Vodacom 3G vs Telkom Dialup

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MrG

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Hey forumites

I currently have a 56K dialup connection, which I only use over weekends. I dont download much, only browse (the entire weekend) and play World of Warcraft the ENTIRE weekend.

Phone Bill : R450 ----> Internet only (occasional phone calls aswell, but ya)
My question, can I put a 1GB Data Bundle onto my Vodacom Talk 120 and not reach the cap in one month?

What do you think? Anything I should know before cancelling my Telkom account :confused:
 
The latency on dial-up is much better than 3G. For online gaming you are better advised to stick to the dial-up.
 
If we go on 5 MB per hour playing WoW, assuming you play 30 hours over the weekend, multiply by 4 weeks a month = 600 MB . That would leave another 400 MB [80 hours of WoW] to play around with to do whatever.

So yea, i'd say 1GB would be sufficient , given you don't plan to download the game itself via it as well.

As for latency, i don't know, i tried MMORPG'ing on dial-up and it wasn't exactly playable in any place with more than 2 people in your vacinity. My latency on 3G is not "worse" than dial-up as far that goes [more or less the same], but the additional speed still helps.

Now further assuming you pay for that Talk 120 "anyway" [in other words you pay for it now whether you use data or not] then the only cost is that of the 1GB bundle which is R500 [last i checked]. So you don't actually save at all, although you can play wherever you want.

PS: Haven't used dial-up in awhile, but was callmore [the R7 service] stopped? When i was on dial-up with callmore, i paid roughly R200 per month and then i was online the -entire- weekend [as in 7pm friday i log in and 7am monday i disconnect].

PSS: Don't underesitmate "browsing", my browsing stats show i use more data "just browsing" than playing an MMORPG. [just visiting the vodacom site to see how much data you have left can easily end up with a quick 500kb-1MB right there]. So if you browse ALOT [as in flash sites, streaming audio/video here and there, java sites, graphic heavy sites] then dial-up will still be cheaper.
 
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Thank you for your response, yes, the callmore service is now called infini-call and that is what I am using at the moment. I have tested wow over Vodacom 3G and it is actually marginally worse (lately), but usually it is the same or better than dialup.

Dialup I get about 700 - 1200 latency on the U.S Server that I play on.
3G today I was getting 1800 - 2200 which is rather unusual.

With these strange latencies I have not had the chance to test the bandwidth usage correctly, are you sure it uses about 5MB per hour?

I really do like the speed of Vodacom 3G, but was not really sure if it was designed to replace dialup or a fix line service.
 
With these strange latencies I have not had the chance to test the bandwidth usage correctly, are you sure it uses about 5MB per hour?
Click to expand...

It's a rough estimate. I played GuildWars, WoW, EvE and Anarchy Online all of them used between 2MB - 5MB per hour. AO actually was about 2MB mostly (i had to check this in detail as i was playing on GPRS with the R2 p/MB rate), Guildwars [which i still play now and then] is about 4MB [and that included some streamed updates]. It also depends on what you actually do in the game. If you just stand in one spot and "bot" all alone, then obviously you won't use as much data as when you run around in highly populated areas and zone every 5 minutes

Shouldn't be hard to test anyway, just play an hour :P

PS Speaking of GPRS....if 3G isn't working well, you can always try GPRS since it's almost same speed as Dial-Up (slightly faster). [If can get 3G you can get GPRS/EDGE mostly too]
 
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what kind of latency do you get over 3G and Gprs over wow cause i think mine might be a little high
 
diabolus said:
600-800ms usually, although mine is also bad lately [1000-1200 to google].
Click to expand...

Maybe its better after hours, just now 18h08 I got 280 ms average to www.saix.net and 618 ms average to www.google.com.
Also I pinged my company's website in Germany and that averaged at 711 ms.
Not bad?

Edit: This was on Vodacom 3G. GPRS pings are usually higher in duration.
 
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