Why do I stay with Neotel...

[medicnick83]

Okay, it's been asked alot (mostly via PM or chats via MSN or whatever) but now I'll answer for you.

"gdiza, why do you bother with Neotel?"

Easy answer...

Goto any major search engine, Google or Bing or whatever "Neotel problems" or "Neotel disconnections" or anything related to Neotel etc and see what happens.

MyBroadband threads come, depending on what search engine you use, quite a few of MY threads come up within the first few pages.

I'm not sure why I get some attention from people, but I think it's probably because whenever I post, I try to be VERY detailed in what has happened, what did happen, what should happen and ultimately, what did happen to fix the problem.

Alot of people then join MyBB and some PM me asking ME for advice on how to fix problems, or some ask ME if they should goto Neotel.

You can only imagine my answers (generally).

So as you can imagine, I love posting about my problems, if it stops 1/2 people going to Neotel (after seeing all my posts or asking me for advice) then "WONDERFUL"

And considering I'm in the IT trade, whenever we goto clients and they ask us about Neotel... the words "avoid" "stay away" "don't go near them" "lots of problems" etc come up very quickly and hey, it's not like I'm lying! Actually, I'm being incredibly honest.

Having said that, I like to think of myself as a very honest person.

I mean, how is it possible that after all this time (God knows how long I've been with Neotel) they still have problems, and it's all the same problems.

Over Christmas season, I was getting 200KB/s (generally) then just after new years (say the 2nd) my speeds dropped to under 100KB/s then lately, I get 50KB/s and less.

I've been told that Neotel have a 'fair usage' policy in place which they fail to mention to people - it IS there... which is weird because Neotel (Hugo) have denied this but I've heard from numerous 'reliable' sources that IT IS IN PLACE and that's why my speeds drop, but even with that, I've logged in to my home PC, checked my logs (during office hours) and my line does 10-20KB/s - I think it's something they don't like to tell people because it will cause issues, scare people away. Hugo can answer / deny in his own time.

Neotel blames everything ELSE, wind, clouds, SUNNY DAYS, but never it's own network etc for problems.

Thus... "this is why I stay with Neotel"

 

[Next Thing]

I've been told that Neotel have a 'fair usage' policy in place which they fail to mention to people - it IS there... which is weird because Neotel (Hugo) have denied this but I've heard from numerous 'reliable' sources that IT IS IN PLACE and that's why my speeds drop, but even with that, I've logged in to my home PC, checked my logs (during office hours) and my line does 10-20KB/s - I think it's something they don't like to tell people because it will cause issues, scare people away. Hugo can answer / deny in his own time.

Quite frankly if this can be proved they are actually in a lot of ****.

They advertise the neoflex service as unshaped so if they are in fact shaping it then they will be opening themselves up to ASA , false advertising, fraud as well as a few other headings.

Prove this and I can see a class action lawsuit.

I do honestly believe though there is prioritisation of Business over Consumer traffic setup on the towers and the misconfiguartion of this is what is causing a lot of the speed issues.


Hugo says they have no facilities for shaping LOL , but the prime service is shaped and advertised as shaped......

 

[Drake2007]

MyBroadband threads come, depending on what search engine you use, quite a few of MY threads come up within the first few pages.

That's your reason you stay with them?

 

[LabAnimal]

Everybody with Neotel should call and Cancel. I did, and I'm happy for it! Its the right thing to do!

 

[Neotel]

Answer

Gdiza

As much as we can go on and on arguing and again, its not there and it doesn't help trying to flush out a non existant theory, the bottom line is that we have an increasing volume of traffic on our network and we are focusing on rolling out capacity now faster than we aretrying to sign up user base,as well without denial it should be obvious that the network had fewer users over Christmas due to vacations etc, and hence each user had better performance, and that the pressure is back on again now that everyone is back from holidays.

Because we offer high caps and low prices, our network is typically under even more pressure than other providers. As a company, we pride ourselves on being ethical and not lying to customers - it's right at the heart of what Neotel is about. Don't misinterpret the failings of some individuals, or even simple confusion, for intentional malice. When we say we don't shape, we don't shape. With the exception of a few specific incidents involving core or international links, the vast majority of effects any user sees are on the radio access network - either congestion, or maintenance work and repairs (which we now advise on this forum and many others).

Neotel's national backbone is the highest capacity IP network in the country, and our international connectivity is through the only global Tier 1 network in the country (which carries 15% of core Internet traffic globally), with multiple physical routes to other nodes, making use of SAT-3, SAFE and SEACOM, which we connect to directly, not through any other providers. We don't publish figures for our international traffic, but we have more capacity than is currently used, meaning that there is currently no contention whatsoever on international links. Similarly, we have uncontended peering to all the other major SA ISPs. To repeat - the only contention that consumers are seeing is on the radio network. Our fibre customers don't see this at all.

Hugo

 

[Sting]

Neotel's national backbone is the highest capacity IP network in the country

Can you prove this claim?

 

[diabolus]

Heh, gdiza you need to look at that tinfoil hat of yours. Sometimes the most obvious reason is the correct one...which would be an unstable/congested/under provided network and possibly even poorly implemented network. I would also even consider "traffic prioritization" towards certain types of clients a more likely possiblity [i.e. business vs consumer] than some "fair use" cap.

Just the fact that i'm now on an ADSL package coming from Seacom and hearing things like "Neotel backbone is having issues, therefore [name your lower tier ISP] are having issues" tells me it's not some "built in" function Neotel implemented to enforce some sort of "global fair use" cap .

Surely they're not capping the ISPs too are they?

I would also like to believe Neotel is that advanced [the same company who can't even provide a bandwidth meter] to have built all kinds of little "checks and balances" right down to consumer level to "throttle" you when it looks like you're pulling too much data as compared to the rest of the users on your tower......it's like saying Google is actually reading your email in person and caring.

 

[Quest10n]

Gdiza

As much as we can go on and on arguing and again, its not there and it doesn't help trying to flush out a non existant theory, the bottom line is that we have an increasing volume of traffic on our network and we are focusing on rolling out capacity now faster than we aretrying to sign up user base,as well without denial it should be obvious that the network had fewer users over Christmas due to vacations etc, and hence each user had better performance, and that the pressure is back on again now that everyone is back from holidays.

Because we offer high caps and low prices, our network is typically under even more pressure than other providers. As a company, we pride ourselves on being ethical and not lying to customers - it's right at the heart of what Neotel is about. Don't misinterpret the failings of some individuals, or even simple confusion, for intentional malice. When we say we don't shape, we don't shape. With the exception of a few specific incidents involving core or international links, the vast majority of effects any user sees are on the radio access network - either congestion, or maintenance work and repairs (which we now advise on this forum and many others).

Neotel's national backbone is the highest capacity IP network in the country, and our international connectivity is through the only global Tier 1 network in the country (which carries 15% of core Internet traffic globally), with multiple physical routes to other nodes, making use of SAT-3, SAFE and SEACOM, which we connect to directly, not through any other providers. We don't publish figures for our international traffic, but we have more capacity than is currently used, meaning that there is currently no contention whatsoever on international links. Similarly, we have uncontended peering to all the other major SA ISPs. To repeat - the only contention that consumers are seeing is on the radio network. Our fibre customers don't see this at all.

Hugo

Who are these so called fibre customers? Residential or Businesses only

 

[jeanres]

Neotel cannot even cap themselfs they do not have the technical knowladge to do jack ****. Not even cancelations.

 

[kilobits]

Neotel cannot even cap themselfs they do not have the technical knowladge to do jack ****. Not even cancelations.

Neotal are indeed capping themselves...

They are very evidently self -handicapping themselves as are their clients ? ? !!!

Neotel Self-handicapping, a psychological method of finding something to blame for failure besides one's own inability.

Neotel / iBurst client Self-handicapping, a psychological method of finding something to blame for failure besides one's own inability to finally pack it in and change providers.

 

[Neotel]

Reply

Can you prove this claim?

The national IP backbone consists of multiple 10 Gbps wavelengths (on DWDM fibre routes), forming a mesh across nine major nodes (all cities, not just the main ones). Each node has a minimum of 3 links, making >30 Gbps of connectivity per node. I guess others would have to refute our claim. Only Telkom would come close, we think.

Hugo

 

[Sting]

The national IP backbone consists of multiple 10 Gbps wavelengths (on DWDM fibre routes), forming a mesh across nine major nodes (all cities, not just the main ones). Each node has a minimum of 3 links, making >30 Gbps of connectivity per node. I guess others would have to refute our claim. Only Telkom would come close, we think.

Hugo

Yes, Telkom has this just to meet the standalone FIFA requirements for SWC2010.

Then they have their normal backbone on which they carry 4,5mil subscribers' traffic plus corporate traffic....

 

[Neotel]

Who

Who are these so called fibre customers? Residential or Businesses only

Currently, only larger services are offered on fibre - hence are typically bought by larger business customers. Neotel is looking for creative ways to make it cost-effective to deliver broadband services over fibre to consumers and to smaller businesses. We are getting closer to making it possible as we get more fibre in the cities, and are working on products. Just the cost of deploying access fibre is the biggest hurdle compared to wireless.

Hugo

 

[ads]

Yes, Telkom has this just to meet the standalone FIFA requirements for SWC2010.

Then they have their normal backbone on which they carry 4,5mil subscribers' traffic plus corporate traffic....

Telkom's FIFA network is just transmission - it's not part of their public IP network (Internet) at all. I don't suppose you happen to know the size of their public IP network, which is what this is about. Lots of carriers (including the two we have in SA) provide corporate networks at this scale (although there aren't that many corporates in SA who need them). The travesty is that Telkom is able to do this for FIFA, but it cannot offer anything better than a claimed 4 Mbps to most of us. ("We have enough fibre to go around the world three times, but we can't get it to your house.") You'd think they'd be able to do better by now, given their 100 year lead in the market. BTW They have well under a million ADSL subs (around 600k) - the rest of the 4.5 million (and dropping) copper line subs are connected to their legacy voice network. According to mybb stats, wireless now makes up about 60% of the broadband market, depite Telkom's unfair advantage. Of course, they're soon going to cannibalise their own network, by becoming Cell C Lite...

 

[medicnick83]

That's your reason you stay with them?

Nothing gives me greater pleasure than going to these Neotel stands (all over) and going up to them and asking them if they can explain problems like 'disconnections' or 'slow speeds' or 'speeds are NOT consistent' or 'try calling the centre and asking questions' and seeing what they say and (insert every other problem we have) and then they sit there and UMMMMMMMMMMMMM and ERRRRRRRRRRRRR while I look on and 'potential' customers wait to see what they'll say.

And trust me, I do it - every chance I get, I do it.

If I wasn't with them, I would have no right because I am not with them - so I probably wouldn't know what I was talking about - but I do!

On a few occasions, I've just told the people to goto "this web site" and check the Neotel section before signing up with Neotel.

I'd bet R20 that NONE of them went Neotel.

I remember when I originally signed up with Neotel, not only was my installation delayed by almost an entire month, but the guy even said; "Sir, I can almost GUARANTEE you will get 100KB/s average" since 9am this morning, 35KB/s is what I have been getting - the most basic of promises and that wasn't even kept, let alone the installation (receival of device)

Ag, I can carry on but why bother... I just await the next PM or something and take it from there.

 

[Sting]

If I wasn't with them, I would have no right because I am not with them - so I probably wouldn't know what I was talking about - but I do!

Good one. I have a similar principle: don't comment on assumptions, but from self-experience!