The truth behind ADSL

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syntaX1

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As many of us know, ADSL's service leave much to be desired. Just yesterday, my logs show an uptime of 77%, our caps and 24 reconnections, ports being blocked, and so the list goes on.

The real reason ADSL is so shockingly poor, is that major companies are paying HUGE money towards Telkom's existing services, amounting to many, many millions. If telkom were to provide static IPs with their xDSL solutions, the revenue they would loose would be substantial. I believe ADSL to be stable in SA, it's just that Telkom is not willing to take a loss on it's monopolistic ways by providing a better, faster service for far cheeper.

Sad that we cannot yet grow as a country, and those small businesses out there wishing to contribute towards SA cannot do so.
 
Just as a matter of interest, one can get a "static" ip by using a free dns service.. www.dyndns.org
 
Yeah, thanks, I'm running one now. As far as I was aware, Telkom had also very briefly blocked the use of dyndns, though that had been removed.

None the less, it's still an incredibly poor option for use by a small business, or anything that relies on a good, solid connection, even with a 3gb cap. For those who have international clients, it is not even an option.
 
<font face="Arial">I have been an ADSL Subscriber since August of last year. In that time I have found that my ADSL has just gone from bad to worse! Firstly I would like to point out that I have had the same problem with my ADSL since I got it. I have phoned Telkom's ADSL support line and lodged complaints and faults on many occasions, but to this day the technicians don’t know what is wrong with my line!

My problem is that every time I connect to the Internet, my connection drops for roughly 10 seconds at a time it is very volatile and could happen 10 times a night or one… but for some unknown reason I stay connected to the net! (E.g.) I do not receive or send any Data, exactly like not being connected to the Internet, but my pc and Telkom’s networks tell me I am still connected!

Another Problem that I have found is that (peer to peer) (e.g.) Kazaa; etc… transfer speeds are extremely slow with an average speed of 5kbps (The same as my 56k modem). However when I first got ADSL I had speed between 35 and 45Kbps.

Between 11AM and 3PM my ADSL is at its worst I get an average ping of 150ms on SAIX gaming servers which are located in South Africa... (E.g.) dahshur.saix.net, berserk.saix.net, etc…

If Telkom is supplying a service like ADSL, and they have all these setbacks for their clients who have ADSL. Instead of promoting them selves as "LIGHTNING FAST INTERNET". They should on their websites and adverts say "LIGHTNING FAST INTERNET" (but we have capped all our users and we offer extremely slow speeds during the day, etc…) Telkom offers us something we don’t get this is false advertising, and theft! I pay for a service every month, which I don’t get!

I hope that Telkom addresses these problems because like me there are many unhappy ADSL users!
<font face="Arial"></font id="Arial"></font id="Arial">
 
What is the point of this uncapped ADSL anyways? If i be uncapped and try to connect to a simple irc server such as efnet or ANY international server, i ping out every few minutes, and it takes about 2 minutes to connect initially as it is. Why are there capped and uncapped states if this is the case? (This is during the day)

At night it seems a little better, well, let's just say i don't ping out AS much and my general server lag of 1minute+ goes down to about 10 seconds...

We Pay close to R1k a month and get this kind of service? I'd rather much be back on my ISDN. I could at least check my Yahoo mail account and talk to people on international servers.

As for telkom blocking certain ports?! WHAT is up with that? Are we not allowed to use our 3gig on anything we please?

I personally think Telkom's Service and approach towards ADSL is Pathetic and unreasonable...

Aren't there laws against this type of theft from telkom?[:(!]

=TT=
 
Yes Syntax , spot the word in the sentence ;-)

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">I personally think Telkom's Service and approach towards ADSL is <b>Pathetic</b> and unreasonable...<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

=TT=
 
Hi guys

Thanks for the interesting discussions.

Port prioritization is a major problem for me as well. I am using software for my studies that utilizes port 500 and up, and that means that I have to do most of my work in the early hours of the morning, as you have most probably seen from my posting times. I contacted Telkom to confirm this, and it is indeed the case if anybody wondered.

Regards,

RPM


RPM
[email protected]
 
Hi rpm,

Yeah, I also attend live webcasts broadcast by Microsoft almost nightly, sometimes twice a night excluding weekends. Because of Telkom, I cannot attend these but now have to download them at about 60 - 180mb for each presentation.

It's sad that not only have our business ventures been hurt, but also our studies, and thus, the growth of South Africa.
 
hey hey, whay do you know, you have the same problem as me....
a month ago i installed ADSL, spent 3000 rands on this Netgear wireless enabled adsl modem. Initially i got 45-50 kb/s downloads, now i just get about 2-5kb/s. I think telkom has identified me as a Kaza user and switched me over to a slower pipe (wink wink) them bastards ............
 
Trace I have the EXACT same problem:

"My problem is that every time I connect to the Internet, my connection drops for roughly 10 seconds at a time it is very volatile and could happen 10 times a night or one… but for some unknown reason I stay connected to the net! (E.g.) I do not receive or send any Data, exactly like not being connected to the Internet, but my pc and Telkom’s networks tell me I am still connected!"

It is most frustrating and can last up to an hour at a time!! What modem are you useing, I suspect it has something to do with the marconi ethernet modems as after having mine replaced with another the problem subsided for a while.
 
<blockquote id="quote"><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by ItalicBold</i>
<br />Trace I have the EXACT same problem:

"My problem is that every time I connect to the Internet, my connection drops for roughly 10 seconds at a time it is very volatile and could happen 10 times a night or one… but for some unknown reason I stay connected to the net! (E.g.) I do not receive or send any Data, exactly like not being connected to the Internet, but my pc and Telkom’s networks tell me I am still connected!"<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

Join the club!

I've got a Alcatel Modem Italic, its not the modem, I actually had some people out here with some brains. The tested my line with a new digital cable tester. Within 30 seconds they picked up 16 errors. Turns out the copper cabling is so poor of nature that the adsl system does'nt operate properly through them. My result : "Sorry sir, we cannot gaurentee 52K" ?!?!?!?!? I mean is Telkom using that excuse for every problem?!

Personally I think they never did their homework on the actually quality of infrastructure SA has to accomodate ADSL lines. This is not an excuse, Telkom is stealing THOUSANDS of rands from us the public and we just bend over and take it.

I worked for Telkom for a while and the only way you get a response out of them is to threaten them to cancell your service. So the resolution you ask?

Get a poll up and going where by you state the following :

"If Telkom does'nt meet the ADSL consumers(your) needs, will you cancel your service?"

Now as we all know, there are people out there waiting for ports to open and that will only happen if we cancel our service. <b>BUT</b>, what we need to do is inform the public of the EXACT nature of ADSL at the moment and basically scare them away from it.

I'll bet you anything that Telkom wil jump.
 
I would gladly cancel my service if there was something comepetitive, or an alternative.

But ISDN, and Analogue is just too expensive for an always on connection, and Diginet is ridiculously expensive.
 
About the delays and hesitations in connecting to other sites as well as brief outages.
I used traceroute to find the blockage and it always was on of the two following nodes.
In my case they are the first and second nodes after my router.

tpr-bras-128-01.telkom-ipnet.co.za
rndf-er-1-atm-12-0-0-2.telkom-ipnet.co.za

I have reported this repeatedly to the help desk to no avail.

What I think is happening is that one of these nodes performs traffic shaping. This is quite a processor intensive task and I think that connections queue up due to congestion of the traffic shaping node. (internally traffic shaping works by putting slower traffic in a pool and delaying it)

I think the fix is to put in more powerful nodes (little hope of that) but an even better fix is simply to abandon traffic shaping (snow ball's hope in ..) I can dream, can't I?
 
<blockquote id="quote"><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by TrAcE</i>


My problem is that every time I connect to the Internet, my connection drops for roughly 10 seconds at a time it is very volatile and could happen 10 times a night or one… but for some unknown reason I stay connected to the net! (E.g.) I do not receive or send any Data, exactly like not being connected to the Internet, but my pc and Telkom’s networks tell me I am still connected!

<font face="Arial"></font id="Arial">[/font=Arial]
<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

I have this problem too. I used to have the same problem when I was with Telkom Internet on ISDN. As soon as I changed ISP's the problem disappeared.
Now I am back with Telkom Internet, very unwillingly, as an ASDL user.
If anyone can recommend an alternative, reasonably priced ISP for DSL I would be happy to change.
 
<blockquote id="quote"><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by syntaX</i>
<br /> Telkom had also very briefly blocked the use of dyndns, though that had been removed.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

I have been using dyndns since November 2002. In my opinion Telkom have not and cannot block it. When u log on with ADSL, u get ur dynamic IP from Telkoms IP server(s). There are over 20 different dynamic dns clients available to download. All they do is allow you to set a DNS name to ur dynamic IP addy. How can Telkom block what they have no direct control over? The software monitors the connection and when it drops and reconnects, sends the new IP to their DNS Servers.

Its also instant, the minute its uploaded, u can type in your friendly DNS and BINGO! Unlike the 8 hour delay we have with normal DNS population...
 
Doesn't telkom block incoming connections? So why would you need a static ip (other than for routing issues) or a dyndns?
 
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