesn't care. You can the re-orientate your antenna and test again. The better your RSRP,RSRQ & RSSI (i.e. less dB's), the better.

 

[SideWinder]

BTW, you are correct, you are being throttled!

Let's first look at your upload. On the 4M package, your throttle speed = 1/3 of your upload speed. Thus 4/3 = 1.33 Mbps, which you seem to be getting. So seems you are being throttled correctly.

Now for Download. Your throttle speed should be 4 Mbps. Clearly your setup is struggling to get there. There can only be 2 explanations for this.

1) You do not have enough signal to sustain 4 Mbps (I recon you need at least RSRP of >-100 dBm (once again , smaller numbers are better), but the results may vary, depending on what your RSRQ is reporting (This should be better than -10 dB). The more "cluttered" your line of sight between you and the tower is, the worse your Quality of your signal will be. So, while you are on the roof, look over your antenna in the direction it is pointing towards the horizon. If you see lots of trees, buildings etc. in the way, it may be why your Q is bad.

and 2) the tower you are connecting to, is congested. Then you can as a last resort, "scan" (rotate) your antenna through a full 360 deg, just to check for other towers. You can observe which tower you are connecting to by looking at the CELL ID on the same page as the signal strength indicators. I rather take a signal from a tower that is further way, but with better LOS(Line of Sight) (thus RSRQ's), then a signal from the nearest tower with lots of clutter.

Hope this helps!

 

[Firecorp]

Thank you for the detailed technical info. I will try it.

 

[N3otel2012]

Good Afternoon,

We believe our team discovered that torrents were running whilst speed tests were performed. We believe your query has been resolved and your speeds are back to normal.

Kind Regards,
The Neotel team

 

[Firecorp]

Yes that is correct it has been resolved, but I need to correct that your team did not discover that I was running a torrent.

They said that somebody has connected to my wireless. That is all they could see. I fact in our discussion and trial and error we (I and the Neotel Person) discovered that a torrent was running.

As I said the slow speed problem is resolved although there is still some other issues which need to be resolved.