But the problem is, you get moved to another backbone, it works perfectly for a few hours, and then the performance degrades until you're left with more or less the same issues you were facing on the old backbone. I've never had an account on any backbone that worked well for more than a few days.
In my case, I first signed up with OpenWeb at the beginning of last year on 384 Gold. I was on the Vodacom Business backbone and never had an issue. When I upgraded to 4Mb Gold, still on Vodacom, the issues started. I'd get maybe 1Mbps if I was lucky, connectivity was erratic and Skype (the #1 thing I use constantly) went to Hell. I really didn't want to switch to IS because of horror stories and because in the few hours on occasion where I did use it to test, Skype was choppy. Eventually I was put on the Altech backbone which, for one entire month, was
perfect. Then that went to Hell and started doing exactly what the Vodacom one did.
I decided **** that and signed up with MWEB to see what it was like, and if I could get some stability. Frankly, it was worse. Where Skype was perfect (AT LAST)
EVERYTHING else went to Hell. I couldn't stream videos (even YouTube) any more without it buffering every five seconds. Steam downloads went at 100kB/s if I was lucky and even browsing was slow. I cancelled three days into it. Thought I'd basically wasted R1,000 (yay MWEB's one-month-in-advance billing). Fortunately one of my errant rants was spotted by Will@MWEB and he got me my refund so MEGA kudos to him.
I decided to stick with OpenWeb and went back to Altech. I still had issues, so around and around I went on basically every backbone until Keoma convinced me to try an IS account. I was hesitant at first but decided what the hey and caved.
At first I had issues, I realised that during the day everything was really, really slow and Steam downloaded at 250-odd kB/s and that bugged me since, I don't download things often but when I do, I really would prefer my line-speed. I e-mailed Keoma, he told me he'd try resetting my port. And, amazingly, everything was perfect.
I don't think I've nagged him for a port reset in three or so weeks but basically for me, when it slows to Hell, that's all it takes, unless there's a fault, and that generally resolves itself in three or so hours.
As loathe as I am to say it, I'm very, very happy with IS. As I said in an earlier post, video streaming during the day is shaped, not to the point of constantly buffering but it's noticeable. However, everything else is perfect so I
really am not going to complain.
My point is just that some backbones will work for you and others won't. Perhaps none will work for you, that's also possible. But the problem isn't at the ISP end, it's very much a Telkom one. Contention ratios on uncapped products aren't as ideal as capped products so unless you have the money for top-of-the-range uncapped (R1,500-R2,500) you're stuck with it, really.
I'm fortunate that I found a backbone that, at least for now, works perfectly fine for me since I'm guessing that I'm not in a highly contended area (for IS, at least) so, I guess that helps. I have no idea
Also, I don't know if you're on the standard package or the gold one but as far as uncapped in ZA goes, OpenWeb's gold accounts are as good as consumer-grade uncapped will be for a
long while yet. And I'm sure that if there were better options, OpenWeb would've afforded them to us, any ISP would've.