Friday, September 21, 2012

How to Choose an ISP for your Cyber Cafe


Its sometimes a difficult call when you want to use a VSAT connection. When I used to use VSAT, there was MWEB (now IWAY), NETCOM, Direct on PC and the rest.

Things have changed now. People have found alternatives. Multilinks, Visafone, Starcomms, MTN and others. Personally, I prefer Multilinks and Visafone. I don't know about MTN and other GSM networks. I don't know if they can comfortably carry 10 computers. Maybe they've developed products for office use now but I never tried them because of the bandwidth limitations they have at that time in 2009.

Nigerian CDMA networks provide good data plans, sometimes with good bandwidth allowances. VSAT internet providers may tell you they are giving you 128/256kbps. Your download speed is supposed to be at most 256kbps which is supposed to be around 64KB/s. Now that's the maximum. Your average speed may now be around 30KB/s or so.

When you start using VSAT internet from some of these companies, you may have the fastest internet speed in town. 6 months to a year down the line you'll be appalled to notice your speed dwindle so badly. Everytime you call customer care they might tell you they are doing upgrades or that a satellite is passing their own or some technical stuff.

My experience with CDMA has been different. You may have downtime but speed is generally consistent. I have tested a both visafone and multilinks modems. I have shared them on 6 systems. I refused to use them for up to 10 computers because I wanted to maintain the speed of all the computers.

So, if you're new and you want to start an average cafe with about 10 computers or less, you can use a CDMA modem. Use it to reduce your cost. You can use a data plan of N15000 to carry 6 systems. I'm sure you can use a data plan of at N21000 to serve 10 computers. This saves cost, compared to paying over N80000 (I once paid about N127000 every month for VSAT).

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