Panorama/Sonnendal: How to get fibre when not on anyone's fibre coverage map?

[Johand]

Bastid! Vumatel says they are going live at end of month, but still haven't been contacted here in Panorama even after doing a pre-order

PS - what you mean by better than Plattekloof?

Phone them and schedule an appointment - that is what I did when the area went live and they haven't contacted me (I think they work down some list and you can jump the queue if you phone). My fibre was up and running a week after I phoned.

Plattekloof has OpenServe and OpenServe runs through IPConnect which means bandwidth is expensive - e.g. Cool Ideas have 100 Mbps for R1119/R1219 on Vumatel or R1499 on OpenServe. And of course theoretically you can order a 1Gbps on Vumatel... And on OpenServe you are dependent on Telkom ...

 

[Splinter]

Phone them and schedule an appointment - that is what I did when the area went live and they haven't contacted me (I think they work down some list and you can jump the queue if you phone). My fibre was up and running a week after I phoned.

Plattekloof has OpenServe and OpenServe runs through IPConnect which means bandwidth is expensive - e.g. Cool Ideas have 100 Mbps for R1119/R1219 on Vumatel or R1499 on OpenServe. And of course theoretically you can order a 1Gbps on Vumatel... And on OpenServe you are dependent on Telkom ...

Ok thanks. I have been emailing the team (funnily enough, they still call themselves Fiberhoods or some such). They keep on telling me they still planned to go live at "end of month".

Got my new ASUS RT-AC86U router sitting here in an unopened package; plus new Cat 6 cables.

 

[Splinter]

Okay...have got an appointment for next week for Vumatel to connect into my house . Whoo hoo!

 

[DeatheCore]

Okay...have got an appointment for next week for Vumatel to connect into my house . Whoo hoo!

Great stuff! Let us know how it goes.

They (Nano Fibre) came to install my fibre in Sonnendal on the 29th of May but ended up not completing the install due to the line not being patched before-hand or something. So on the 31st a Vuma technician came through and worked his magic, although he ran into an issue with my primary line, where apparently the error margin was way too high to carry a stable signal (he mentioned -20, I'm assuming he was talking about an attenuation value of -20dB) and their target is below -12.

With a quick visit to the POP and changing the connector at my boundary wall I was switched over to the secondary line and up and running within 30 minutes and the "error margin" was around -9! Hoorah! Still not sure how this value affects packet loss/latency/sustained throughput but so far so good.

I was actually quite surprised how rough the installers were handling the actual fibre, one would probably have mistaken them for a couple of cowboys trying to lasso a horse. I was frantically running around trying to make sure it didn't kink too badly!

Ended up going 100/100 with Cool Ideas, early, but happy days