Telkom ADSL

[Martinco]

What has been your experience with Telkom adsl lately ?

Well..............mine not too good !

Since about August last year, I started to experience slow connection speeds and took this up with my ISP and Telkom. Well as you can imagine, the one blamed the other for the problem. I then moved the adsl line over to the ISP and then took them to task on this issue.
The long and the short is/was that the "exchange is overloaded" and nothing to be done about it.
I had a 384 line that sometimes connects to as low as 4 kb/s which is of cause unworkable. Very frequently the speedtest.net would not even load.........a 800 Kb file takes +- 40 minutes to download. In all the time I had the adsl line, I never came close to the advertised speed of 384 ! ( Is there a case here for misrepresentation ? )

The suggestion from the ISP was to "upgrade to a 1 Meg line" which "should help a bit". Ja well no fine.......if you calculate this out I can then expect about a 12 kb/s connection.

The result of this whole scenario was that I cancelled my ISP, adsl and for that matter my phone line as well and moved over to a local Wi Fi ISP which now gives me without fail a 460 to 550 download and a 260 to 400 upload speed These guys do not make use of Telkom lines at all ! Towers all the way to PTA.

And all this for a lower cost than the adsl route !

[Just Gone]

Eish - I have just ordered an ADSL line for home with wi-fi. I want to convert my existing line to adsl so I sincerely hope that I dont have the same hassle as you. I currently use I burst from home and work (same one) where I have a modem at work and a modem at home, but the home iburst coverage is not so good, therefore the changeover to adsl. At work the iburst is great and I very rarely have a problem - so heres holding thumbs.

[Dave A]

Fortunately my experience with Telkom ISP is mostly good, but then I'm coughing up for ADSL Fastest.

But every now and then I do get a sense that things are taking strain, mainly when AJAX functionality slows down (obviously one of the protocols they shape when bandwidth gets tight). The other indicator is IMAP response times between my local network server and the dedi server in JHB.

[irneb]

All I can say, is we had endless hassles with our ADSL lines. Used to have 2x 4 MBps ADSL lines into our firewall. And doing tests (i.e. overnight when no-one was on the network - LAN and WAN) we could expect a WOPPING 48kbytes per sec download on web. Email IMAP/POP3 wasn't running much better - so it wasn't a question of shaping. It should have read at around 350kby on a single 4MBit line!

The ADSL was used as a backup line, the main one was a wireless (from Verison through MTN) which ran at around 10MB ... if it worked .

Since around a year ago, we've chucked both those and moved to a NeoTel FibreOptic line ... usually don't get speeds less than 100kby/s (even when the line's in use by 20+ people at the office). It's supposed to run at 15MBit unshaped and uncapped ... well we were told they'd soft-cap us at 3TB/month . Thus far we've not experienced any capping / shaping whatsoever, and have experienced peaks of 2 MBy/sec downloads (i.e. around 21MBit/sec bandwidth). Only it's a bit expensive ... especially if you compare it to what's available overseas ... though about 1/2 price on what Telkom+Verison+xDSL charged us for the previous setup (which had a 50GB cap).

About the misrepresentation about that 384 ADSL. It's a situation of it being stated in BIT-rate, and you thinking it is BYTE-rate. See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_ra...ding_confusion

So at best, the difference is 1 to 8. In practise it's more like 1 to 10 because of control signals. So on a 1 MBit/sec line you wouldn't expect much more than 100 kByte/sec throughput. On that score, the speeds you see on your new WiFi seems to suggest they're running at 6 MBit/sec.

[AndyD]

Well reading some of the speeds on this thread makes me wonder how they can get away with it. If I ever got 'as low as 4 kb/s' I would probably cancel my ADSL on the spot and buy a 16gig flash drive and a homing pidgeon. I live way out in the sticks and I've been with Cybersmart for several years and their speeds are always up to scratch. I'm not a high bandwidth user (usually <60Gigs/month) but their prices are reasonable and they don't ever throttle and they don't shape or penalise by protocol. On the odd occasion I encounter a bottleneck it's always been my VPN or TOR network that slows things down.

[Dave A]

I'm not a high bandwidth user (usually <60Gigs/month)

Proof if ever there was that all things are relative

[Blurock]

I have been on ADSL for the past 4 years. The initial problems I've had, related to my being IT challenged, but we learn fast.

In the past 2 years we have hardly missed a byte. I have had one or two bad experiences with an incompetent at the call centre, but once I get through to a technician the service was mostly awesome.

[Martinco]

Just some feedback...............................

Still happy with my Wi-Fi and have upgraded to 3 gigs @ R 199.00 inc.
So to my mind not a bad deal !

[popayetwo]

According to a recent news report, Telkom is going to upgrade all 384 lines to 1 Meg in about two months time (July 2012) at no extra cost but ONLY in those exchanges that support the technology.
This brings them right up to world standard for the 20th century. Unfortunately, the rest of us are in the 21st century.
Still, its a step in the right direction. At this rate we should get 10mps in about 40 years time always supposeing Telkom still exists then.

[murdock]

I have been on ADSL for the past 4 years. The initial problems I've had, related to my being IT challenged, but we learn fast.

In the past 2 years we have hardly missed a byte. I have had one or two bad experiences with an incompetent at the call centre, but once I get through to a technician the service was mostly awesome.

the trick is just getting thru to the service technician.

dealing with mtn (we wont even talk about virgin molbile) is no better or quicker...in fact it takes longer to get thru than telkom and the call centre operators lack the skills to answer questions...so you end up getting transfered to other members to a point that you end up going to the mtn centres...and sit in ques for a long time.

[irneb]

Yes, well - just because all companies in SA has p*** poor service doesn't mean we should just roll over.

About the "upgrade" from 384 to 1024 ... that's a big MEH ... while most of the (so called) 1st world looks down their noses at 21MB/s. It's as if Telkom wants us to jump up for joy because they've finally harnessed 2 extra horses to their rickety wagon, while everywhere else they've already got airports and some places you can even get space port access!

As a sample, a colleague of mine in the US has a fast enough WAN connection over his home line to work directly across VPN to his office server with filesizes averaging on 500MB, without even noticing any speed difference when he's in the office connected to the 1GB/s LAN. And it's so cheap as to be feasible for him to rather work from home and save the fuel costs.

[kleva]

With current fuel prices it works out still cheaper to sit with the dodgy ADSL connections.

I have no choice about fixed line since I need the fixed IP's and live in an area that makes general Wi Fi/3G access pretty useless. For a long time I have had 2 x ADSL lines, 1 to back up the other (only backup) and still have battled. Line so slow and restricted no that I use a CellC stick at Edge speeds for my use and the ADSL stays dedicated for server otherwise the link gets chocked. Connect a facebook app on the 4Mb ADSL (HA HA HUGE JOKE) from 1 machine and everything dies... Line went down for 4 months once while Telkom fought about which department had to fix the fault.

I dream of having affordable alternative, but then again I live with it because it is still better than what I had when living in Nigeria for 2 years, so a good step in the right direction.

[murdock]

Yes, well - just because all companies in SA has p*** poor service doesn't mean we should just roll over.

.

the problem is we all do...why because if i told you enough is enough and we should all meet at city hall to demostrate...i would be the only Ahole standing there...if however a chain email did the job where you only had to click a button on a media ntwork...companies would be folding by the minute...so the solution...the person who comes up with that solution will become the next richest person...even trying to get people not to buy etags isnt working...so everyone will be paying the toll road.