The Notorious Northcliff Tower.

[PieterR]

I’m experiencing quite a bad case of “Disco Lights” while connected to the Northcliff tower. I’ve noticed that particular tower being vilified in this forum, and I’d like to get an idea of who else is connected to it, and what your service is like. I’ve noticed (for example) that the service is a lot more stable (i.e. no Disco Lights) early mornings when the load is presumably light.

Here’s my stats:
Cost: -65db
Distance: 18
Average Ping (to www.iburst.co.za): 907ms

If there’s a problem with that tower we need to make WBS aware of it.

Regards
Pieter Rabe

 

[nocilah]

i think wbs is well aware of it... but no harm in making sure they do not forget it...

 

[BigJ]

Lately the tower in question seems to have fallen over. It was incredibly fast in the early hours 3-5am. (Got a screenshot downloading at 2.04mbps with a max of 2.44mbps) Used to have 4-5 lights but now its all over the place. Cant get more than 700kbps at the same time now. Day time is well, fcuking useless.

Good idea to step on them.

Average to www.iburst.co.za at 22h00 = 768ms

 

[morebroadband]

A reason?

I have heard from some informed sources that the installation of this tower was not done in the best possible way. The thinking went because of the location, we (WBS) whould place this on high platform i.e. Where it is now.
The problem with this is it is too high, or so my sources tell me.....might they be rectifying this?

 

[BigJ]

There are many things at iBurp that are "too high".

 

[native]

I’m experiencing quite a bad case of “Disco Lights” while connected to the Northcliff tower. I’ve noticed that particular tower being vilified in this forum, and I’d like to get an idea of who else is connected to it, and what your service is like. I’ve noticed (for example) that the service is a lot more stable (i.e. no Disco Lights) early mornings when the load is presumably light.

Here’s my stats:
Cost: -65db
Distance: 18
Average Ping (to www.iburst.co.za): 907ms

If there’s a problem with that tower we need to make WBS aware of it.

Regards
Pieter Rabe

doest it timeout when the modem is "disco lighting" or is just the latency which is super high?

 

[PieterR]

I have heard from some informed sources that the installation of this tower was not done in the best possible way. The thinking went because of the location, we (WBS) whould place this on high platform i.e. Where it is now.
The problem with this is it is too high, or so my sources tell me.....might they be rectifying this?

Hey Morebroadband.

That would actually make sense. In my case the Linden tower is much closer (by about a third) but because the Northcliff base station is so high it tends to 'blanket' everything in the area. A good example of this is the load - Northcliff is usuall 2 and Linden 0, because nobody's connecting to Linden. The software in these modems seem to think that the signal strength is the only criteria when connecting to a tower.
I would speculate that if the load were spread more evenly among the base stations in the area that the Northcliff tower would become quite reliable.

Just a thought.

Ciao
Pieter

 

[BigJ]

I think someone read this lot. Now Im flying again thismorning! Average transfer rate of 1.20mbps!!! Topping off at 2.24mbps.

Cool!

 

[lman]

Another unhappy Northcliff user

I'm right on top of Northcliff hill - a stone's throw from the tower (hmmm, tempting)

I don't see disco lights as often as I used to, but then again I don't see the UTD as much of the time since I moved it to another room for better signal.

I see a LOT of ppp re-authentications, resulting in a new IP address everytime (whichs breaks any transfers in progress). Sometimes I clock 10-20 of these in an hour.

I also see quite a lot of brief losses of signal, where the UTD will go from full-5 green signal to nothing, then re-aquire about a second later.

Generally, mornings aren't too bad and at times I get the full 1Mbps. Evenings are painful and when I really need something , I often switch to GPRS. The only way I get larger transfers done is with a persistent download manager that doesn't let IP changes interrupt the download. Of course, some servers dont' support resumes and I have to involve a remote shell account with web access, just to make the hassle a bit worse.

I just don't have time to diagnose this thing and I think it's time to see if ADSL is available here yet. I thought I might try contact GRES and try tuning the signal reception with his directional antenna, first.

What really gets me though is that when I mention the fact that I'm on Northcliff to anyone at WBS, I normally get some sort or reaction that seems to recognize that Northcliff is bad news. One techie even used those words. It's been like this since April/May - why is the problem not fixed yet?

 

[Roman4604]

Topping off at 2.24mbps.

Dont know how this is possible, either you're trialing iBurst2 or you got some serious compression going ... which is not really a measure of raw iBurst transfer.

 

[fairlady]

Pieter,

I think your disco lights might be due to your modem bouncing between Linden and Northcliff (I think the WBS tech guys found this for me I am in South Road behind the church). If you use an antenna you can pick up either - though I am not sure which is the lesser evil.

WBS know about Northcliff since January - ath least that is when I started complaining of the terrible, terrible speeds I was getting from that tower. I think they kind of fixed it in May ... and now it is apparently over-saturated giving bad speeds during daytime for everyone.

My decision was to leave WBS iBurst altogether and would suggest this to anyone whose problems are not resolved within 1-2 months.

 

[Glipsie]

Damn I'm getting good pings tonight! Even as low as 79! [/sarcasm] But yeah, been like this for months. Daytime is useless, worse than trying to access international on a capped adsl account. Doubt they're interested in fixing the prob :/
Pinging www.iburst.co.za [196.30.31.120] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 196.30.31.120: bytes=32 time=1871ms TTL=126
Reply from 196.30.31.120: bytes=32 time=480ms TTL=126
Reply from 196.30.31.120: bytes=32 time=80ms TTL=126
Reply from 196.30.31.120: bytes=32 time=350ms TTL=126
Reply from 196.30.31.120: bytes=32 time=640ms TTL=126
Reply from 196.30.31.120: bytes=32 time=1902ms TTL=126
Reply from 196.30.31.120: bytes=32 time=79ms TTL=126
Reply from 196.30.31.120: bytes=32 time=220ms TTL=126
Reply from 196.30.31.120: bytes=32 time=300ms TTL=126
Reply from 196.30.31.120: bytes=32 time=430ms TTL=126

Ping statistics for 196.30.31.120:
Packets: Sent = 10, Received = 10, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 79ms, Maximum = 1902ms, Average = 635ms

 

[Blackface]

Northcliff people. Please hang in there we will be helped. We shall overcome some day.

 

[Glipsie]

I've been telling myself this for 5 months now. Net result, check these great pings:

Pinging www.iburst.co.za [196.30.31.120] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 196.30.31.120: bytes=32 time=33ms TTL=121
Reply from 196.30.31.120: bytes=32 time=32ms TTL=121
Reply from 196.30.31.120: bytes=32 time=34ms TTL=121
Reply from 196.30.31.120: bytes=32 time=33ms TTL=121

Alas, this would be from a 64K ISDN solution, which, basically, says it all

Cheers
Marnitz

 

[Crash]

Again I put this down to contention on the tower. Too many people on one tower. The towers are trying to be fair and give everyone a chance, but there are too many users for the same time slots. They need to put more towers up in that area to soak up the load.
Simple as that in my mind.

 

[Glipsie]

I agree. Though I had hoped that with the addition of the Linden and Roodepoort towers things would improve. No such luck. Now its a toss up of what to do next, wait it out, get a directional antenna and try to connect to another tower, or wait till 1st of Nov to see how much telkom will rape me for an ADSL line. For now, I wait with my 64K ISDN, 512 business dsl at work (soon to be 1024) and of course, IBurst works well everywhere else, so theres no real rush. However, I can't believe that IBurst aren't losing customers in droves (in Northcliff of course). Is everyone playing the waiting game like me and sticking it out? Really can't believe that. Maybe everyone is satisfied with losing every 2nd packet during daytime?

I'd really like to know everyone elses experience during daytime. Obviously you can't be satisfied with the speeds but is it bareable? I was forced to use IBurst during the day on Monday (stupid Telkom line was down!) and I was ready to throw the stupid modem against the wall.

Cheers
Glipsie