A lot of people have been asking me about Neotel in the last fews months. The most important piece of advice I can give on the subject is this: do not sign a 24 month contract if you haven’t tested signal in your house. Or you just might get screwed. When I signed up a year ago, Sunninghill was an area with “excellent” coverage. You will soon learn what that really means. Bottom line, do not trust their website coverage map.

After many ups and downs, I eventually purchased an external antennae from Poynting. It has boosted my signal – which is now permanently on 4 bars. While the download speeds have improved, the upload is still poor. And several times a day, the connection just drops. I’m not sure if Neotel is doing this intentionally because before the antennae, my connection was fine. I suppose you could say it’s a small price to pay for good signal. Not at all impressed with the upload speeds. This is my speed test results after setting up the antennae:

If you’re thinking of signing up wih Neotel, know this:
1. You can’t monitor / check your bandwidth usage.
2. Network isn’t established properly, yet. You will experience down time now and then.
3. You might have to invest in an external antennae for better signal (roughly an additional R 1,500)
4. You might find that when your connection drops, you have to manually reconnect (even though you set the device to redial automatically). I’m bringing this up because when I access the internet from upstairs and it disconnects, I have to trek all the way down to reconnect. It’s annoying.
5. I can’t vouch for the reliability of P2P, I’m not a pirate