Question: Swapping ADSL providers

[rainynight65]

Hi,

first of all please forgive me if any of these questions seem silly to you. I just moved to South Africa and don't have enough experience with Telkom and the likes yet, so I may be projecting my experiences made in Germany (where I come from).

I am currently running a 192 ADSL with a 3GB access from Telkom. Pending the outcome of the current discussion (http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthread.php?t=28917) I am thinking of swithcing over to Axxess with their 5GB or 10Gb product. In order to do that, I obviously have to cancel the Telkom Powered By ADSL product. I'd like to know if that is generally easily done, meaning does Telkom do what I tell them? Or are there any problems that might arise?

(I do remember that in Germany, where we have a slightly similar situation - one big Telco, formerly state-owned, and a lot of resellers - some people who just wanted a different ADSL access option from a reseller ended up with their line canceled, either accidentally or intentionally.)

If you don't mind, please provide me with a little advice or your experiences.

Best Regards

Alex

 

[RetroPedro]

I also used Telkom Internet when I started off and cancelled after 10 days and using my 3GB to the max. They did cancel after the 48 weekday hours they quoted and did not charge me a cent to this day . You have to persevere though and phone two or three different numbers just to make sure. Get a reference number and follow up.

On the other hand, just wait for the 1 Nov price increase issue to become clear before you cancel.

 

[VQuest]

Hi Alex

Welcome to MyADSL and South Africa.

Unfortunately doing most anything with Telkom leads to problems. I cancelled my Telkom ADSL account just over two months ago. I was told it would be done straight away, which it wasn't. I was then charged for the next months fee, which I was promised not to be.

The rules when dealing with Telkom are: always insist on a reference number; don't believe anything you've been told by them; double/tripple check everything; bitch and moan as much as possible and you'll finally get somewhere.

I bitched and moaned so much that they finally credited the overcharge. You will hear from others on this forum that they were being charged many months after the cancellation.

I originally signed up with TelkomISP because I thought it would be easier having them supply both the ADSL line and ISP account. I was so wrong. I'm so glad to be rid of them, atleast for the ISP part.

Good luck with your future ordeal. (Lets hope you're one of the lucky ones to have no problems while dealing with Telkom).

 

[rainynight65]

Hi Alex

Welcome to MyADSL and South Africa.

Unfortunately doing most anything with Telkom leads to problems. I cancelled my Telkom ADSL account just over two months ago. I was told it would be done straight away, which it wasn't. I was then charged for the next months fee, which I was promised not to be.

The rules when dealing with Telkom are: always insist on a reference number; don't believe anything you've been told by them; double/tripple check everything; bitch and moan as much as possible and you'll finally get somewhere.

Hi VQuest,

thanks for the reply and the welcome. I will certainly keep in mind what you told me when dealing with Telkom. That's the problem with companies who have a virtual monopoly: they can afford pushing their clients around like that. If there was real competition, all this wouldn't be necessary.

Regards, Alex

 

[kilos]

Swap ADSL providers

We are dropping our SAIX 256k Silver line R12k/month for the IS Uncapped,unshaped 512k Business ADSL
(ship u with Cisco 837 ADSL Router with 5 public static IP addresses)which is being re-sold thru various
ISP ie Imaginet or you can contact IS themselves R1350/month

(1 Mb Business ADSL resells for R2700/month thru IS)
* Imaginet Premium 512k (R1539/month) (http://www.imaginet.co.za/accessoptions.asp?from=ADSLPREMIUM512

* Internet Solutions email: [email protected]

Cost Savings
R12k/month -> R2.2k/month. SAIX ADSL and Diginet lines route mainly via fibre circuits with better latency times than IS
Still maybe get another Telkom SAIX routed ADSL line for some better international routing to Europe.

Ping IS ADSL network from SAIX ADSL line

PING 196.33.245.137 (196.33.245.137) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 196.33.245.137: icmp_seq=1 ttl=247 time=109 ms
64 bytes from 196.33.245.137: icmp_seq=2 ttl=247 time=106 ms
(During the day that IS ADSL line stays at about 220ms)

traceroute to 196.33.245.137 (196.33.245.137), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 192.168.X.XXX 1.380 ms 0.489 ms 0.511 ms
2 wblv-146-192-01.telkomadsl.co.za (165.146.192.1) 23.103 ms 26.648 ms 26.997 ms
3 wblv-ip-er-1-fe-11-1-1-1.telkom-ipnet.co.za (196.43.11.214) 28.376 ms 29.734 ms 31.577 ms
4 196.43.23.150 55.559 ms 56.676 ms 57.852 ms
5 196.25.5.30 68.045 ms 69.886 ms 70.634 ms
6 168.209.86.165 72.609 ms 46.688 ms 46.942 ms
7 core5-jhb.isnet.net (196.26.0.14) 48.519 ms 50.836 ms 55.373 ms
8 cdsl1-rba-gi0-2.isdsl.net (196.26.96.197) 57.723 ms 59.520 ms 59.455 ms
9 clns2-rba.isdsl.net (196.36.80.213) 61.477 ms 62.142 ms 64.067 ms
10 196.34.50.34 115.886 ms * *

Their are pro's and con's of Diginet and ADSL I feel the cost saving per year
R120k is quite a saving
Applied for the Power 30 package from Imaginet and that was short lived.

Their is a very handy Linux package called tcptraceroute which allows
you to see which ports are severly shaped Port 80 & 8080 are fine.
When you try to do a traceroute on the PPTP port 1723 & you get plenty of timeouts eg " tcptraceroute adslnetworksubscriber_IP 1723 "

http://michael.toren.net/code/tcptraceroute/

I know of a local ISP that has a 512k SAIX Silver R16k/month
and is testing the IS 512k ADSL solution as I said previous this comes with 5
public IP addresses and the cost savings are tremendous, so the SME market
will be hit hard by this "MONOPOLY", we are indeed way behind Europe, India,
US etc, now take trip next door to Botswana, Zambia, Zimbabwe and their
it is like going back 10 years to us here SA, ADSL no ways but, slowly
Wireless ISP are coming in and providing broadband 64k @ $75/month.

Some are totally congested with 500bits/sec access nothing like QOS
Wireless security well that is another discussion

Cheers
Justin