TelOne is very much known for being the most reasonably priced ISP in Zimbabwe making it the most favored choice for home internet. However, for a long time, the performance of TelOne’s internet has been the biggest factor pushing its subscribers away towards more expensive but better-performing providers. TelOne saw a dip in broadband subscriber figures by 1,870 subscribers in 2021 and 2022. Recently Telone announced that it has completed its network upgrade which should improve the performance of its network for its subscribers.
The Network Upgrade
There is not much detail on the specifics of the network upgrade apart from it being primarily a core network performance improvement. This said improvement is looking at quality of service which refers to the speed of the package you are on.
Telone mentions that this upgrade is primarily targeted at ADSL and Fiber customers with some experiencing improved speeds of 15 to 50Mbps on Fiber and 2 to 14Mbps on ADSL. When looking at the TelOne X page (formerly Twitter), The comments on their upgrades suggest that their customers are still facing poor internet speeds.
@TelOneZW for the efforts put in stabilizing your infrastructure, we however seem to be still having some challenges on download speeds, sometimes we will actually be offline. May you kindly look into this.
Twitter commets on TelOne’s upgrade post
There no change after your upgrade. Is it still ongoing ?
Yooohhh there is nothing that has improved, it’s just the same old story or even worse for me
My landline had cut recently and when it was fixed (around the time when you first posted about the network upgrade) i did see an improvement to my adsl download speeds (from around 3.6mbps max to 6mbps max), though its still very slow for mordern day tasks
Let’s look at TelOne’s capacity
According to their 2022 annual report, TelOne has 133,617 broadband subscribers and an installed bandwidth capacity of 142.5Gbps. Doing a bit of rough math this works out to a guaranteed 1.066Mbps for each TelOne subscriber. Not exactly a lot.
Telone mentions that this upgrade is primarily targeted at ADSL and Fiber customers with some experiencing improved speeds of 15 to 50Mbps on Fiber and 2 to 14Mbps on ADSL. When looking at the TelOne X page (formerly Twitter), The comments on their upgrades suggest that their customers are still facing poor internet speeds.
Granted in the real world it’s highly improbable for every internet user to be using the internet all the time, neither is it possible for each internet user to be demanding maximum bandwidth from their ISP at all times. So with those realities in mind, it is possible for a user to get the promised 15Mbps that their package allows for. However, it is now best effort which is why ISPs in general use the term ‘up to 15Mbps’. It’s a bandwidth cap rather than a guaranteed download speed.
So if the network inherently still faces congestion then this might still pose performance issues for subscribers since the outright capacity of the network does not offer enough headroom to reach the bandwidth caps that subscribers are expecting to get.
We will be running another survey to find out the reality of fixed internet service providers similar to the one we did for mobile internet service providers. If you are a TelOne ADSL or Fiber subscriber, let us know in the comments how you are finding your internet speeds.
Share
Home
What’s your take?