Webafrica Home Uncapped - Whats ACTUALLY working as it should be ?

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KinsZA

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Hi

Right I'm sick of Lies, time stalling, things being changed without being notified, things being broken and generally being messed around. Let me drag up the points as the uncapped feedback thread is just rinse and repeat of issue after issue.

1 - Time Stalling:
Every single support query I've had regarding performance has resulted in "We are awaing feedback from our engineers" and then I wont hear another thing until I ask say 10 days later and get another generic response. WAJeff, I know you do your best but it seems even you are getting stuffed around in giving us information as I've had answers in support while you are still waiting for feedback in forums.

2 - Notifications
I have not once been notified by mail over ANY change of policy, rules, freezone removal, maintenance only by following these forums have I found out a single thing and yes my mail is correct because the stall tactic support mails I get do come through.

3 - Lies
The problem of reduced performance during the hours 00:00-06:00 was brought up at the beginning of December, and assurance after assurance of "The capacity upgrade will fix it and no more problems after then" well the reduced performance came back after a week or two of the capacity upgrade and I still experience it in different forms of severity.

I go over my threshold every now and then and instantly everything just stuffs out thats not web, now I understand about that however below "we will NEVER move users to a lower priority if we have spare capacity on our network", we have been assured on multiple occasions that there is ample capacity, if at different time periods everything dies then I doubt that policy is in place. "browsing remains awesome" no it does not, I've classed it as usable at best recently and considering its a lower priority I accepted it until someone on webafrica's own forums pointed out that their internet became unsuable on every level which made me look up the Q&A and awesome is not correct.

Why would your speeds decrease?

First, we will NEVER move users to a lower priority if we have spare capacity on our network, unlike other ISPs. In addition to this, you will only get slower speeds IF you don’t play by the rules. Even if your service is switched to a lower priority, browsing remains awesome. Here’s how we determine our prioritisation:
Click to expand...

4 - Broken
Just how many things are currently broken/not working correctly, we have the midnight to 6am, what seems like the threshold browsing, freeZone's "we cant make it work" I will class as broken because the solution to it was to drop it, that's not a solution. Now I have worked in the IT technical and now development sector and if a client ever has a problem it's fixing it 100% at top priority, if something really and truly is not doable at all then the closest solution is found FreeZone's pure removal of service is extremely poor, how about alternate "FreeZone only" accounts for uncapped users at LEAST ?

Why am I still with webafrica ?
When things work with WebAfrica they work well, I give you guys that credit but when things are broken they are broken for far too long support tickets are responded to quickly (even if its a useless response) and there is a good forum presence.

The question is how long are you going to mess your clients around before you get things right ? Two months is a lot of messing around.
 
And here i thought i was the only one? :p

My experiences really do shadow yours, and my clients (Who I resell to) are also getting a little peeved off with the drop in performance lately.

I Have thought about moving, firstly because WA is no longer the cheapest, :( , and secondly, because their network really has depreciated, even after they bragged about the fact that they now have THEIR OWN LOCAL NETWORK...

I Will hang in for a few more weeks, as I feel obliged to, but if I get any more complaints from clients, i'm going to have to look elsewhere for my connectivity...

General website loading, and DEFINITELY pop and smtp performance have taken a dive. Both locally and internationally.

I Haven't however noticed and difference with the 12:00am to 06:00 service, as most of my downloads are done by the morning, and apart from that i'm sleeping and don't sit and watch what's happening anyway...

Come on WA, time to shape up or we're shipping out...
 
Hi Kinza,

Could you provide me with some of your support ticket reference numbers, so I can do some digging and see what happened here.

You're right though, we do indeed have some improvements to get in place (eg: On the issue around slowness between 00h00 - 06h00). Sorry for this, and thanks for hanging in there. We are actively working on the problem and should have something in place soon.
 
I have pm'd you the reference numbers.

I really REALLY want things fixed because I don't want to leave.
 
waroop said:
Hi Kinza,

Could you provide me with some of your support ticket reference numbers, so I can do some digging and see what happened here.

You're right though, we do indeed have some improvements to get in place (eg: On the issue around slowness between 00h00 - 06h00). Sorry for this, and thanks for hanging in there. We are actively working on the problem and should have something in place soon.
Click to expand...

You should really speak to rpm and get your alias reddened and official status with WA put underneath, for legitimacy's sake, if nothing else.
 
KinsZA said:
Hi

Right I'm sick of Lies, time stalling, things being changed without being notified, things being broken and generally being messed around. Let me drag up the points as the uncapped feedback thread is just rinse and repeat of issue after issue.

1 - Time Stalling:
Every single support query I've had regarding performance has resulted in "We are awaing feedback from our engineers" and then I wont hear another thing until I ask say 10 days later and get another generic response. WAJeff, I know you do your best but it seems even you are getting stuffed around in giving us information as I've had answers in support while you are still waiting for feedback in forums.

2 - Notifications
I have not once been notified by mail over ANY change of policy, rules, freezone removal, maintenance only by following these forums have I found out a single thing and yes my mail is correct because the stall tactic support mails I get do come through.

3 - Lies
The problem of reduced performance during the hours 00:00-06:00 was brought up at the beginning of December, and assurance after assurance of "The capacity upgrade will fix it and no more problems after then" well the reduced performance came back after a week or two of the capacity upgrade and I still experience it in different forms of severity.

I go over my threshold every now and then and instantly everything just stuffs out thats not web, now I understand about that however below "we will NEVER move users to a lower priority if we have spare capacity on our network", we have been assured on multiple occasions that there is ample capacity, if at different time periods everything dies then I doubt that policy is in place. "browsing remains awesome" no it does not, I've classed it as usable at best recently and considering its a lower priority I accepted it until someone on webafrica's own forums pointed out that their internet became unsuable on every level which made me look up the Q&A and awesome is not correct.



4 - Broken
Just how many things are currently broken/not working correctly, we have the midnight to 6am, what seems like the threshold browsing, freeZone's "we cant make it work" I will class as broken because the solution to it was to drop it, that's not a solution. Now I have worked in the IT technical and now development sector and if a client ever has a problem it's fixing it 100% at top priority, if something really and truly is not doable at all then the closest solution is found FreeZone's pure removal of service is extremely poor, how about alternate "FreeZone only" accounts for uncapped users at LEAST ?

Why am I still with webafrica ?
When things work with WebAfrica they work well, I give you guys that credit but when things are broken they are broken for far too long support tickets are responded to quickly (even if its a useless response) and there is a good forum presence.

The question is how long are you going to mess your clients around before you get things right ? Two months is a lot of messing around.
Click to expand...
I know they hired some trainees/interns recently. Maybe that's affecting things.
 
I feel the same. When I first signed up in Dec last year, uncapped with them was awesome. But midway through Dec came the the capacity issues.

From then on its been up and down the whole way through till now.
Problems popping up here and there. Then WA fixes it and it is fine for a while then another problem comes up. News servers not working some of the time.

I liked what I saw in the beginning of Dec with WA so I'm also going to stick it out with them for a bit longer hoping that the problems (note the plural) get fixed and it returns to normal.
 
I think it is just a lack of IPC capacity on WA side..... Mweb at least has 7gigabits in JHB, CPT & DBN....
As far as i can tell WA only has IPC in CPT and who knows how much?
 
@Hummercellc

"I think", "Maybe", "I assume" etc... should not have to be questions we are asking when facing an ongoing problem. Is it capacity, routing, bandwidth calculation, shaping etc... and when its going to be fixed, that's what I want to hear.
 
Reading this thread made me wonder about this reply
WAJeff said:
Never said we completely denied saying it.
At the time, on our network we couldn't have an Uncapped offering - now we can and have launched a very successful Uncapped product to the market. Because our network has come on in leaps and bounds, we've found it possible to offer Uncapped.
Click to expand...
 
My 4 meg account was averaging 800kbps during download plus, so I did the most sensible thing: voted with my wallet.
Hi efitol,

Your Home ADSL Uncapped 4Mbps (efitol@wadsl) service has been scheduled for cancellation on 2012/01/31.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your business. If this has been done in error, please do not hesitate to contact support.
Click to expand...
So long WebAfrica and thanks for all the fish. As slow as they were.
 
efitol said:
My 4 meg account was averaging 800kbps during download plus, so I did the most sensible thing: voted with my wallet.

So long WebAfrica and thanks for all the fish. As slow as they were.
Click to expand...

I have to say that I am also very disappointed at the moment and share the sentiment. I did a speed test just now and I am getting 0.15 Mbps on a 4Meg line. I have been with Web Africa for about 10 years but my experience is that things have really gone downhill the last year or two. I also have to agree that if things work, then they work fine. The unfortunate thing is that things not working has been way to often recently.

Any suggestions on alternative ISP's?

The only really unfortunate thing is that I have to give 30 days notice with WebAfrica. If not, I would probably have left already!
 
I have been with WA for a long time especially amazing for raiding in WOW but I must say their uncapped is nowhere as good as their capped but I guess that is expected.
 
Macabre25 said:
I have been with WA for a long time especially amazing for raiding in WOW but I must say their uncapped is nowhere as good as their capped but I guess that is expected.
Click to expand...

Why ?

If you are in threshold then why should you have a lesser experiance than their normal capped product as they are both rated as "silver". I'll add that to the "broken" section.

I didnt create this thread to discuss an issue thats been reported but to just list the issues to expose the flaws in the product.
 
Morning KinsZA,

Hopefully I'll be able to address and resolve all the points that you bring up here. If I can't, I'll be emailing the guys involved with our ADSL and Networking to get answers and get things fixed.

KinsZA said:
Hi

Right I'm sick of Lies, time stalling, things being changed without being notified, things being broken and generally being messed around. Let me drag up the points as the uncapped feedback thread is just rinse and repeat of issue after issue.

1 - Time Stalling:
Every single support query I've had regarding performance has resulted in "We are awaing feedback from our engineers" and then I wont hear another thing until I ask say 10 days later and get another generic response. WAJeff, I know you do your best but it seems even you are getting stuffed around in giving us information as I've had answers in support while you are still waiting for feedback in forums.
Click to expand...

Turn around times is a massive concern, and in all honesty - this isn't the first time it's been brought up. What I can say though, is that behind the scenes at WA at whole lot is going on to sort this out. We'll hopefully see this fixed soon. Feedback loops can get complicated, specifically concentrating on the forums - for the entire 2011 period I've been alone with monitoring the forums. That'll also change within the next month when I get another guy to help me out with it.

KinsZA said:
2 - Notifications
I have not once been notified by mail over ANY change of policy, rules, freezone removal, maintenance only by following these forums have I found out a single thing and yes my mail is correct because the stall tactic support mails I get do come through.
Click to expand...

We didn't need to send a mail out about any changes, because nothing has changed. If our T&C's do change, we will obviously send out a mail. The FreeZone discontinuation has already been debated, and we emailed the customers using the service. The online debate can be found here Perhaps we'll see FreeZone introduced again. For now though, we can't offer it.

WAJeff said:
Initially, FreeZone was a good idea on our part as it was already a standard offering on our Capped packages. The accounting system that calculated FreeZone usage and allocates the traffic is an extremely complicated one - and does have conflicts with how our Uncapped packages work. It wasn't seen as fair to continue offering as for one month you may have 100% traffic towards Freezone, but other months FreeZone traffic would been seen on the normal usage.
Click to expand...

KinsZA said:
3 - Lies
The problem of reduced performance during the hours 00:00-06:00 was brought up at the beginning of December, and assurance after assurance of "The capacity upgrade will fix it and no more problems after then" well the reduced performance came back after a week or two of the capacity upgrade and I still experience it in different forms of severity.
Click to expand...

I go over my threshold every now and then and instantly everything just stuffs out thats not web, now I understand about that however below "we will NEVER move users to a lower priority if we have spare capacity on our network", we have been assured on multiple occasions that there is ample capacity, if at different time periods everything dies then I doubt that policy is in place. "browsing remains awesome" no it does not, I've classed it as usable at best recently and considering its a lower priority I accepted it until someone on webafrica's own forums pointed out that their internet became unsuable on every level which made me look up the Q&A and awesome is not correct.[/quote]

The midnight issue is in the process, as Ru posted earlier too. Yeah, it would be ideal to have things fixed within the hour - however running an IPC network is challenging with a lot of issues that sit outside the reach of the WA engineers - however we still manage to get things fixed. Saying that though, I'll be emailing the ADSL & Networking guys today will some feedback on the fixes that we need to have in place simply from the amount of issues raised online. And yes, I have done this before - we're aware of everything that gets said online.


KinsZA said:
4 - Broken
Just how many things are currently broken/not working correctly, we have the midnight to 6am, what seems like the threshold browsing, freeZone's "we cant make it work" I will class as broken because the solution to it was to drop it, that's not a solution. Now I have worked in the IT technical and now development sector and if a client ever has a problem it's fixing it 100% at top priority, if something really and truly is not doable at all then the closest solution is found FreeZone's pure removal of service is extremely poor, how about alternate "FreeZone only" accounts for uncapped users at LEAST ?
Click to expand...

Why am I still with webafrica ?
When things work with WebAfrica they work well, I give you guys that credit but when things are broken they are broken for far too long support tickets are responded to quickly (even if its a useless response) and there is a good forum presence.

The question is how long are you going to mess your clients around before you get things right ? Two months is a lot of messing around.[/QUOTE]

In sumarry then,

  • The midnight issue is getting looked into
  • FreeZone debate has been addressed
  • Customers issues are priorities, of course! However our Dev and IT guys don't sit around waiting for things to break. All day, everyday, we're working on improvements, new products and fixes
 
however running an IPC network is challenging with a lot of issues that sit outside the reach of the WA engineers
Click to expand...

See now hearing that's playing a factor in delay's makes me feel better about why its taking so long, its just the responses I see from support is always "we're waiting on our network engineers" and that makes me think its all you guys. Which you have cleared up.

I am one of those people who hates feeling blind and I know there is a degree to how much one can say to a client but just not knowing whether it will be sorted tomorrow or in a months time" really sucks and some form of extra info is nice to hear.

EDIT: I was contacted and provided with an alternate account to test with tonight to compare, thanks WA.
 
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I would just like to add that WebAfrica has phoned me, given me detailed explanations and increased confidence, since things are in the improve and still being worked on I am quite satisfied.
 
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KinsZA said:
I would just like to add that WebAfrica has phoned me, given me detailed explanations and increased confidence, since things are in the improve and still being worked on I am quite satisfied.
Click to expand...

Good to hear!
I'm also going to post something a little later, once it's been confirmed from the Networking Manager which should also give you a little more insight into things.

Hope we can get things sorted soon!
 
One thing we also need to understand is that WA is a Slaapstad (Cape Town) based company, and things take twice as long to get done there as they do in Joburg.

I Blame the mountain, i can never stay there for more than 10 days....
 
ben dover said:
One thing we also need to understand is that WA is a Slaapstad (Cape Town) based company, and things take twice as long to get done there as they do in Joburg.

I Blame the mountain, i can never stay there for more than 10 days....
Click to expand...

You got some of the aspects right, metality... (more like unskilled personel) - not isolated to WA, goes for most local ISP's
 
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