Assasin_Zer0
Senior Member
My struggles with Rain .
I had a Telkom R599 uncapped LTE package 350GB FUP and had a fairly stable 80Mbps Connection.
I also had a Rain 4G sim installed in a TP-Link TL-M7450 which was doing great.
I started my Rain 5G Journey in October 2019 ,This was just before it was commercially launched when they
were contacting user to trail 5G , I still had to pay R2000 Odd for the Router .
Everything went great this included great speeds both up and down , low latency , no jitter it was pretty much flawless.
With the exception of Load shedding , Most of my equipment in my home office is connected to UPS's .
This is where i learnt that Rain didn't cater for load shedding on 5G , what we did find out was that during load shedding
after a reboot , you could fail-over to 4G and the connecting was still fairly usable.
During the second week of December i had a hardware failure on the then N5368 (with Q20) note it's not the X Version.
After contacting Rain and a couple of weeks of struggling they finally sent out an engineer to investigate.
This was the first week of January , The unit was replaced with a N5368X (Units that are being supplied now) and they also took back the Q20.
During the second week of December after the new unit was again mounted outdoors same spot. My overall experience started rapidly degrading ,
Speeds were dropping , pings were high , jitter was bad this kept going until i finally opened a case on 18 January 2020.
After a few weeks of back and forth between myself and the Rain customer support engineers , I don't know how many router reboots and factory resets.
They sent out an engineer to investigate, We then took down the router and spent about 2 - 3 hours walking my yard and doing speedtests.
We eventually found a good spot on the other side of my house. The engineer left and i then remounted the outdoor brackets pole and ODU and redone
my network cabling.
The next few days was smooth Sailing.
Then during one of our MS Teams sessions with Colleagues i started getting constant call drops , video was bad , audio was really bad.
i tried rebooting the router and that seemed to have made no difference , I did a factory reset ,and still no improvement.
I phoned Rain again , and had the ticket reopened.
Sometime a few few day's went past sometimes a few weeks where i wouldn't hear anything ,
I would then try to call or ask for an update via chat, The answer or update if you could call it that was that , "Your issue has been escalated to our networks department"
I would try call or chat every 2nd or 3rd day to get an update. After you mange to get through to someone the update would be "Your issue has been escalated to our networks department"
Eventually a few day's later i got a call from a customer engineer , Stating that they have remotely changed something on my router and that everything should be fine.
I spent the next 2 or 3 day's testing , and found that there is not much that has changed.
i had phoned back in again and reported my findings ,and they said they would "Escalated to the networks team"
Fast forward a few weeks , and still have the same issues So i decided to start putting some monitoring in place ,
You can see from the the blow more or less what my experience has been like . Now bare in mind this doesn't show stuff like packet loss , ping and jitter.
That experience has been quite horrible , Dropped calls , delayed audio in calls , voice breaks , sluggish laggy video
So Rain phones me yesterday 16 April after @rain_mobile asked me to send my account details .
"We have some news from the network department "
"Because you get around 20 - 30 Mbps we can downgrade your account to the Rain standard package"
.................... Your Joking right ? Now this is after i have explained to them , i took the 5G Package for a reason (Back then there was no standard or premium, only premium R1000\Month )
Now i do need to work from home , When i do it usually involves Teams sessions , Webex , Skype , RDP , VPN , Mail and the list goes on.
So i explain this again, To which i get the following reply "Our networks teams have determined that the issues to all 3 towers is due to elevation difference between myself and the towers" and the more users that connect to the tower i'm latched onto the narrower the 5G beam\Radius gets
So the only thing we can do is downgrade you for a more stable and better connection.
As a side-note , i have been able to connect to all the 3 towers in the past.
At the moment and for the last month or so , i have been latching onto a tower that is over 2.4Km's away ...
There is two other towers about 300m and 600m away.
Now i have more or less the same issue with the 4G router, which also used to work fine.
They also at some stage said that i wouldn't be able to get 5G Speeds.
I know of another RAIN user on the forum that has the same performance issue, that doesn't live too far away,.
Now my issue is , Telkom no longer has the R599 LTE package i used to have .
So i cant go back to that .
There is no Fiber available ,
ADSL up to 2Mbps
Wifi : Only Level-7 but not worth the price .
Anyways enough Talk ,Time for pictures. Please share your thoughts
I am Latched onto tower "1"
The Peaks are usually between 02:00 - 07:00 (Best performance , Stability , Ping , Jitter) I have other tools to monitor that
I had a Telkom R599 uncapped LTE package 350GB FUP and had a fairly stable 80Mbps Connection.
I also had a Rain 4G sim installed in a TP-Link TL-M7450 which was doing great.
I started my Rain 5G Journey in October 2019 ,This was just before it was commercially launched when they
were contacting user to trail 5G , I still had to pay R2000 Odd for the Router .
Everything went great this included great speeds both up and down , low latency , no jitter it was pretty much flawless.
With the exception of Load shedding , Most of my equipment in my home office is connected to UPS's .
This is where i learnt that Rain didn't cater for load shedding on 5G , what we did find out was that during load shedding
after a reboot , you could fail-over to 4G and the connecting was still fairly usable.
During the second week of December i had a hardware failure on the then N5368 (with Q20) note it's not the X Version.
After contacting Rain and a couple of weeks of struggling they finally sent out an engineer to investigate.
This was the first week of January , The unit was replaced with a N5368X (Units that are being supplied now) and they also took back the Q20.
During the second week of December after the new unit was again mounted outdoors same spot. My overall experience started rapidly degrading ,
Speeds were dropping , pings were high , jitter was bad this kept going until i finally opened a case on 18 January 2020.
After a few weeks of back and forth between myself and the Rain customer support engineers , I don't know how many router reboots and factory resets.
They sent out an engineer to investigate, We then took down the router and spent about 2 - 3 hours walking my yard and doing speedtests.
We eventually found a good spot on the other side of my house. The engineer left and i then remounted the outdoor brackets pole and ODU and redone
my network cabling.
The next few days was smooth Sailing.
Then during one of our MS Teams sessions with Colleagues i started getting constant call drops , video was bad , audio was really bad.
i tried rebooting the router and that seemed to have made no difference , I did a factory reset ,and still no improvement.
I phoned Rain again , and had the ticket reopened.
Sometime a few few day's went past sometimes a few weeks where i wouldn't hear anything ,
I would then try to call or ask for an update via chat, The answer or update if you could call it that was that , "Your issue has been escalated to our networks department"
I would try call or chat every 2nd or 3rd day to get an update. After you mange to get through to someone the update would be "Your issue has been escalated to our networks department"
Eventually a few day's later i got a call from a customer engineer , Stating that they have remotely changed something on my router and that everything should be fine.
I spent the next 2 or 3 day's testing , and found that there is not much that has changed.
i had phoned back in again and reported my findings ,and they said they would "Escalated to the networks team"
Fast forward a few weeks , and still have the same issues So i decided to start putting some monitoring in place ,
You can see from the the blow more or less what my experience has been like . Now bare in mind this doesn't show stuff like packet loss , ping and jitter.
That experience has been quite horrible , Dropped calls , delayed audio in calls , voice breaks , sluggish laggy video
So Rain phones me yesterday 16 April after @rain_mobile asked me to send my account details .
"We have some news from the network department "
"Because you get around 20 - 30 Mbps we can downgrade your account to the Rain standard package"
.................... Your Joking right ? Now this is after i have explained to them , i took the 5G Package for a reason (Back then there was no standard or premium, only premium R1000\Month )
Now i do need to work from home , When i do it usually involves Teams sessions , Webex , Skype , RDP , VPN , Mail and the list goes on.
So i explain this again, To which i get the following reply "Our networks teams have determined that the issues to all 3 towers is due to elevation difference between myself and the towers" and the more users that connect to the tower i'm latched onto the narrower the 5G beam\Radius gets
So the only thing we can do is downgrade you for a more stable and better connection.
As a side-note , i have been able to connect to all the 3 towers in the past.
At the moment and for the last month or so , i have been latching onto a tower that is over 2.4Km's away ...
There is two other towers about 300m and 600m away.
Now i have more or less the same issue with the 4G router, which also used to work fine.
They also at some stage said that i wouldn't be able to get 5G Speeds.
I know of another RAIN user on the forum that has the same performance issue, that doesn't live too far away,.
Now my issue is , Telkom no longer has the R599 LTE package i used to have .
So i cant go back to that .
There is no Fiber available ,
ADSL up to 2Mbps
Wifi : Only Level-7 but not worth the price .
Anyways enough Talk ,Time for pictures. Please share your thoughts
I am Latched onto tower "1"
The Peaks are usually between 02:00 - 07:00 (Best performance , Stability , Ping , Jitter) I have other tools to monitor that
