Sonic Wireless

Good to know. Maybe it's just a "we reserve the right to" type of thing.
 
I have now been with Sonic since the start of the month. Must admit they did a trouble free install. Don't like being locked out of my router (but they quickly did the tweeks to allow my son his XBox access)
Found general streaming impressive, currently testing their 5Mb Download/1Mb Upload service before looking to see if I really need the 10Mb offering.
Just finished chatting to my son about his gaming experiences and he seems very happy, until midnight when the torrent access is opened up, then his ping shoots to 400, so maybe it's a good thing as it reminds him to sleep sometime on a weekend.

For now I'm a very happy cutomer, happy to be free from the bottleneck of Telkom ADSL, although I was with another ISP for access before who gave good service within the limits Telkom imposed.
 
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Sharkykzn said:
For now I'm a very happy cutomer, happy to be free from the bottleneck of Telkom ADSL, although I was with another ISP for access before who gave good service within the limits Telkom imposed.
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My biggest yay from moving to a wisp is so that ISP/Telkom can't play the blame game when something goes wrong and you feel like a ping pong ball being bounced around. Also I don't need a home telephone as I only use that phone to call Telkom to complain and they take forever to answer their calls (sometimes I even get cut off after 30~45min).
 
henry1103 said:
My biggest yay from moving to a wisp is so that ISP/Telkom can't play the blame game when something goes wrong and you feel like a ping pong ball being bounced around.
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Agreed although to be honest mine is with a cheap landlord who laid his own telephone cable on our business premises which means when it rains, everything goes to the dogs.

SW just finished an install now and pretty happy with the results and stability. Now to move to voip and lose telkom forever.
 
I have mixed feelings about Sonic Wireless' tech support. So far I've only had two issues and both issues have been resolved but It's taken more than one attempt on both occasions to get my issue resolved.

These guys are still leaps and bounds ahead of Telkom, no question about that.
 
My install was done on Monday so here's my experience so far.

Install:

I wasn't here for the actual install but I've been told the folks were great. They did a bunch of cabling and the workmanship is good. They used my existing ADSL router as an extra AP which is nice. I got a Tenda router with three antennae - they left the default password intact so luckily I have access to that (had to change SSID).

The actual service:

Off the bat they said that some tweaking needs to be done as we're not getting full speed just yet. Getting about 6/1.5Mbps on the 15/2Mbps home package which obviously isn't that great. The site survey was done for 20Mbps so 15Mbps should be fine. Steam was sitting at a decent 7Mbps just now - again not great but it's amazing compared to my ADSL.

Latency: I'm not too chuffed about this. I get anything from 20ms to 150ms from the second hop in a trace route. Is this normal? According to PingPlotter I'm also getting packet loss on most of the hops. http://i.imgur.com/1g32thI.png

Gaming: also not too good. I'm currently pinging 80ms to the local Dota 2 server. Last night it was around 50ms though. There was also around 5% packet loss constantly. Again - is this normal? Latencies to the EU side aren't fantastic either. Any gamers around here I can compare with? http://i.imgur.com/0EDO7eL.png

Location: Speedtest.net and Dota 2 seem to think that I live in Paarl. Not that there's anything wrong with living in Paarl, but I live in Blouberg.

Streaming: Not too bad considering I'm not getting full speeds. YouTube 1080p and 720p60fps is possible. Watching high quality on Twitch also works. Source (this particular steamer had it set to 1080p60fps) quality did not work so well.

p2p downloads: A well seeded torrent from a public tracker is bouncing between 50 and 200KB/s. Last night I did however reach around 500KB/s on the same torrent.

HTTP downloads: I'm hovering around 200KB/s on a file I'm getting from put.io using Free Download Manager.

That's all I can think of at the moment. All-in-all the performance wasn't what I was expecting but it's still early days and I'm hopeful that they can patch up the connection :). Will post another update in a couple of days or if there are major changes.
 
Kwerty said:
My install was done on Monday so here's my experience so far.

Install:

I wasn't here for the actual install but I've been told the folks were great. They did a bunch of cabling and the workmanship is good. They used my existing ADSL router as an extra AP which is nice. I got a Tenda router with three antennae - they left the default password intact so luckily I have access to that (had to change SSID).

The actual service:

Off the bat they said that some tweaking needs to be done as we're not getting full speed just yet. Getting about 6/1.5Mbps on the 15/2Mbps home package which obviously isn't that great. The site survey was done for 20Mbps so 15Mbps should be fine. Steam was sitting at a decent 7Mbps just now - again not great but it's amazing compared to my ADSL.

Latency: I'm not too chuffed about this. I get anything from 20ms to 150ms from the second hop in a trace route. Is this normal? According to PingPlotter I'm also getting packet loss on most of the hops. http://i.imgur.com/1g32thI.png

Gaming: also not too good. I'm currently pinging 80ms to the local Dota 2 server. Last night it was around 50ms though. There was also around 5% packet loss constantly. Again - is this normal? Latencies to the EU side aren't fantastic either. Any gamers around here I can compare with? http://i.imgur.com/0EDO7eL.png

Location: Speedtest.net and Dota 2 seem to think that I live in Paarl. Not that there's anything wrong with living in Paarl, but I live in Blouberg.

Streaming: Not too bad considering I'm not getting full speeds. YouTube 1080p and 720p60fps is possible. Watching high quality on Twitch also works. Source (this particular steamer had it set to 1080p60fps) quality did not work so well.

p2p downloads: A well seeded torrent from a public tracker is bouncing between 50 and 200KB/s. Last night I did however reach around 500KB/s on the same torrent.

HTTP downloads: I'm hovering around 200KB/s on a file I'm getting from put.io using Free Download Manager.

That's all I can think of at the moment. All-in-all the performance wasn't what I was expecting but it's still early days and I'm hopeful that they can patch up the connection :). Will post another update in a couple of days or if there are major changes.
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I am assuming they installed cambium equipment? if so would explain your high latency on 1st hop normally in dota 2 CPT i get 2-7ms and JHB 18-25ms but using Mikrotik so yeah
 
willsotaku said:
I am assuming they installed cambium equipment? if so would explain your high latency on 1st hop normally in dota 2 CPT i get 2-7ms and JHB 18-25ms but using Mikrotik so yeah
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I do. I must say I've never heard of that brand before the installation. What made you ask? Bad experience?
 
Yeah they installed Cambium after a speed compliant that they caused due to line throttle but never told me and tech never informed some one else about the throttle not sure what was going on there but it caused slow line and high pings so they wanted to use cambium and i said fine then also had pings like yours without load beforehand when i was on ubunt or mikrotik i had sub 5ms pings so stay faaar away from Cambium
 
Busy looking for a wireless solution myself - Telkom useless
Decided to go with a company called LegendsConnect - looks like we are 6km from Primrose tower, should be up and running by the 1st june

What i like about them - you take a 12 month contract - instllation cost - R500
If you take a 24 month contract - installation FREE

Another company i tried:
Megasurf - based in Vanderbijl - also using Primrose tower - Their pricing is good R360 for 2mbps - However, they are in Vanderbijl and their callout fee is R2500 + fo 50km and more!!
They also charge a R4500 installation fee...too excessive in my books - R1500 is more reasonable

Also found Sonicwireless - should legends connect not do it for us - after a year can try someone else...
 
Yep went down early this morning. Could ping an IP or URL bit could not browse. Spent 30 min with tech support trying to resolve without success as I had to get to work. Returned home to a working system this evening. However it just died again at 8pm this evening and can't get support at this time.
 
Sharkykzn said:
Yep went down early this morning. Could ping an IP or URL bit could not browse. Spent 30 min with tech support trying to resolve without success as I had to get to work. Returned home to a working system this evening. However it just died again at 8pm this evening and can't get support at this time.
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I hear you... there was planned maintenance this afternoon and it was around that time that my connection died, according to my traffic report. And since i came home it's been on and off. I managed to reach support they say the issue is widespread and their engineers are working on it.
 
Yep also back up after chatting to them. Informed they have been having DNS issues today, now routed to another server and all should be good.
 
Anyone using Sonic in Plumstead?
We're in the green, but verging on the orange section of their coverage map.
My concern is that the tech's run through a qucikie install saying the signlal is sufficient, close the deal and I'm left up sheet creek.
 
Anyone experiencing an increased amount of disrupted connections lately?
I'm in Durbanville and the last few evenings I keep getting dropped, (Only for a minute or two) this however causes disruption on a particular server with queueing and keep getting bumped to a few hundred down the line before I can rejoin.
 
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