Dropped connections on Cell C

[Dave A]

The dropped connections on Cell C have been driving me scatty for the past week or so.

Right in the middle of their big promo about how much better their choice of a lower frequency band is because it means a stronger signal.

And quite often when I try to connect, I get a "remote computer failed to respond" error message.

Cell C - For me the signal isn't the problem - your capacity is!

[AmithS]

I agree, this is the same problem I have been having for a few months now - I posted on another thread and it is getting worse to a point where even if I tried to finish my bundle for the month I cannot!

[Sparks]

Yip, I ended up giving mine away, dongle, sim & all.

8TA is better than CellC has ever been. I live outside the "8TA reception area" yet there is full strength signal and no dropped connections. The speed is amazing. All it took was a USB extension cord to lift the dongle.

[irneb]

We'll see you back in a few months after 8ta's client base has grown the same way Cell-C's has. When C started with their cheap and fast connection, they were also the golden "perfection" everyone was looking for. But that was due to them only having about 10 people on their network at the time! Now with 100,000's it's a total different story.

Dave, you're showing EXACTLY what the issue is. It's not the signal strength, it's the hard-wired capacity of their towers-connections-servers-link-etc. Once the numbers climb, they very seldom do an upgrade on that lot. Usually (if you're lucky) they simply add more towers, but that only solves one (and that's a small one) part of the problem.

[Sparks]

Precisely, the dropped connections waste your bandwidth. I do big downloads and battled to get them completed. Sometimes you cannot resume a download. With 8TA the the drop rate does not exist. For big downloads I will stick to my ADSL. It may be a lot slower but it is reliable.

[irneb]

Actually you're lucky with the ADSL ... we used to have a dual 4MB/s ADSL on top of our Verison Radio (actually piggy-backing on MTN) connection for the office. The radio was usually very buggy to say the least, but the ADSL was slow and continued to timeout on connections. Our downloads / uploads are also rather huge, since these a DWG/RVT/PSD/PDF/etc. files which could be anything from 2 MB to 500MB (or sometimes even more). We constantly (near the end of the month) had messages stating our capping limit was reached (at a 20GB cap). Then after paying extra the cap limit message disapeared though we still got those timeouts.

We've moved to Cell C on a fibre optic broadband line. It's not perfect either, but we tend to be able to at least get the job done. A few months ago our major program (AutoCAD) had an update ... only available through download. All of 4.7GB worth for the Vanilla program and a further 6GB for the Revit companion program. Then also another 3GB of standard materials and libraries. All that took a whole 4 hours to download, whereas previously such stuff would simply fail outright! While we were still on the ADSL/Radio I sometimes had to plug my phone into the PC to use my Vodacom Data Bundle for such downloads.