Here is a scenario. It’s a 3rd of the way through the month, and you have used up your 3GB cap because you were without DSL for a month and needed to do A LOT of catching up. You only got 3GB because for 2 people in a small home office, that should be enough. You don’t have a Credit Card because you think they are evil, but you need to top-up your internet cap, and for this you need a Credit Card. For you overseas folks that have uncapped broadband, this is something you will not have heard of.
Without the Credit Card, topping up with your current ISP is not as easy as it sounds, it requires fax machines, deposit slips and a trip to the bank. So you investigate other ISP’s – there are a few but you don’t want another month-month contract, you need something quick, something that is relatively cheap, and something you can throw away when you are done – but there is a catch, it must be reliable. After you have investigated the different offerings, you are left with 2 viable options.
Lets break it down. <– See what I did there Etienne :)
Option 1’s minimum offering is a 5Gb package, that lasts for 30 days on an Unshaped Line @ R30/Gb or R150.00. This is provided by the guys at G-Connect.
Option 2 offers a prepaid per gig service @ R39/Gb – which gives you 5Gb on a Semi-Shaped Line for a total of R195.00 – This is provided by the guys at AfriHost.
I posted the question on Twitter, asking if anybody had any bias towards either, and got some mixed responses. Option 1 is a new service, and as South African’s are, we are a bit unsure of new services, as we have been let down before.
Anyway, to cut a long story extremely short, after weighing the options, I decided to go with Option 1 from G-Connect. The biggest seller for me were the following 2 things. The cost and the speed. While R45.00 is not a huge difference, choosing between a shaped/unshaped line was.
After a few teething issues getting connected, I must admit, I am very impressed. Signing up was easy to do. – I had already done it a few months ago for my old apartment – but in terms of getting going, the signup process is easy.
Paying for the service was much better than I had expected. Because I don’t have a Credit Card, I needed another alternative. I bank with both FNB and Standard Bank, and they offer an EFT option for both as well as ABSA. After purchasing the R150 Voucher, I was sent an email with their banking details for the financial institution I chose. I made the deposit, emailed the EFT Proof of Payment all from within my Internet Banking profile and got back to work.
To be honest, I was expecting a delay of at least 1 day, and they did warn me (via the disclaimer) that it could take 1 – 3 days to be processed. Fair game. But no. Within minutes of receiving the first email, another 2 had arrived. One to tell me the payment was successful, and one to give me my 5Gb Voucher number.
Now that is good service. If other ISP’s could learn from this, we would have a lot less pissed off internet users in South Africa.
Connecting up was not as easy at first, but that was due to my error more than anything else. I will be writing a follow up post on how to connect to GConnect’s ADSL service on OS X via PPPoE later today or tomorrow so that user’s do not have to go through the same issues that I went through getting started. While I dislike the “hotspot” type authentication that is currently necessary to keep the connection alive, I will give GConnect a 9.5 out of 10.
The connection speed is great, my iPhone update downloaded at a steady 3Mbits/second and took about 5 mins to download 220mb and the line is extremely stable. I will definitely use this as a Top Up service in the future.
Please Note: This post is not a paid post, and we are in no way affiliated with GConnect. GConnect did not request this post or any feedback of their service. This post was written without gain to serve as information for other users.