Please could I have a decent and transparent ISP?

[who.is.michael]

I do not wish to sign-up for another “uncapped” account that does not resemble what has been advertised in any form; therefore it will be appreciated if ISP’s could clarify their offerings.

The following ISP’s - Afrihost, RSAWeb, OpenWeb, MWEB, Shaped, IS, Plugg, etc. “Uncapped” do not declare fully what is required to make an informed decision on their uncapped consumer / SME offerings:

1. Contention Ratios (International & Local)
2. Response times (Local – saix.net / Intl – google.ca/fr)
3. Fair Use Policy/Acceptable Use Policy (A copy of your FUP / AUP)
4. Throttling (When and under which circumstances will throttling be applied, if at all)
5. Shaping (When and on which ports will prioritisation be applied)
6. International bandwidth provisioning and redundancy (Seacom or Safe / Sat-3)
7. Rolling thresholds

I have been with Afrihost, RSAWeb, OpenWeb, MWEB, Shaped “Uncapped” offerings, etc. - all extremely disappointing, (especially MWEB - dishonest imo) as this is not uncapped, it is a 60 GB account throttled to death thereafter, which makes browsing impossible. (I accept others might be of a different opinion – before the MWEB fanboys attack me.)

It seems ISP's like Vodacom/Web Africa/Telkom is best so far; but this breaks the budget.

Can we not have transparent and honest ISP’s? Does all ISP’s need to follow IS’s dishonest approach?

Waiting for a decent and affordable (I am not a corporate entity that can afford to pay R 2 –R 3 K per month) “Uncapped” consumer / SME offering…

 

[iblade]

To be honest, I had the normal shaped uncapped account with M-Web and I could happily do everything except P2P after a certain amount. I have now switched over to the uncapped unshaped and I have never been happier, full speed on everything at all times...

 

[DarkStreet]

Waiting for a decent and affordable (I am not a corporate entity that can afford to pay R 2 –R 3 K per month) “Uncapped” consumer / SME offering…

I suggest then that you wait for the other cables (such as EASSy and WACS) to be active. The fact is, unless you are willing to pay business rates you will simply not get the uncapped offering you are expecting.

 

[Tanya35]

I suggest then that you wait for the other cables (such as EASSy and WACS) to be active. The fact is, unless you are willing to pay business rates you will simply not get the uncapped offering you are expecting.

I think that's partially his point. What to expect. There should be no surprises or mid-contract changes (ala Afrihost).

 

[DarkStreet]

I think that's partially his point. What to expect. There should be no surprises or mid-contract changes (ala Afrihost).

Maybe this so called Consumer Protection Act that comes into play later this year will force companies to be more transparent.

 

[Shayd]

Nobody and I mean nobody shares Contention ratio's, these are business secrets and are stored safely away pretty much worldwide.

 

[AVX]

.

Can we not have transparent and honest ISP’s? Does all ISP’s need to follow IS’s dishonest approach?

Well your in South Africa. Most of the providers will rather rob their customers blind then instead of providing a decent and affordable connection.

 

[DarkStreet]

Nobody and I mean nobody shares Contention ratio's, these are business secrets and are stored safely away pretty much worldwide.

They are hardly secrets, they don't publish it simply because there are too many factors involved in determining this value accurately.

 

[RSkeens]

Nobody and I mean nobody shares Contention ratio's, these are business secrets and are stored safely away pretty much worldwide.

You should be able to get estimate figures from a knowledgeable sales person quite easily.

Back to topic, you could try ordering from that WazzUp ISP I see some threads about, however I haven't used them.

 

[D34M0n7]

Well, I'm with MWEB and they are great, not sure why you think they were throttling you... I'm always going at my full line speed.

Why don't you try axxess' express uncapped accounts, a little on the expensive side and slow during the day or theres WA they are expensive too but they use saix so are usually quite reliable, no uncapped though >.>

The comments on waiting for the new cable are good too but its not international BW thats the biggest issue (not refering to seacom outages) when it comes to servicing the customer, have to remember that telkom charges an obscene amount of money for connections on their network and thus forces ISPs to oversell a greater amount of BW resulting in a loss of performance.

 

[GTAMCN]

Well, I'm with MWEB and they are great, not sure why you think they were throttling you... I'm always going at my full line speed.

yes +1 ... mee 2

 

[Chevron]

I do not wish to sign-up for another “uncapped” account that does not resemble what has been advertised in any form; therefore it will be appreciated if ISP’s could clarify their offerings.

The following ISP’s - Afrihost, RSAWeb, OpenWeb, MWEB, Shaped, IS, Plugg, etc. “Uncapped” do not declare fully what is required to make an informed decision on their uncapped consumer / SME offerings:

1. Contention Ratios (International & Local)
2. Response times (Local – saix.net / Intl – google.ca/fr)
3. Fair Use Policy/Acceptable Use Policy (A copy of your FUP / AUP)
4. Throttling (When and under which circumstances will throttling be applied, if at all)
5. Shaping (When and on which ports will prioritisation be applied)
6. International bandwidth provisioning and redundancy (Seacom or Safe / Sat-3)
7. Rolling thresholds

I have been with Afrihost, RSAWeb, OpenWeb, MWEB, Shaped “Uncapped” offerings, etc. - all extremely disappointing, (especially MWEB - dishonest imo) as this is not uncapped, it is a 60 GB account throttled to death thereafter, which makes browsing impossible. (I accept others might be of a different opinion – before the MWEB fanboys attack me.)

It seems ISP's like Vodacom/Web Africa/Telkom is best so far; but this breaks the budget.

Can we not have transparent and honest ISP’s? Does all ISP’s need to follow IS’s dishonest approach?

Waiting for a decent and affordable (I am not a corporate entity that can afford to pay R 2 –R 3 K per month) “Uncapped” consumer / SME offering…

Where you on Open wen standard or GOLD?

The GOLD uncapped sounds like the type of account you are looking for.

 

[Pada]

Well, I'm with MWEB and they are great, not sure why you think they were throttling you... I'm always going at my full line speed.

+1
I've never had issues with my Mweb 384kbps uncapped account, although I have to add that sometimes I can't establish connections to their news servers, where as with IS Local only I can always connect to the IS news server.
I'm not utilizing my line at 100% 24/7, but when I do use it, I get 38-41kB/s on everything I download.

Why don't you try axxess' express uncapped accounts, a little on the expensive side and slow during the day or theres WA they are expensive too but they use saix so are usually quite reliable, no uncapped though

+1
If you're a heavy downloaded, then you should rather leave Mweb and all these other cheap (R300pm) uncapped offers and go for Axxess Uncapped Express. Its slow during the day if you've exceeded the threshold, but its lightening fast after hours - ALWAYS.

What who.is.michael said in his post is so true and I wish that this kind of information was easily accessible, but in reality there are very few companies (including non ISP's) that are fully transparent.
I think someone can actually make quite a bit of money out of our current situation by running a paid web service that provide all these kind of details on a single website for all the big ISP's! A few years ago I've always checked out hellkom.co.za, but that site is utterly useless/out of date nowadays!

The problem with most of the ISP's are that they rely on IS, and they don't really know how IS is shaping/throttling the traffic and therefore they can't provide you with nice AUP's. This is where Tier 1 ISP's like Web Africa have an advantage where they don't have to rely on IS, which is why they're great with this Seacom connection being down. I was really impressed with how WebAfrica handled the registrations too, by checking up on your ID number via telephone

I also appreciate the updates coming via E-mail from OpenWeb. Keoma Wright is always trying to be as objective as possible and not just trying to point the finger at Seacom, like everyone else does.

 

[who.is.michael]

...those ISP's mentioned are not an option, (as clearly stated) alternatives please.

(Great for you if you are a fanboy; let's just stick to the reality and leave emotions out of the discussion.) - with respect.

@Qwikslver - It is a last alternative, thanks. (have tested account)
@RSkeens - Tx, investigating. seem only 512?

 

[RSkeens]

@RSkeens - Tx, investigating. seem only 512?

I am not sure. I remember reading a post somewhere that you must call / contact them to upgrade the account to a higher speed.

 

[who.is.michael]

TX

 

[w1z4rd]

Ive dropped IS as a provider, they are simply too dishonest for me.

 

[who.is.michael]

Ive dropped IS as a provider, they are simply too dishonest for me.

...hopefully more will take your example and vote with their wallet.

 

[Tharaxis]

(Great for you if you are a fanboy; let's just stick to the reality and leave emotions out of the discussion.) - with respect.

Depends on what reality you're speaking about here, your own or the "real" reality.

No doubt you've had a bad experience with M-Web, and given their recent issues it's definitely not *entirely* unfounded. However, to call them (or many of the other companies you referred to) as "dishonest" or "liars" is just disingenuous.

The reason that providing you with an "alternative" ISP that meets your criteria is so difficult is because... well... they ALL work that way in one way or another. Not spilling the beans on every detail of how they run their business or provide their services is not dishonesty, it's how large companies work. Especially where certain bits of information are what differentiate competitors.

Company A doesn't want Company B knowing how they do things, because if Company A is "better" than Company B they don't want Company B copying what they do. They have a very real and very legitimate reason for holding back on certain information... whether you like it or not, and if you were in their position you would be doing exactly the same thing.

So lets run through the list, shall we:

1) Contention ratios:

Afaik Telkom/SAIX does provide this information (though that might just be at the exchanges), and it would make sense that most ISP's try to meet these as a minimum. However this number is useless as eg. a 50:1 contention ratio is worse on 100mbits than it is on 1gbit. Without any real knowledge of the load on the network, a contention ratio won't help you discern the "true" day to day performance, only the potential minimum, which may or may never be reached.

2) Response times:

This isn't really helpful once you start accessing things outside your ISP's network since your ISP has no control once it leaves their network.

3) Fair Use Policy/Acceptable Use Policy:

Not sure what you mean here, most (if not all) of the ISP's you mentioned *do* provide AUP's, how are they lacking?

4) Throttling:

If throttling occurs, it should definitely be displayed prominently. However something tells me you would never believe those that don't have throttling anyway.

5) Shaping:

This is often vaguely provided ("We de-prioritise P2P and other non-essential traffic"). ISP's are likely to *never* give out this information in detail for competitive reasons.

6) International bandwidth provisioning and redundancy:

If you're looking for Mbits/s or GBits/s you won't get it, and likely never will. Many ISP's will *never* give out this information for competitive reasons. However indicating that redundancy is in place and how making use of it would affect service performance would be helpful.

7) Rolling thresholds:

This is really just an extension of point 4, and I agree, if there are thresholds they should be provided and displayed prominently.

This problem also filters down to the smaller ISP's whose AUP's and the like are completely dependent on those of their Tier-1 providers (SAIX, IS, M-Web, Web Africa, Cybersmart). If you don't like one of those Tier-1 guys, it's unlikely you're going to like any ISP in one way or another.

 

[who.is.michael]

@ Tharaxis - I respect your opinion, however it is not mine. Please try to positively contribute to this thread with a suggestion of an ISP.