Returning i-BUTT modem tomorrow morning.

So sad.. At this rate looks like I will just stick to ****ing ISDN and Callmore. Give Telkom more money, at least then I will be able to download more than 8 gigs a month.

I was really looking forward to this service, but now, doesn't look like a good service anymore. Somebody talk to them about the caps. One thing they MUST understand is they HAVE to offer a more attractive package than what the competition are offering to stay afloat in the Commercial world. If they offer something MUCH better than Telkom and Sentech, Telkom and Sentech will have to do something in turn to improve their product. Who knows, Telkom might Cut their Bandwidth costs to ISP's, implement a 15 gig International Cap *probably dreaming*. If this happans we all win, and Iburst will win the biggest, as they will have all of us saying what a good service we are being provided and telling all our friends. I would just like to see the internet the way I experienced it in the UK with NTL. If the country wasn't such a hole I would have stayed there just for the Broadband. Yes...addict!

Cheerz
 
Take a look at the compliments thread regarding the package offerings. It might change your opinion.

http://www.myadsl.co.za/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=5639
 
Yep, I can second that, the lack of activity on the compliments thread, taken together with a spate of crit threads, is an indication that there are problems right now.
 
<blockquote id="quote"><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by CreepyCrawley</i>
<br />Too bad that none of the people on here that make sense works for any of these effing places...

Telkom se ma...
<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

i worked on the project that helped make the safe/sat3/wasc 80Gb/s optical cable a reality.

and i'm still stuck on a 56K modumb. go figure. IIRC, telkom is making sh*t loads off that project.
 
I knew there were under-water cables, but I didn't know there was a site dedicated to them, go figure.

Thanks martin, was a breakaway from working involuntarily for sars.

Now I want to know, why did they have to link up Nigeria - we would surely have been better off without a flood of emails trying to cheat us out of our money?
 
OK Everyone,

We've been through the some of these issue in Australia with regard to iBurst pricing. One thing you have to understand is that the product will start out expensive. iBurst is now 1 year old in Sydney and we have over 30 towers across 3 cities and the pricing is now becomming quite reasonable.

Hardware is the number one pricing issue here in Australia with the service pricing 2nd.
With regard to the bandwidth throttling and soforth, that I guess is a policy that is up to WBS, but here in Australia things are built a little differently.

PBA (Personal Broadband Australia) does not sell iBurst to the public, but is a wholesaler to ISP's like ourselves. We obtain capacity to the iBurst network and sell it onto our customers. The 'interconnect' that we have to the iBurst network is very expensive and is very precious. iBurst is NOT to be treated like typical DSL-like services and is not an appropriate technology for things like P2P and gaming technologies.

There are about 15 ISP's providing iBurst to the public here in Sydney and all of them are very different in their iBurst offerings. Yes, some have flat rate services and now there are speed limited iBurst services (256k, 512k, unthrottled) and each provider enforces their own type of throttling services to protect their interconnect to the iBurst network.

When iBurst first started here in Sydney there were a LOT of people complaining about the cost... but now that there are thousands of users across Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and the Gold Coast, there is much more competition and prices are competitive.

My suggestion is that you guys really need to wait atleast a year before you bash WBS around... these guys had the forsight to bring iBurst to South Africa and they need to be given the chance to rollout the technology (the base stations are NOT cheap!).

If you have any questions about iBurst from our experiences over the last year, please let me know.

...Skeeve
 
Skeeve, your post is most welcome. Its always good to get opinions from people that have a bit more experience with a product. I think in South Africa we have been bitten too often, tends to make us sceptical when it comes to any form of telecommunications.

I truely hope that you are right, I have already subscribed to the service and its great.... for now. Once things get capped it will be a different story.

Remember we only have 3 "broadband" options here which don't require donation of kidneys in order to make payment. Iburst which you are familiar with. IpWireless provided by Sentech which has turned out to be a disaster & ADSL provided by Telkom which is capped at 3gigs and shaped.

We are all really hungry for real competition and true broadband options.
 
Skeeve,

same as Alchamy, thanks for the post, apologies upfront bcos I'm going to overload you with a bunch of questions.

How is iBurst coping capacity-wise?

From what you say about 15 ISP's with different packages & offerings etc it sounds like there has to be sufficient capacity, but is there?

Also do you know how many iBurst end-users there are now in Sydney alone? Are there stats available somewhere?

I noticed Vodafone AU is partnered with PBA (on PBA's iBurst site), is that for 3G or what?
 
Last edited:
I think the reason everyone is so pesimistic is we have seen sentech (who also use wireless) go down the drain in service. And after that you cant blame us for being pesimistic.(you could call it cautious)
 
Very interesting post skeeve.

However there are fundamental differences between the telecoms regime in ZA and AUS:

  • We wont have more than two PSTN operators for the forseeable future. Our second PSTN operator isn't even here yet will have been delayed for at least 3 years before becoming operational due to (self enrichment related?) government bungling / Telkom intrigues.
  • Most of the current broad band "competition" consists of government and/or ex-government "companies".
  • Effectively as things stand, only Telkom can carry international data traffic. Monopoly pricing ...

This is NOT the case in AUS.
Given the above there is little incentive for cheaper broadband.
Extrapolating AUS experiances onto ZA conditions is silly ...
 
ic said:
How is iBurst coping capacity-wise?

From what you say about 15 ISP's with different packages & offerings etc it sounds like there has to be sufficient capacity, but is there?
Click to expand...

iBurst is coping quite well... in Australia though the ISP's who resell iBurst decide the contention ratio of the interconnect. The iBurst network itself has a LOT of capacity and while not being a PBA employee, from my guess the network would not even be more than 10% of its capacity, and that number is probably too large.

It depends on the size of the base station backhaul that WBS has decided on. In Australia PBA states that Base Stations have a capcity of about 24MB/s, which is quite capable of handling hundreds of connected users when you consider your average GSM tower only has 1MB/s backhault.

ic said:
Also do you know how many iBurst end-users there are now in Sydney alone? Are there stats available somewhere?

I noticed Vodafone AU is partnered with PBA (on PBA's iBurst site), is that for 3G or what?
Click to expand...

I couldn't say how many users for sure.. but it has to be in the thousands of end users.

Vodafone, while being a consortium partner, has not yet chosen to rollout iBurst to its customer base and currently are pushing their own GPRS based products.

...Skeeve
 
hArTh said:
[*]Most of the current broad band "competition" consists of government and/or ex-government "companies".
[*]Effectively as things stand, only Telkom can carry international data traffic. Monopoly pricing ...
[/list]

This is NOT the case in AUS.
Given the above there is little incentive for cheaper broadband.
Extrapolating AUS experiances onto ZA conditions is silly ...
Click to expand...

I understand these are very different markets. Given that WBS is rolling out iBurst and taking a chance on this excellent technology, perhaps things are changing for the better over there.

I understand some of the issues regarding the government control of telecoms as I have a few SA friends who have settled here and I cannot say that I envy you guys and would not like to deal in that sort of market.

But eventually technology has a way of forcing itself into the marketplace based on the demand of consumers.

Can someone explain the costs of iBurst in SA? - perhaps in US$ as I don't understand South African money and how it best converts to AU$.

...Skeeve
 
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