NeonNinja
Neon Resident
This is a collective review based on 4 MyBroadband members including myself.
Words to sum up the product: Bad, (more like) defective.
Words to sum up the company support: Subpar, mediocre.
Words to sum up company itself: Fickle, rookie like, dishonorable.
Why? Take a look at this mutual review.
We were all jubilant when we heard of a mobile uncapped product that looked like it was to be decent.
On the 2nd of October 2013 our accounts were debited R199. But only got to use the product on the 15th of October. No follow-up, incentive nor anything. The delivery process was a pain in the back-side, as we had to suck our thumbs to guess when will the sim card be delivered, initially upon registration, we were told it will be delivered on the 5th of October, which didn't happen. We weren't provided with any tracking details or a web page to track our orders. Upon calling Lucidview on the days prior the delivery (multiple times), they said they don’t know anything, or will get back to you, in which case they didn't. The sim card finally arrived on the 14th of October. Which we had to wait for MTN to assign and RICA our numbers, after that was done, it was another wait for the APN to be established on the number, which started to work as stated, on the 15th of October. We paid for a full month’s use, but only get half a month. No prorata billing whatsoever.
MTN offers the same but with 3GB and 10GB soft-caps, throttled to 128Kbps. The initial MyBroadband article did the following comparison here: http://mybroadband.co.za/news/cellular/87617-r199month-for-uncapped-mobile-broadband.html
Mobile device review:
Semi-usable on a mobile phone. Downloads prioritised to death.
OK, I told myself ‘if the product is for chatting, I will go into to the Google Play Store (Android) and download my "chitchat" applications.’ Was I so disappointed! Google Play Store times out, I've tried it about 20 times now, at the time of this writing. Oh wait, Whatsapp is 11MB, and that is a download. And downloads are classified last/fourth priority, why did I even bother thinking I was going to be successful in downloading it? Never minding a 500KB "chichat" app which you'll never find this day and age. I tried the Whatsapp apk, and download was crawling at 10-15KB/s on the Dolphin HD browser. Just gave up.
Trying to use Opera Mini on my Android devices (Samsung Pocket and Galaxy Tab 2), to no avail. The default browser works, but many web pages take eons to load, or they time out, with www.bing.com and few others like www.news24.com being exceptions.
Question is, if the first priority is given precedence, what difference does it make if you use Whatsapp/Viber at 4Mbps or 0.4Mbps, wait, songs would download faster if someone's sending you a song, yes, but now we would be violating the terms by using the service to send copyrighted material. So text messages it is (which requires less than 128Kbps).
PC review:
Connections used: Huawei E5331, Huawei E220, Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 as hotspot. Settings changed accordingly.
Quality of service is abysmal.
This is a speedtest:
No no no, don't get too excited, as the speedtests are part of priority 1, for a reason unbeknownst to humankind why. This is nowhere near what the product actually is and performs, far from that.
This is how almost everything excluding priority 1 performs:
On the first day, some websites were inaccessible like: Google
Lucidview on the 16th of October gave me a call to tell me "everything is sorted. Try again." I got a little bit excited, because I knew better. This a review an hour after supposedly “everything was sorted”:
All downloads are on the last priority, a 133KB ".ppt" PowerPoint file took 34 seconds to download.
This 500KB PDF document I was downloading for my school assignment:
Failed because it is a ‘download’.
Furthermore, here is video footage I took, exhibiting how dismal this product is:
Other forumites:
After initial launch, the http://www.lucidview.net/chitchat/how-it-works website was amended more than 5 times, unfortunately I did not record the changes. But what I know for sure, there were 3 priorities instead of 4. OK just found proof now, just took a snapshot of their priorities page
As seen here. 3 priorities initially, then bumped to 4 and priorities themselves edited. They didn't even bother to edit the web page properly.
Bare in mind, these changes are done when we already put in our orders and paid, and were never notified of any changes.
18/10/2013
Another policy change:
No downloads (except for Phone store and app updates)
No streaming (video or audio)
No torrents
No VPN tunneling
No multi user sharing of single chitchat sim
Sim cards is to be used in cellphone and tablets only
If you caught breaking any, service is suspended and no refunds.
And the product died.
Good luck on trying to pull 500MB in a month on this product, and good luck to Lucidview selling this to their target audience.
There's Afrihost Mobile (MTN) 10GB for R197, TM 20GB for R299 (12 month contr), hell even TM's 3GB for R150 product, and much cheaper chat products all over the place @ the R60 price range which are superlative to this product + the famous BIS for Blackberry's @ R60.
At R199, the product is a FAIL and a huge rip off.
Daily feedback/review here: http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthread.php/563251-LucidView-mobile-uncapped-feedback/page14
Steer clear!
Words to sum up the product: Bad, (more like) defective.
Words to sum up the company support: Subpar, mediocre.
Words to sum up company itself: Fickle, rookie like, dishonorable.
Why? Take a look at this mutual review.
We were all jubilant when we heard of a mobile uncapped product that looked like it was to be decent.
On the 2nd of October 2013 our accounts were debited R199. But only got to use the product on the 15th of October. No follow-up, incentive nor anything. The delivery process was a pain in the back-side, as we had to suck our thumbs to guess when will the sim card be delivered, initially upon registration, we were told it will be delivered on the 5th of October, which didn't happen. We weren't provided with any tracking details or a web page to track our orders. Upon calling Lucidview on the days prior the delivery (multiple times), they said they don’t know anything, or will get back to you, in which case they didn't. The sim card finally arrived on the 14th of October. Which we had to wait for MTN to assign and RICA our numbers, after that was done, it was another wait for the APN to be established on the number, which started to work as stated, on the 15th of October. We paid for a full month’s use, but only get half a month. No prorata billing whatsoever.
MTN offers the same but with 3GB and 10GB soft-caps, throttled to 128Kbps. The initial MyBroadband article did the following comparison here: http://mybroadband.co.za/news/cellular/87617-r199month-for-uncapped-mobile-broadband.html
Mobile device review:
Semi-usable on a mobile phone. Downloads prioritised to death.
OK, I told myself ‘if the product is for chatting, I will go into to the Google Play Store (Android) and download my "chitchat" applications.’ Was I so disappointed! Google Play Store times out, I've tried it about 20 times now, at the time of this writing. Oh wait, Whatsapp is 11MB, and that is a download. And downloads are classified last/fourth priority, why did I even bother thinking I was going to be successful in downloading it? Never minding a 500KB "chichat" app which you'll never find this day and age. I tried the Whatsapp apk, and download was crawling at 10-15KB/s on the Dolphin HD browser. Just gave up.
Trying to use Opera Mini on my Android devices (Samsung Pocket and Galaxy Tab 2), to no avail. The default browser works, but many web pages take eons to load, or they time out, with www.bing.com and few others like www.news24.com being exceptions.
Question is, if the first priority is given precedence, what difference does it make if you use Whatsapp/Viber at 4Mbps or 0.4Mbps, wait, songs would download faster if someone's sending you a song, yes, but now we would be violating the terms by using the service to send copyrighted material. So text messages it is (which requires less than 128Kbps).
PC review:
Connections used: Huawei E5331, Huawei E220, Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 as hotspot. Settings changed accordingly.
Quality of service is abysmal.
This is a speedtest:
No no no, don't get too excited, as the speedtests are part of priority 1, for a reason unbeknownst to humankind why. This is nowhere near what the product actually is and performs, far from that.
This is how almost everything excluding priority 1 performs:
On the first day, some websites were inaccessible like: Google
Lucidview on the 16th of October gave me a call to tell me "everything is sorted. Try again." I got a little bit excited, because I knew better. This a review an hour after supposedly “everything was sorted”:
Minor change.
(Honestly, don't expect us to review Whatsapp, news &/or banking websites)
- Websites still take some time to load, no difference in browsing whatsoever.
- Facebook's picked up a tad, Twitter as well.
- Sometimes other websites don't load or take pretty long and time out. This could be a DNS resolution issue. This happens to Google a lot as well.
- YouTube 144p quite a lot of hiccups. It pauses for 30 seconds then streams for 2 seconds.
- Twit.TV 400Kbps fine (for how long?), 800Kbps unusable.
- Can't go into Vimeo or Hulu because of the slowness of website loading.
EDIT: Vimeo refuses to load on Chrome, it finally loaded on Mozilla and every resolution is stagnant.
- I can now stream on 5fm.co.za without issues including tunein, but some stations buffer.
- Sky.FM. streams well (the default 40Kbps).
- Downloads from the most popular virus free freeware website www.filehippo.com run @ 5KB/s (On Afrihost Mobile
they run at close to 2MB/s, 2000 times faster on the same network, MTN) as seen here
- MyBroadband seems nifty. But in no way nifty as Afrihost Mobile.
I'm currently sending Tarryn an email to this post, and the email itself is "sending" for 30 secs now, then "retrying" for 10 secs, then after a minute email sent.
EDIT: I know there's really a problem with my connection when this part of Gmail is not active:
P.S, the upload wizard for this image took a minute
All downloads are on the last priority, a 133KB ".ppt" PowerPoint file took 34 seconds to download.
This 500KB PDF document I was downloading for my school assignment:
Failed because it is a ‘download’.
Furthermore, here is video footage I took, exhibiting how dismal this product is:
Other forumites:
Xeslaro:
After initial launch, the http://www.lucidview.net/chitchat/how-it-works website was amended more than 5 times, unfortunately I did not record the changes. But what I know for sure, there were 3 priorities instead of 4. OK just found proof now, just took a snapshot of their priorities page
As seen here. 3 priorities initially, then bumped to 4 and priorities themselves edited. They didn't even bother to edit the web page properly.
Bare in mind, these changes are done when we already put in our orders and paid, and were never notified of any changes.
18/10/2013
Another policy change:
No downloads (except for Phone store and app updates)
No streaming (video or audio)
No torrents
No VPN tunneling
No multi user sharing of single chitchat sim
Sim cards is to be used in cellphone and tablets only
If you caught breaking any, service is suspended and no refunds.
And the product died.
Good luck on trying to pull 500MB in a month on this product, and good luck to Lucidview selling this to their target audience.
There's Afrihost Mobile (MTN) 10GB for R197, TM 20GB for R299 (12 month contr), hell even TM's 3GB for R150 product, and much cheaper chat products all over the place @ the R60 price range which are superlative to this product + the famous BIS for Blackberry's @ R60.
At R199, the product is a FAIL and a huge rip off.
Daily feedback/review here: http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthread.php/563251-LucidView-mobile-uncapped-feedback/page14
Steer clear!
Last edited:
