About Me

I ramble about a number of things - but travel experiences, movies and music feature prominently. See my label cloud for a better idea. All comnments and opinions on this blog are my own, and do not in any way reflect the opinions/position of my employer (past/current/future).

08 July 2009

Neotel's Neoconnect Service is Kak

I got a Neotel account in April, and it has been a big waste of money. Yes, price wise they are very competitive - but if only they would deliver a service that they are offering. This is supposed to be broadband, but I have never got download speeds exceeding 100 KBps (or 800 kbps). The normal speeds I do get on a good day, is usually half that - averaging between 40 and 50 KBps.

But it is not the speed that is the most frustrating thing - it is the latency. And coupled with that - the failure to really deliver true broadband usage. Streaming video - forget it; unless you are willing to buffer it all and then play it back (so not useful for any live streaming). Streaming audio - if you must, at very patchy and unusable rates. File downloads ... hope it does not cut out - but sometimes it is so bad that even download agents give up because they exhaust the number of retries!

As for their phone service - I don't really use it to give real input. But the speaker phone functionality (on the hardware side) is awful and the voice quality is not exactly crystal clear. It has come to the stage that I am seriously considering cancelling the contract and going with Telkom - because I have no faith that Neotel will actually manage to fix all these issues with their service.

So far, in my experience, the 3G services from Vodacom has been the most reliable and the only service that offers reliable and usable broadband. However, it is just too expensive to really use it for everything - but Neotel is certainly not competing on quality.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Stay away from Neotel, till they get their service at least 50% better. Which will still be below Telkoms at the moment.