On the verge of cancelling iBurst

C

Creed

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Location
Close to Jan Smuts airport
I have been an iBurst customer for close to two years and I have had it with with the quality of the technical service.

I logged a complaint with the the technical department and I got a call from them today and the guy explained to me why I was getting such bad speeds and high latencies.

He explained to me the system that is used by iBurst to determine what speeds you get.Slots. When I signed up I got good speeds, about 900Kb/s now I get bad speeds that is making the service unuseable at times.

The guy told me that this is as good as it is going to get for me and that I have to "take it or leave it".He told me that there is no congestion or flooding on the service and that the slotting system assigns you a speed depending on your coverage, he also told me that I was never supposed to get 900Kb/s and that I was lucky to get those speeds.He also told me that if I want to play games I can play them at night.

Yes they throttle u to the speed that they thnik you are supposed to get depending on what colour of the coverage u live in.Sigal makes no difference

I am sick of this crap, last time when I couldn't send attachments(worked through my phone's internet) I was told that the file isn't allowed to be over 6Meg and it has to be in PDF, o and I need to make sure my MTU is 1352.

I don't want to support Telkom but it seems I have little choice
 
Eish I am glad I heard this and I wanted to join them. I think their network is getting to maximum capacity anyone else ex piercing this?
 
Eish I see you are close to jack airport next thing they will tell you is the planes are destroying the molecules in the air.
 
This seems to fit in with what happened to me "never supposed to get 900Kb/s and that I was lucky to get those speeds" as I already said after they played with my tower my speeds dropped but others who were getting lower speeds increased.

This then means for those who had good speeds before are wasting their time getting an antenna to increase signal strength etc., if iburst are putting a throttle on those that used to have full speed because they don't fall into the dark orange areas of the coverage maps.

The only reason I can see for this is to reduce the tower loading which is BS, they should rather increase the amount of users a tower can handle or put up additional towers.

Looks like they trying to make as much money out of each tower as they can even if it means reducing the speed we as customers pay for each month.
 
Well I dont think the "network" is being overloaded, its purely up to individual towers. If a new tower comes up outside my house and noone else logs on, I will get great speeds, over 1mb/s half the time I'm sure, especially at night.

So it depends where you live, actually Plumstead is still good, and so is most of Cape Town, bar the CBD obviously.
 
Ha.. If i actually switch off my lights i can turn my room into a club.

It fluctuates so badly: from red LED straight to 5 LED - i wait 2 seconds, back to red LED again!!!

"Experience up to 1mb/s" - my f!ucken ball sack!

I'd never think i'd say this, but i wish i could get ADSL in my area!!!!!!!! :(
 
Hi Creed.The Technical Department at iBurst is 100% correct concerning your declining speed issues.I've been to an iBurst Technical training course done by Shaun Green and this was explained by him.
 
Creed said:
Yes they throttle u to the speed that they thnik you are supposed to get depending on what colour of the coverage u live in.Sigal makes no difference.
Click to expand...

Well honestly I think this is a good load of crap. I've seen my speeds go up to 1mb at night and Mr.H's speeds were often over 900 during the day, yet he isn't even in the darkest shades of orange. That is because he is high up so he gets amazing signal, and it makes all the difference, unless your tower is congested.

How would you explain better speeds at night when there is obviously less load? Do they unthrottle you at night, just sort of for fun, and then throttle you during the day to loose customers?

You really think signal makes no difference? Anyway, how do they work in antennas on that system? I guess they cant use signal... must just take a guess at what your speed should be and give you those ;)
 
The reality is not that the throttling is intentional .. rather it's a "feature" of the iburst protocol specification.

Dependant on the quality band you fall into you are allocated time-slots.

Sadly I think that cogestion DOES play a roll on many towers. Recall that there are only so many slots per second to share among all available users....
 
Hi Creed.The Technical Department at iBurst is 100% correct concerning your declining speed issues.I've been to an iBurst Technical training course done by Shaun Green and this was explained by him.
Click to expand...
so in essence they all bull****ting you about the nice 1Mbps speed... guess 2Mbps is also bull**** then...
 
According to them there is no flooding during the day, meaning that there towers aren't being overloaded.

Crappy speeds during busy times and better speeds late at night disprove this statement.What do u think is going to happen when the ppl close to the tower get preference on the 2MB connection?

There isn't enough bandwidth to go around now and when the 2MB connection come in those of us who live in light green will get the proverbial table scraps.
Sure you u might get decent speeds late at night when the network is deserted but during the rest of the day the connection speed will be very bad.

Obviously signal does make a difference if you get very bad signal.I have LoS to the tower and I used to get 900Kb/s on speedtests now they tell me that I should be happy with 150Kb/s.I got an antenna to boost my signal but because I aready had a pretty good signal it made no difference.

I am thinking of moving to 384Kb/s, sure if I want to DL something at 3AM the iBurst will give me better speeds but when I DL something at 3AM I'll start it then go to bed so it won't make a diff to me.

Check this out, Telkom's prices have gone down bigtime since I have gotten iBurst. http://www.telkom.co.za/athome/products/dsl/home_how_much.html
 
Oh and about the 1Mb speed, when I said I am paying for a service that I am not currently recieving I was told that they NEVER claimed to give a 1MB connection, if I read the ads properly I will see that it says up to 1 meg.
 
Yeah, but it is the up to bit that they use to justify k@k speeds.

I reckon point rpm to this thread, so they can do an article. Should open a few eyes (and mouths)
 
Shaun Green contacted me after reading my post and asked me if he could help me.

I was very busy so it took me a while to get back to him but 2 days after I did there was someone here.My connection is now a lot better than it was and I am getting decent WoW latencies.

If only all the iBurst personnel was friendly and efficient as he is they would have next to no complaints.

Thanx Shaun
 
Creed said:
Shaun Green contacted me after reading my post and asked me if he could help me.

I was very busy so it took me a while to get back to him but 2 days after I did there was someone here.My connection is now a lot better than it was and I am getting decent WoW latencies.

If only all the iBurst personnel was friendly and efficient as he is they would have next to no complaints.

Thanx Shaun
Click to expand...

What did they really do?
And what was the main cause to your problems?
 
My latencys and speeds have also been poor of late. My speeds went from around 800-900k to about 350k. I have no clue what the issue is and iv phoned iBurst and logged a complaint with the techincal department as well and they still havent got back to me which was over 2 weeks ago.

Thanks
DB
 
I'm not sure of everything the tech did but this is what I saw him do:

1) Update my firmware. (NB!!)
2) Used a program to change my network card's mtu(Dr TCP I think & to 1352)
3) Got on the roof and tested all the different signal strengths and told me where to put up the antenna.

All I know is that my connec is a lot better, the tech also gave me another piece of advice:

If the antenna is outside you need to make sure that the silver connector that the cable screws into is completely waterproof.According to him this can make a HUGE difference if it gets wet and is a common problem.

My connec is still slower during the day but as far as I know Kempton is getting more towers soon and I'll wait for that and the 2Mb/s connecs before I do anything drastic.

I tested my speeds at 4pm and got 350-600 KB/s
I did the same thing at 2 am and got 879 KB/s
 
Creed said:
I'm not sure of everything the tech did but this is what I saw him do:

1) Update my firmware. (NB!!)
2) Used a program to change my network card's mtu(Dr TCP I think & to 1352)
3) Got on the roof and tested all the different signal strengths and told me where to put up the antenna.
Click to expand...

Good stuff

I tested my speeds at 4pm and got 350-600 KB/s
I did the same thing at 2 am and got 879 KB/s
Click to expand...

So Kempton Park B/S does get congested during the day?
 
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