Pros and Cons - ISP's

Icemanbrfc

Icemanbrfc

Honorary Master
Joined
Jul 28, 2011
Messages
21,644
Reaction score
4,711
Location
Cape Town
Ive read quite a bit of posts, with people indicating that they going to leave Afrihost, and some advising others to do the the same and join another ISP.

Having read through the Vox thread, as well as the others, there are alot of moaning as well. Maybe less than some in terms of issues, but still, there are issues at some point, which needs to be attended to and resolved.
Many people are getting good results off the AH network, others not so much, Likewise for Vox and CW. Some wanting to move between ISP's and so it goes.

My question is this, unless one specific ISP is going to have no issues, no down time, no nothing, how do you seperate them from each other. what are each ones pros and cons, and why are you going to stay or why do you feel the need to move to somebody else.

for what its worth, im with Telkom, and have a small capped account with Afrihost, where i have had no issues thus far.

It would be good if the admins could add a poll to this thread, so we can see where people are leaning to, but importantly why are they leaning towards that ISP.
 
Icemanbrfc said:
Ive read quite a bit of posts, with people indicating that they going to leave Afrihost, and some advising others to do the the same and join another ISP.

Having read through the Vox thread, as well as the others, there are alot of moaning as well. Maybe less than some in terms of issues, but still, there are issues at some point, which needs to be attended to and resolved.
Many people are getting good results off the AH network, others not so much, Likewise for Vox and CW. Some wanting to move between ISP's and so it goes.

My question is this, unless one specific ISP is going to have no issues, no down time, no nothing, how do you seperate them from each other. what are each ones pros and cons, and why are you going to stay or why do you feel the need to move to somebody else.

for what its worth, im with Telkom, and have a small capped account with Afrihost, where i have had no issues thus far.

It would be good if the admins could add a poll to this thread, so we can see where people are leaning to, but importantly why are they leaning towards that ISP.
Click to expand...

In my time with Afrihost it had a few days of good line and the rest was shyte.
Vox has a few customers with problems but a very large majority with zero problems.
Personally I have been with vox for over 2 years now and have only had very minor hiccups when compared to the previous isps I've been with.
 
Electric said:
In my time with Afrihost it had a few days of good line and the rest was shyte.
Vox has a few customers with problems but a very large majority with zero problems.
Personally I have been with vox for over 2 years now and have only had very minor hiccups when compared to the previous isps I've been with.
Click to expand...

fair point there, it was just something i was thinking about. For some, things are better than what others are experiencing, due to various factors, which may be out of the control of an ISP.

as an aside, if Telkom manages your line, and there are issues on the Telkom side, do you generally hold the ISP accountable(if not Telkom on the data portion), if you are not aware that its a Telkom issue?
 
I think in the case of Afrihost is that their network was the best some years ago. They then changed some things and people couldn't use the internet as they were before these changes.

This pissed off a lot of IT people who started raging against Afrihost.

I feel this way about Mweb because many many years back I used to be able to download an unlimited amount of data unthrottled, they then changed some things and I was on the throttled list permanently. This pissed me off and I left.

My advice to most people is use which ever ISP made you feel comfortable before and if its your first ISP the best deals.

Also if you look at hellopeter and know a few things about ADSL you will see that 80% of reasons why people leave an ISP are Telkom related and not the ISP you are with.
 
I've been with MWeb for probably 8 - 10 years now, started with a 384 k line back in the day and now I'm on 4 MB. I can't remember any major issues in all the time I've been with them, all issues so far was Telkom line related which BTW gets sorted faster and faster in the last year or so, so big ups to Telkom as well. The only major issue I can remember was when that ship anker buggered up the Seacom cable a couple of years ago, but that also wasn't really MWeb related, I think 80% of ISP's in SA had issues back then.
Yes MWeb have a fair usage policy on their uncapped packages, and yes in the past Iwas in the dwang a bit for going over the cap and had to cut back to be unthrottled, but over all I'm happy with their service.
P.S. I have a pre paid Afrihost account which I use for big downloads and streaming if I don't want to influence my MWeb FUP, this works for me because I can buy Afrihost data as I need it, no monthly payments etc. This might work for you as well for if you have issues/downtime with your primary ISP.
 
Basically what I'm doing at the moment. Uncapped with Telkom, capped acc with Afrihost. Buying a 20GB capped account, and I'm hoping to use this to keep me in the good books with Telkom. Although I only stream, so I'm not a heavy user. Do about 2 to 3GB's a day.
 
Anybody know if Mweb would throttle streaming (say youtube) on a capped account? Or would they only go after torrents ?
 
PeterBee said:
Anybody know if Mweb would throttle streaming (say youtube) on a capped account? Or would they only go after torrents ?
Click to expand...
No throttling at all on capped accounts as far as I know. With uncapped accounts, only torrents are shaped to almost nothing till after hours.
 
I use several Vox FP accounts. This is what I can categorically state and prove on demand:

Positives:
a. The product is not shaped, well, more accurately I am not capable of detecting it. It reminds me of a leased line
b. You can push the maximum line speed of your DSL connection, consistently.
c. It works exceptionally well for remote login, i.e. VPN, SSH, and the like. I cannot explain why, but it does.
d. It either works, or it doesn't which eliminates a lot of grey areas that cause doubts.
e. It works extremely well for p2p.
f. It is free of the common censorship used by other ISPs most notably MWEB. MWEB have in the past blocked numerous websites it deems "offensive".
g. The system is effective at disconnecting the account when the cap is reached. Many other ISP are still trying to get this right.

Negatives:
a. The billing system is a bit of a hit-and-miss. Often, the roll-over is not allocated. I receive bandwidth notices for an account that has been re-allocated for the new month (likely because I never dropped the session since the previous month).
b. When it fails, it does so spectacularly, no internet access, and very limited access, being common.
c. IP addresses were static until the recent change of the system.
d. The client portal is slow, clunky and I have struggled to log-on many times.
 
1441568916 said:
I use several Vox FP accounts. This is what I can categorically state and prove on demand:

Positives:
a. The product is not shaped, well, more accurately I am not capable of detecting it. It reminds me of a leased line
b. You can push the maximum line speed of your DSL connection, consistently.
c. It works exceptionally well for remote login, i.e. VPN, SSH, and the like. I cannot explain why, but it does.
d. It either works, or it doesn't which eliminates a lot of grey areas that cause doubts.
e. It works extremely well for p2p.
f. It is free of the common censorship used by other ISPs most notably MWEB. MWEB have in the past blocked numerous websites it deems "offensive".
g. The system is effective at disconnecting the account when the cap is reached. Many other ISP are still trying to get this right.

Negatives:
a. The billing system is a bit of a hit-and-miss. Often, the roll-over is not allocated. I receive bandwidth notices for an account that has been re-allocated for the new month (likely because I never dropped the session since the previous month).
b. When it fails, it does so spectacularly, no internet access, and very limited access, being common.
c. IP addresses were static until the recent change of the system.
d. The client portal is slow, clunky and I have struggled to log-on many times.
Click to expand...

I've never had an issue with billing or data allocation.
I've never had VOX fail on me.
The client portal has never been slow for me and now with the update is certainly not clunky.
Logging on is a breeze as well.
 
Icemanbrfc said:
Ive read quite a bit of posts, with people indicating that they going to leave Afrihost, and some advising others to do the the same and join another ISP.

Having read through the Vox thread, as well as the others, there are alot of moaning as well. Maybe less than some in terms of issues, but still, there are issues at some point, which needs to be attended to and resolved.
Many people are getting good results off the AH network, others not so much, Likewise for Vox and CW. Some wanting to move between ISP's and so it goes.

My question is this, unless one specific ISP is going to have no issues, no down time, no nothing, how do you seperate them from each other. what are each ones pros and cons, and why are you going to stay or why do you feel the need to move to somebody else.

for what its worth, im with Telkom, and have a small capped account with Afrihost, where i have had no issues thus far.

It would be good if the admins could add a poll to this thread, so we can see where people are leaning to, but importantly why are they leaning towards that ISP.
Click to expand...
My opinion, just stay with Telkom.
 
Electric said:
That's not a great opinion.
Click to expand...
Well, to elaborate:

I've been hopping from ISP to ISP for years. I've been with almost all of them. It's always the same routine. Look through threads, spot one where everybody is singing praises of how good the ISP is, so I sign up. A few months down the line everything goes down the ****ter and the same people who were praising are now swearing. A few months go by and I move on. Same procedure, different ISP. I got tired of this and just went back to Telkom and I'm now staying with them. Headaches have been minimal.
 
Last edited:
Firstly keep your line with Telkom.
Then see where most people are swaying here as guys generally know what they're talking about. The MyBB ISP surveys are actually really useful.
Sign up with an ISP that is top dog at that time, unless they have a cancellation period like OpenWeb or Mweb
Stay with ISP until they go to ****, rinse and repeat

I went MWeb->Afrihost->Vox

Still have an open account at AH, just downgraded to a lower package and use it as a backup(could even change it to the 1gig free account)
 
Arksun said:
Well, to elaborate:

I've been hopping from ISP to ISP for years. I've been with almost all of them. It's always the same routine. Look through threads, spot one where everybody is singing praises of how good the ISP is, so I sign up. A few months down the line everything goes down the ****ter and the same people who were praising are now swearing. A few months go by and I move on. Same procedure, different ISP. I got tired of this and just went back to Telkom and I'm now staying with them. Headaches have been minimal.
Click to expand...

I had endless headaches with Telkom and being Telkom they are generally useless.
The less I have to deal with them the better.
I have my line with them but ISP is Vox and happily so.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X