The sh*t starts again

[MrGray]

For most of the year so far Sentech has been behaving well.

Yesterday I got a call from Sentech asking me to update my contact details but the first question was whether I use Sentech for business or private use. When I asked what that had to do with my contact details they got very thorny and it became clear that this was the real motive for the call.

From that time onward, my bandwidth started to decrease. On the 256k package (or whatever they call it now) I was often getting close to 256k speeds up to yesterday, but suddenly it's reverted to dialup speeds - I go nowhere near the supposed cap limit so I'm sure that has nothing to do with it. I've also started experiencing connectivity outages to the international and local net.

Most of the original Sentech users on this forum are long gone - victims of last years fiasco which was the sentech network but I've stuck with it from day one and it's starting to feel like last year again...

 

[Connection]

Hi Garp

I really doubt that this is the reason why you are slower. I am guessing it is coincidental. I could be wrong but I really would be very surprised. Are you saying they capped you because you weren't prepared to answer their questions or because you answered that you were using it for business? Post back in a day's time or so if you are still slower but if you are getting 140kbps plus then this is part of the normal variation that users experience. Sure if you are getting 30kbps then this is abnormal but like I said, I doubt you will find this lasting long if that is the case. Could be a technical hitch on one of the towers etc. Keep us updated...

 

[SoulSe]

I also got a call and my speed is also worse now. It could be a technical problem that just so happens to coincide with their too-little-too-late survey.

Which tower are you on garp?

 

[MrGray]

I'm on the Randburg metro tower. Excuse my cynicism but having lived through last year's farcical mismanagement of the Sentech network and their attitude towards users, I'm not a big believer in conincidences. When I signed up for Sentech it was heavily advertised as "UNLIMITED" broadband internet at 128kbps, 256kbps or 512kbps only to be told ridiculous things such as due to contention ratios "256kbps" actually meant 256kbps divided by 28 other users which actually meant average throughput of 9kbps and that "UNLIMITED" actually implied soft caps, etc.

Don't believe me? Search this forum and Sentech's past press releases because that's seriously what they were telling us at one point. And we actually endured almost 6 months of on and off speeds as low as 9kbps and never ending technical problems on a "256k" package until sanity prevailed for a while.

So many of the original users left Sentech that they eventually decided to actually spend some money on providing decent bandwidth.

I'm very attuned to the network and I can just tell that something has changed after the latest series of "upgrades" last week. I hope it's only temporary but I suspect that they've changed something with their bandwidth mismanagement system as I now get nothing like the download speeds that I was getting for the first half of the year. The 1 minute window on downloads where you got full speed before being throttled was a stupid system but it was bearable, but even that seems to have gone away and now downloads start throttling instantly.