Which ISP to choose

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Pansyfaust

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Hey MyBB folks

So here is the situation. There are 5 of us in a house in Durban, we are all students and need internet. We are all connected to one wireless neotel router in the house.Three of us play online.

Now we have been using neotel for a year, we pay R700 for 10gigs...yup...makes you ache.The speeds are okay, but internet struggles if all of us are on at the same time, thats why we only mostly play games at night.

The real problem is the their billing system, or lack thereof, and bandwidth restrictions. The price per gig extra is ridiculous, and many months we have been overcharged for gigs we did not use(we all have bandwidth monitors: Netlimiter). Sometimes 3-5 gigs over, thus causing inflated costs which puts us in the R1000 costs per month. This has happened at least half of the months of last year...no amount of emailing them has helped to change it. Anyways....

Now thank be to all the gods, the contract is ending in March. Firstly we will have to activate the telephone line here, it does have one, but it is not activated. We must also check out if the telkom line here can manage 4mb or higher speeds, then we must choose an ISP.....

at first Mweb uncapped was an option, but of late i have seen many threads complaining about their 4 meg service and performance. But uncapped would be nice as its a flat rate each month. The total cost would be R900, does that include the line rental from Telkom? i.e, if we get a phone line installed, we wont have to pay telkom anything else each month, and just pay the R900 to mweb? I'm new to the line rental thingy....

We wouldn't really mind a capped one, as long as we can monitor it properly and its at least 20 gigs. Is WA a viable option for Durban? The price for 20gigs is R799, which is more, but speeds up too 10mb/s...sorry for the long post....
 
no R900 to mweb and R130 for telephone line rental for telkom even if dont use the phone.

and yes mweb will be a good option, or openweb gold.
 
they milk you for every cent you have :P

sorry was in hurry with that msg :p
 
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the 'concurrent connection' refers to the fact that if you open an account with them you will only be able to use it from 1 access point (telephone line), basically all 'reasonably priced' uncapped packages avail in SA are like this so don't worry about it.

I'm actually also looking for a 4mbps uncapped adsl package, since my neighbour and I are tired of our pathetic 384's and decided to split the cost of a 4mbit line..so I guess we're sorta are in the same boat, I'm currently considering the:

Openweb standard uncapped 4mbit @ R539
Openweb gold uncapped shaped 4mbit @ R738
Mweb standard uncapped 4mbit @R900, which includes the adsl line

The problem is I don't really play much online games but download like 24/7, while my neighbour plays online and probably also downloads (although I doubt as much as me), so basically we need something that has good latency most of the time and can also allow quite a bit of downloading

Currently I think the first and last packages are pretty much dog shaait when it comes to low latency (am I wrong?) but can provide a decent amount of downloading capacity per month (same as the gold account?)

Does anybody have any of these packages and if so, how much do you generally get out in a month of frenzied downloading (100gig?) and can you jam online games most times of the day with out any lag etc. ?
 
i can download like 300kbs( i limit it), thats news downloads, torrents takes to much connections to play online, but http and newsgroups then you can play online with decent ping.
 
sho that's quite nice. What package do you have and did you get that speed using the local news group server of just some international one?
 
Oh okay, concurrent connection should not be a prob. Well that open web deal looks good. R738 + 130= R868, which is not too bad i guess. Anybody here using open web and can recommend or not? Maybe some users in durbs....
 
Pansyfaust said:
Oh okay, concurrent connection should not be a prob. Well that open web deal looks good. R738 + 130= R868, which is not too bad i guess. Anybody here using open web and can recommend or not? Maybe some users in durbs....
Click to expand...

The ISP cost R738, the analog line cost R130 I guess. You still have to pay R483 I think for a 4mb line from telkom.
Don't get over excited.
 
I never get over excited about SA bandwidth :)
Okay, so what would the total cost be? We would have to pay R738 to Open web and R483 to telkom for the line and an extra R130 for telephone service every month? Seems mweb is cheaper, but more shaped, which is fine i guess. Dont do alot of p2p. Gaming should be okay hey?
 
Pansyfaust said:
I never get over excited about SA bandwidth :)
Okay, so what would the total cost be? We would have to pay R738 to Open web and R483 to telkom for the line and an extra R130 for telephone service every month? Seems mweb is cheaper, but more shaped, which is fine i guess. Dont do alot of p2p. Gaming should be okay hey?
Click to expand...

MWeb is R899 total, whereas OpenWeb would be R1221, both excluding the R130 line rental.

Most local gaming will be fine, international should be okay too but it's not the best connection for it. I'd say try MWeb first, you can easily change after a month if you're not happy.
 
Last year, there were five of us in a digs in Grahamstown. After fiddling around with Screamer, Digichilli and IS uncapped accounts we moved to MWEB. Generally, I've found their service to be fantastic. Our setup was like this:

Line Rental: R131.00
ADSL 4096: R413.00
MWEB UNC: R539.00
----------
R1083.00 / 5 = R216.16 per person per month.

All in all I thought it was a bargain. We had a dedicated machine to download torrents automatically with RSS feeds, three of us could play online games (BF2 on XBOX, CoD and Black Ops on PC) without any problems - bar a couple of evenings marred with latencies though the roof. In terms of data, on average though the year we pulled about 215.86GB/month and the average latencies were 57ms Grahamstown -- Joburg, which I thought was reasonable.

Anyway, call me an MWEB fanboi but it was the best thing we ever did :)
 
hambone said:
Last year, there were five of us in a digs in Grahamstown. After fiddling around with Screamer, Digichilli and IS uncapped accounts we moved to MWEB. Generally, I've found their service to be fantastic. Our setup was like this:

Line Rental: R131.00
ADSL 4096: R413.00
MWEB UNC: R539.00
----------
R1083.00 / 5 = R216.16 per person per month.

All in all I thought it was a bargain. We had a dedicated machine to download torrents automatically with RSS feeds, three of us could play online games (BF2 on XBOX, CoD and Black Ops on PC) without any problems - bar a couple of evenings marred with latencies though the roof. In terms of data, on average though the year we pulled about 215.86GB/month and the average latencies were 57ms Grahamstown -- Joburg, which I thought was reasonable.

Anyway, call me an MWEB fanboi but it was the best thing we ever did :)
Click to expand...

this here :) This is what i like to hear. But it was last year, and this year mweb maybe is a lil bit worse for wear. I'll email Koema Wright and see what open web can offer. But openweb are a lil more expensive, even the standard uncapped 4meg service from openweb is around R80 more than mwebs similar offering. They will have to justify why they are R80 more....
 
So much to our dismay, the adsl line to the house we are staying in cannot support 4meg line, the fastest it can do is 512k/bits...this puts us in the ****ter!! Phoned telkom to get things rolling and they said the fastest line speed we can get is 512...so i think we gonna have too get 2 phone lines here, just to accommodate...means paying for two line rentals and then for two modems...damit telkom. If there was real telephone/line competition you'd make dham sure you could atleast give us a time frame for when the line would be upgraded. I mean economies of scale wise if you going around upgrading 4meg line to 10 meg lines it does not benefit the most of us,just the niche market...its just for your portfolio that says "we can get 10 meg speeds, pat on back for us" When i asked the tech dude on the phone when a line upgrade could be done she said she has no idea, could be weeks or months...or a year. If this was any other business you could demand they make a service available to the consumer, but no competition(neotel aint competition, spiritually or actual), no commitments....
 
1. CellC 4G Promotion
2. ADSL (NO TELKOM ISP) AFRIHOST ISP (Try going for 4mbit line and sharing the cost with neighbors)
 
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