VirtualNet Internet Service, Access and Hosting Provider ISP/IAP

Here follow a few commonly asked questions from customers recorded over the past year.

If you find that your domain isn’t registered in your name or company name, you must contact your service provider or domain registrant immediately and insist that the registrant information must be updated to the rightful owner. It is illegal for a domain registrant to register the domain in their name as that by law proclaims that the domain belongs to them and not to you. Be very careful of service providers registering domains in their name as it is a “high jacking” of your domain. By law you will find it very hard to prove that the domain belongs to you and you might even loose the domain. If you are not sure what the status of your domain is, you can contact us to assist you in that regard.

Q) When I try to connect, I get an error message that there is no dial tone; however I can hear the dial tone on the modem speaker.

This is a common problem with internal modems. You can fix it by adding an initialization string in the modem setup to force the modem to dial with or without a dial tone. The string atx3 can be added in the advanced settings of your modem setup from the control panel under phone and modems.

Q) How is it possible for me to connect at 115kps but yet when I download files it only download between 3 to 7kps?

There is a big difference between the connection speed and transfer rate. The speed you connect at, is the speed at which the modem make the connection. The actual transfer rate is the actual speed at which data will flow to and from your modem. The type of line you use will play a major role in the speed of your connection. Normal analogue lines have the least bandwidth for data flow, because your normal telephone line was designed to carry speech and not data and is therefore very slow. The ISDN line which was designed for data, hence the fact that it is a digital line, has a higher bandwidth and therefore has a higher data transfer rate. That is why you have a higher speed on ISDN, connecting at 64kps in comparison to an analogue line connecting at 115kps. This explains why ADSL offers a high speed transfer rate due to the design, to handle large bandwidth of 256kps or 512kps or even 1024kps. All the above mentioned methods of connections, uses copper wire.

Q) Why is it necessary for me to have additional anti-virus software loaded on my computer seeing that VirtualNet do offer antivirus protection on their e-mail?

Computer viruses do not penetrate your computer only via email. You can be infected by only being connected to the Internet. By scanning your e-mail via our anti-virus server is not enough protection. We can stop most of the known virus infections passing through our anti-virus server to protect you, but as with everything else it is not a guaranteed 100% fail-safe protection. Most common file types you should NOT open when receiving an e-mail are; .com, .pif, .exe and .bat. These file extensions are executable and can load harmful viruses onto your computer.

Q) Why does it happen that my computer and Internet connection become super slow?

We have found over the years that 99.9% of connections and computers become slow because of the computer being infected with spyware or mailware and ten to one infected with a virus or two as well. Spyware and mailware is not a virus on the computer as such, but what it does is looking continually for a connection to the internet. Hence the fact that these applications are running in the background without the user's knowledge and using the entire computers processing power, slows down the actual speed of the system and connection to the internet because it is using up all the bandwidth of your connection to communicate to wherever it sends data. You will also find that at that same time you will be flooded with spam mail due to your computer being compromised. Your system might even act as a mail proxy, sending spam mail out to other computers without you even realizing that it is happening.

If you didn’t get the answer to your question, you may place your question on the help page and one of our engineers will get back to you as soon as possible.