I don’t know too many people who’ve tried 3G, but I’d heard nothing good – everyone claims the line dropped frequently. Now I’ve seen it in ‘action’ (Vodacom’s offering that is). Both in Observatory, Cape Town, and Forest Town/Rosebank, Jhb, it seems 3G is a major disappointment. Lost connections 100 times a day is no exaggeration. Maybe that’s fine for web surfing, but for doing anything useful it’s no good. Sadly it looks like I’ll be staying with Telkom for a while longer.
I see that today ITWeb had an article comparing broadband offerings (price, not reliability, very misleading I’d say!), and an article on an upcoming study on whether the broadband offerings live up to their promises. The answer seems to be a resounding no.
My Vodacom broadband is setup to connect via 3G and if not then GPRS. I rarely get 3G so it switches then to dog slow GPRS. I can imagine that would be fine for people just collecting email but to work remotely (which I need to) its insanely slow. Plus it drops GPRS very often, from my personal experience, which drops my remote connection to the server and plus I have had to download large email attachments which keep timing out. The problem is that is eating into my bandwidth – which is effectively my cost – and thus I am paying dearly for this inefficient access. For now, I will stick to ADSL also.