Sapphiron
Honorary Master
Hi All
My Cybersmart 50mbit FTTH just went live today. Its the R1 499 pm uncapped, based on DFA fibre in Loevenstein, Cape Town.
how I qualified
Cybersmart/DFA is not going to pay to run fibre directly to anyone's home for R1.5k or R2.5K per month. They need about R10k to R15k per month to make it viable for them to go to the expense. So private home owners are out of luck. those is a block of flats, you have a much better chance, provided you can get enough people to commit. In my case, I was lucky. A wireless ISP in my area, had their highsite 400m up the hill from me. They wanted to use Cybersmart fibre as breakout bandwidth for their customer. They got the 200mbit connection from them for R19k-ish per month. They are then connecting the fibre to their highsite wirelessly. Since they are using my building, I automatically qualified for the FTTH installation at no additional upfront installation. For one of my neighbors to get connected, it would cost them about R15k once-off.
I will be posting my feedback and experiences over the coming weeks.
Local Speedtest (Cape Town)
London Speedtest
Joburg Speedtest
UPDATE1:
Shaping
Shaping is actually different from what I expected. it seems that they employ some form of threshold model. What I found was that after I had downloaded about 50GB in 3 hours or so (downloading all the GTA games over steam), they throttled the connection to about 8mbit, until the usage dropped to low levels for a few hours. otherwise the connection seems to be completely unshaped. Small price to pay for uncapped.
Latency
latency is amazing. Its very low and very stable. below is the latency to some equipment we have in the Teraco Datacenter in Cape Town.
The first 2/3rd of the graph was my Telkom ADSL using a Afrihost business uncapped account.
Youtube
Youtube starts playing in under 2 seconds. Typically defaults to 1440p60 if it is available. throughput is about 40 to 50mbits. 4K runs very smoothly.
Twitch
have not done too much testing, but seems to handle 1080p60 source quality in all cases. throughput is about 15 to 20mbits.
Steam downloads
Steam downloads at about 30mbits (3.7MB/s)
Gaming
160ms latency to Wargaming games (WoT and WoW)
same for War Thunder.
No lag despite Youtube 4K steaming in the background.
Jitter stays under 10ms
My Cybersmart 50mbit FTTH just went live today. Its the R1 499 pm uncapped, based on DFA fibre in Loevenstein, Cape Town.
how I qualified
Cybersmart/DFA is not going to pay to run fibre directly to anyone's home for R1.5k or R2.5K per month. They need about R10k to R15k per month to make it viable for them to go to the expense. So private home owners are out of luck. those is a block of flats, you have a much better chance, provided you can get enough people to commit. In my case, I was lucky. A wireless ISP in my area, had their highsite 400m up the hill from me. They wanted to use Cybersmart fibre as breakout bandwidth for their customer. They got the 200mbit connection from them for R19k-ish per month. They are then connecting the fibre to their highsite wirelessly. Since they are using my building, I automatically qualified for the FTTH installation at no additional upfront installation. For one of my neighbors to get connected, it would cost them about R15k once-off.
I will be posting my feedback and experiences over the coming weeks.
Local Speedtest (Cape Town)
London Speedtest
Joburg Speedtest
UPDATE1:
Shaping
Shaping is actually different from what I expected. it seems that they employ some form of threshold model. What I found was that after I had downloaded about 50GB in 3 hours or so (downloading all the GTA games over steam), they throttled the connection to about 8mbit, until the usage dropped to low levels for a few hours. otherwise the connection seems to be completely unshaped. Small price to pay for uncapped.
Latency
latency is amazing. Its very low and very stable. below is the latency to some equipment we have in the Teraco Datacenter in Cape Town.
The first 2/3rd of the graph was my Telkom ADSL using a Afrihost business uncapped account.
Youtube
Youtube starts playing in under 2 seconds. Typically defaults to 1440p60 if it is available. throughput is about 40 to 50mbits. 4K runs very smoothly.
Twitch
have not done too much testing, but seems to handle 1080p60 source quality in all cases. throughput is about 15 to 20mbits.
Steam downloads
Steam downloads at about 30mbits (3.7MB/s)
Gaming
160ms latency to Wargaming games (WoT and WoW)
same for War Thunder.
No lag despite Youtube 4K steaming in the background.
Jitter stays under 10ms
Last edited:
