StellenboschStudent, thank you for reporting your dismay with Snowball on MyBroadband's forum. As the owner of Snowball I would love to take this opportunity to response to some of the matters mentioned in your complaint and the subsequent posts.
1. I am surprised that you are complaining about the reliability of our service. Most of our clients are very satisfied with not only the quality but especially the reliability of our service. If a client is unhappy we try to sort out the problem. Wireless is an abstract medium and this is sometimes a difficult task, but five years of experience have given us the opportunity to identify and eradicate problems.
If a client is unhappy with the service our help desk engineers have strict instructions to escalate the matter to management. The difficult problems normally come to me because I manage the company and I designed the network. Normally when something isn't working I know exactly how to fix it or how to provide a workaround.
Your case was not escalated to me. I am ot sure exactly who you are because "StellenboschStudent" is quite a generic name to use. But you are most welcome to contact me and I can look through our client support history for your case. You do mention being in Welgevonden, and I know that we have one very close high site in Welgevonden and one quite far. Your service could have been poor because you were signed up to the far high site. Either way if you were treated badly I will also refund you your money.
2. I see you mention you wanted another service provider. It's now almost four months after your complaint and I am curious to hear if you came right. Snowball has a policy that if we can't satisfy a client, and we also can't provide them with an alternative or workaround, we will gladly refer them to another network. We also sometimes recommend ADSL as an alternative to wireless, as ADSL is also quite a good technology.
Unfortunately I only came across this complaint by accident but had I known about it before I would have addressed it.
3. If notice "froot" mentions WebAfrica and Axxess. As far as I know both those companies don't provide wireless, but I could be wrong. I assume you had some specific reason why you wanted to choose wireless over ADSL? Most of our clients choose wireless because it's a very cost-effective medium and it does not require a telephone line. We can also troubleshoot wireless much more effectively compared to ADSL - with ADSL we're often left in Telkom's hands.
4. I see froot mentions we are quite expensive. On the contrary we believe our wireless products are very cost-effective. Our ADSL product pricing is also generally on par with WebAfrica and Axxess.
5. StellenboschStudent I see you mention you had the 512kbit burst package. All 512kbit packages called "burst" is no longer, but they are asymetrical with a 512kbit download speed and a 256kbit upload speed. I will put my head on a block and absolutely guarantee you that you will get exactly 512kbit to our data centre. For any of our clients, do this test:
http://www.snowball.co.za/speedtest It's extremely easy for us to control the exact speed you have from the high site to our data centre and we don't use any tricks or rip off our clients by advertising speeds that we don't meet.
What you are referring to is your speed to the Internet and specifically to the interational site YouTube over which Snowball has very little or no control. Our job as Internet service provider is to connect you to the WWW and make sure we have enough capacity to do so for each and every client. We have huge spare capacity on our wireless network. We have more than enough local bandwidth, fed via a fiber optic link into the Internet. In addition to that we load-balance 14 other copper lines in order to supplement our International traffic.
You don't mention the actual speed you got - you realise that 512mbit equates to about 64 kbytes per second? That means under 100% optimal conditions in one hour you will download 225 MB? (512Mbit/8MB*60s*60m/1024) Nobody ever gets optimal conditions to international sites. But I guarantee you would get that to a local site. I download Ubuntu updates on my wireless link from home I get up to 6mbit on my line.
To give you some idea of what we can achieve on our network, I have uploaded some real-world speed tests I recently did from a client. From these you will see that the problem is not the wireless - but rather how the Internet is an interconnected network of networks.
Snowball Download Speed Test
http://mybroadband.co.za/photos/showphoto.php?photo=9475
Snowball DOS FTP Upload and Download Speed Test
http://mybroadband.co.za/photos/showphoto.php?photo=9477
6. I take note of rebel998's comment about "But the guys that started off the industry here has not done so very well it seems." I'm kinda hoping he's referring to Snowball being right there from the start
But anyway let me assure you Snowball is doing extremely well and our network and client base is rock solid and growing every day. We are one of the most stable, sophisticated, and professional ISP / WISPs around and we are very proud of our backup and support. We have transparent systems and our staff is well trained in client service. Quality of service on wireless is huge challenge but we do everything in our power to provide a world-class service.
7. Thank you mountain_lion on complimenting on the quality of our service. We have a lot of very satisfied clients who has the same experience as you.
Finally I would like to mention I really have respect for the guys trying to build the community networks. I have been running an ISP for ten years and doing wireless for 5 years, and it's a very capital intensive game. Just because the airwaves are "free" doesn't mean it's cheap or easy to run a reliable network. The real cost is providing backup and support and great customer service.
