bacchus
Member
I dumped adsl this week for the Vsat product from Sentech. WOW!!
The difference between this product and other "satellite" based connections is the up stream that goes directly from your dish to the sat, not via modem. Didn't think I'd live to see such speeds. Normal bussiness hours I manage to pull between 300kbs and 600kbs. On Wednesday (Pubic Holiday) I downloaded at more then 2000 kbs. That is broadband. Although much more expensive then adsl, I will never look back. A shame though that this kind of bandwith is not available from servers in South Africa (Telkom!!!!) The fastest local site that I could get was Mweb's tucows portal which yielded a noch over 1000 kbs at times.
The huge bandwith is quite usefull for foreign sites, but South African sites are not able to let you make use of this bandwith. An Interesting fact is that I am at least 6 hops (traceroute) from any South African server where adsl was only 3 hops away.
Their is the 600 ms delay for coms with the sat, which you do notice with normal browsing Having said that, pages load much quicker then I am used to, especially so for sites with high graphic content.
I was issued with 5 Ip's (one for the dish gateway) that leave me with 4 usable Ip's. Hosting seem to be quite fast as well, although I'm having some problems with in-address reverse lookups for the Ip's but it will be sorted out in the near future.
The service agreement guarentees 256k in although I'm getting much more. This will propably change in the near future with more subscriptions. The product is mainly marketed towards bussinesses which will probably leave plenty bandwith during night time (I hope)
To summarise, A GREAT connection. At a stage I was paying almost 8OOO for a 64kb diginet line . I'm currently paying R3500 for a line 512kb line that can not be stolen buy affirmative shoppers. You do the maths.
The difference between this product and other "satellite" based connections is the up stream that goes directly from your dish to the sat, not via modem. Didn't think I'd live to see such speeds. Normal bussiness hours I manage to pull between 300kbs and 600kbs. On Wednesday (Pubic Holiday) I downloaded at more then 2000 kbs. That is broadband. Although much more expensive then adsl, I will never look back. A shame though that this kind of bandwith is not available from servers in South Africa (Telkom!!!!) The fastest local site that I could get was Mweb's tucows portal which yielded a noch over 1000 kbs at times.
The huge bandwith is quite usefull for foreign sites, but South African sites are not able to let you make use of this bandwith. An Interesting fact is that I am at least 6 hops (traceroute) from any South African server where adsl was only 3 hops away.
Their is the 600 ms delay for coms with the sat, which you do notice with normal browsing Having said that, pages load much quicker then I am used to, especially so for sites with high graphic content.
I was issued with 5 Ip's (one for the dish gateway) that leave me with 4 usable Ip's. Hosting seem to be quite fast as well, although I'm having some problems with in-address reverse lookups for the Ip's but it will be sorted out in the near future.
The service agreement guarentees 256k in although I'm getting much more. This will propably change in the near future with more subscriptions. The product is mainly marketed towards bussinesses which will probably leave plenty bandwith during night time (I hope)
To summarise, A GREAT connection. At a stage I was paying almost 8OOO for a 64kb diginet line . I'm currently paying R3500 for a line 512kb line that can not be stolen buy affirmative shoppers. You do the maths.
]
] Hope that they will take take notice of the dissapointing road that Telkom followed.
]