This time we will be looking at the Internet Solutions 512KB Uncapped business ADSL solution.
There are very few uncapped solutions in the country and unfortunately you pay a price for the service, not only a cash price but also a performance sacrifice.
Right, as always I will start by declaring my testing enviroment. The connection is being routed through a Cisco ??? and firewalled through a P4 running PFSENSE (A FreeBSD based firewall). As with all my tests I try to get the maximum out of the connection and spend quite a bit of time tweaking everything.
First things first, the Telkom Speed test, granted that there are known peering issues between IS & Telkom.
Not far off from the promised 512kb, this result was the best of 3 with the lowest being around 472Kbps
The international side was tested using the speak easy test, you have to remember the IS routes international traffic via satelitte much like sentech, though the test looks pathetic it is a single thread over a high contention link.
Multiple Threads give us a better idea of the maximum speeds obtainable
Speed wise IS Business 512KB is not far off from the promised speeds, however it is clearly hard capped. Quite honestly I am not overly impressed with the speed however I guess its an uncapped solution and as I said, there is definitely a sacrifice when it comes to uncapped solutions in South Africa.
Latency is the interesting one, local pings look good.
International pings are far less stable and a lot slower, but as mentioned this is being routed via satelitte.
As you can tell by now I am not overly impressed, the speeds are not great and there is too much variation. IS has a long way to go before they can be considered a good business solution.
My biggest complaint with IS is downtime, In the 2 months that I have been using the solution they have been down twice for extended periods (3 hours or more). There is also the occasional blink when for 5 minutes you just don’t have any connectivity. I have had similar problems with a 128KB Diginet solution from IS.
Their technical staff seem to lack brain power, often forgetting to NAT a IP range or deciding to give out your IP to another customer.
I would not recommend IS to any business, I must admit that as an uncapped solution for a home user or small business they offer a good solution. They include “free” fax facilities and other gimicky solutions which will grab the “IT Clueless” and SME portion of the market.