Afrihost ADSL woes continue

NoCause said:
We use MTN Business and that Network Notice" that cbrunsdonza is talking about happens almost weekly. All you see is STM 4 links to london tealacity are down and the carrier is attending.

We are moving away from them when our contract expires.

So Afrihost good luck this has happend for the last 4 years with them what is going to change now?
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Agree. :wtf:

MTN is a nightmare! :twisted:

Cannot believe Afrihost even considered using them. :confused:

On the verge of moving 2 Accounts to Mweb. :erm:

All customers should be reimbursed for this cock-up, since that disastrous move to the emptyN network. :mad:
 
Niren_M said:
Afrihost must be regretting the move to MTN. :mad:

I.S. smirking. :D
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They should get this guy:

hindsight2.jpg
 
I feel for these guys. they're a great company that made a stupid call. Hope they can get back on track soon
 
skimread said:
Apart from value added services, large user base, customer interaction and support there was not much to distinguish them from the average I.S. ISP. I guess they wanted more control regarding negotiating agreements with the network and QoS control.

Forum members forget that a similar thing happened to webafrica. They rapidly grew in size, was rated the #1 ISP on the forum two years in a row and then moved to their own acquired network but only introduced uncapped late in the game.
A similar thing has happened to Afrihost but a big difference is that Afrihost has teamed up with an unproven ADSL network so unlike Web Africa are much more at risk as they don't own their network.
Assurances made by MTN Business about 99.8% service levels is hot air. They still have to much to learn as they have very little experience with ADSL.
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Oh yes, I remember the WebAfrica debacle, but come to think of it; Webafrica dug their own grave after that with all the PR about 'unsustainable' etc.
Afrihost atleast have the right approach to customer service and PR.
A very strange move by Afrihost.....reminds me of that saying...If it aint broke, dont fix it.
Seems like no proper due diligence was done by Afrihost.
 
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I must say that Afrihost/Mtn hasnt been bad overall. Apart from the increased latency (+-30ms) in CPT due to IPC links it has been good. Done 200gb this month without even batting an eyelid. Latency is very important to me though, so I moved to another ISP from December. Will check them out again next year once their latency to cpt is similar to SAIX/Mweb
 
mith said:
lot of unhappy Afrihost users now....compared to the time when a lot of people on the forum were raving about afrihost (when they were with IS).
What was the reason they changed from IS to MTN?
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The grass was greener on the other side/Corporate greed.
 
mith said:
A very strange move by Afrihost.....reminds me of that saying...If it aint broke, dont fix it.
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What people are forgetting is that it was broken. The last month for me on Afrihost/IS was much worse that since the move onto MTN. Most people routing through CT suffered horrendous performance when IS ran out of IPC. It wasn't bad it was very bad.

I am hoping that all the heavy users move away from AH, leaving lots of capacity for the rest of us :whistle:

EDIT: Although the lack of international access last night was also very bad.....
 
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That article is great, all those promises and then when the pawpaw hits the fan, they do not have a redundant link in London? :whistle:

"“One of the key things we looked at in offering MTN services was their excellent local and international network redundancy, which will mean better uptime for our clients,” Afrihost director Greg Payne previously explained.

Visser explained that local traffic is spread across multiple points (IPCs) across the country, “so even if there is a catastrophic Telkom outage in one area we can divert all traffic within minutes”. The new network also uses multiple undersea cables which Visser said will offer unparalleled international speed, stability and reliability.
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They lost 2 accounts on my side (waiting for my brother to complain about the speeds, then it be 3)

But yea.. MTN was a seriously bad move...
 
mith said:
Oh yes, I remember the WebAfrica debacle, but come to think of it; Webafrica dug their own grave after that with all the PR about 'unsustainable' etc.
Afrihost atleast have the right approach to customer service and PR.
A very strange move by Afrihost.....reminds me of that saying...If it aint broke, dont fix it.
Seems like no proper due diligence was done by Afrihost.
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I am talking about after that when Webafrica eventually did introduce uncapped but then had international connectivity problems for long periods when no ISP had, the network performance dropped when they introduced bronze, silver and gold QoS, their bandwidth usage tracker was broken, support levels dropped and their support staff started telling blatant untruths on the forum.

A very similar thing is happening with Afrihost except worse. You could call it teething problems but time will tell how serious it is.

Regarding Afrihost regretting the move I don't think so. Afrihost is betting the company on MTN but the rewards are greater in doing so. It is a business decision.

If you're an Internet Solutions ISP you just have your users as assets so it makes sense if you want to grow/distinguish your business assets that you acquire your own network and data centres like WebAfrica did.

Who knows what Afrihost's agreement with MTN business is but I have a feeling its much more beneficial than we know.
MTN could start offering/bundling Afrihost products in MTN stores. Afrihost could move over their hosting to MTN data centres to increase MTNs hosting. I think it's just a matter of time before the the likes of Vodacom, TElkom and MTN push to to grow their data centres. The founders of Afrihost will be in for a big pay if MTN business either buys a stake in the company or buys it outright.
 
Afrihost has been struggling the last two years.

They were the forerunners introducing cheaper capped ADSL, everyone touted them as the next best thing since chocolate cake.

Then Mweb shook up the market with "affordable" uncapped, and since then Afrihost has been out of their league...

Their FUP was and probably still is draconian and they just could not pull it together again. Even if they did change their policies and products, one has to remember that the older forum members do not simply switch ISP for no reason. I have had almost no downtime on Mweb (apart from the battle.net fiasco that is still not fixed), and to take a gamble on Afrihost, again, after they let me down in the past, not gonna happen easily.
Whenever I got the urge to change back to them, I remember their AUP/FUP and immediately I'm cured.

I feel really bad for them, I would have loved to stay loyal to them, but they have made some very bad moves in the last two years, be it forced or not.
 
I don't believe the AH move from IS to MTN was financially motivated (in the sense that MTN could offer cheaper wholesale bandwidth prices). I would have been very reluctant as a business (especially considering the risk profile of such an undertaking) to shift my operations just for the sake of cheaper pricing. The reason for the move is either deeper rooted (many technical support issues with IS) and perhaps even has a personal motivation for the move.

I don't think that MTN had so much foresight to go and transition AH into their business to have an ADSL service offering. Data offerings will eventually converge into a vertical which offers the best value proposition. In most overseas countries this is provided through cable-TV stations (Virgin in the UK comes to mind).

AH's FB page is presents a horrible status quo of dissatisfied customers and although one can expect teething problems it does feel that the migration project is riddled with too many oversights. I guess IS must be smiling now and AH is faced with the problem of sweating it out and fixing the issues in a re-active manner or crawl back to IS.
 
I really do feel for Afrihost.

I understand that it's very annoying when you want to do what you need to do with a connection you're paying for, but Afrihost is trying to do in a very short space of time what other ISPs have had years to do.

Not that I claim to be an expert, but I know that it's possible that there's a certain amount of flexibility that you need as you grow that they might not have had at IS. It's possible that the move was made in order to give them freedom to innovate.

I'll personally be staying with them for now on the basis that I think it's too soon to say that Afrihost is no longer a good ISP based on some difficulties they are having. Perhaps I'm just lucky but my service hasn't been nearly as bad as others have described. Also, I love the company's attitude and culture. I like that they seem to always be looking for ways to add more value to their customers (in a win/win kind of way, which is fundamental to running a profitable business).

Just in case anyone is wondering: I have no connection with Afrihost other than being a customer. :)
 
Another ISP you can also look at is Kawuleza Connect, we don't shape our packages, also offer a 5day free trial to test our service before joining
 
KawulezaConnectSA said:
Another ISP you can also look at is Kawuleza Connect, we don't shape our packages, also offer a 5day free trial to test our service before joining
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You need to learn some tact with your marketing. Opportunism is blatant and not endearing to consumers...
 
Very aggravating that the Network Status page showed everything was fully operational last night, when it clearly wasn't. :sick:
 
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