Afrihost Business Uncapped Feedback - 2

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Dear Gian,

It is with regret that I pen this letter. I feel it is important to let you know why I have decided to terminate my relationship Afrihost. Until recently, I have been a strong supporter of Afrihost, its products, service and innovative thinking. The many accolades on your mantelpiece are testament to that.

When the Afrihost uncapped business DSL product, started performing at 20% capacity on Friday 17 October 2014, I noted the message on your website dashboard;
17 October 2014 10:00am We are seeing increased demand in the North region (Johannesburg, Pretoria and surrounding areas), which may affect DSL performance for clients in the region. While affected clients may experience slow speeds, we expect latency to continue to be stable for priority realtime services such as browsing, streaming and gaming. Our engineers are working hard to ensure that we provide the best possible experience and we will continue monitor traffic throughout. We apologise to affected clients for any poor experience and wish to assure them that we have ordered additional capacity from Telkom, and the upgrade is imminent. We believe this will make a significant improvement to performance and DSL experience will return to normal.
Various forum threads confirmed that all your Gauteng clients were experiencing the same results that I was, and still are. A call to your telephone support confirmed that your Gauteng DSL users were being throttled due to lack of capacity. It is interesting to note how Afrihost labels this as “increased demand” and iOS software updates, laying the blame at their customer’s feet and diverting responsibility from themself. Let’s call a spade a spade, this fiasco is due to bad management and lack of foresight. Decent monitoring of your network and a little bit of forward thinking would have had the capacity in place before “increased demand” crippled your service.

All your clients using your business DSL products should not have been affected by this “increased demand” and lack of capacity. Your clients choose to pay the premium for your business products primarily because they expect no throttling (or shaping) in any way or form. Your business products are also marketed and priced as such.

The fact that Afrihost without word or warning, modified the product that I pay for by implementing 80% throttling is unacceptable, as such I am cancelling my agreement with Afrihost as of today.

Regards,
 
Good Morning

I see that some clients are still having a poor experience, but the great news is that we've already seen IPC go live in the EAST and we're currently seeing excellent performance in the region.

This bodes well for the remaining regions to get more IPC very soon, ad we should start seeing improvement. Since all the upgrades were ordered at the same time, we don't expect that the rest of the IPC should be too far behind.

That may be, but the proof will be in the pudding....
Monday morning, 08:00 on the dot, and all speed and performance has gone to hell again.... limited to 2MB on international links on ALL protocols. Local JHB is fine, but CT links are horrid AGAIN.

We'll see what the consistency is like once the South's IPC goes live - I really hope AH has ordered MORE than required in lieu of the rapid uptake rate in the South. Hopefully the additional order will be enough to sustain us for at least 6 months, before we have the same issues again. The last IPC upgrade took ages, and by the time it was lit up, it didnt even make a dent :(
 
Good Morning

I see that some clients are still having a poor experience, but the great news is that we've already seen IPC go live in the EAST and we're currently seeing excellent performance in the region.

This bodes well for the remaining regions to get more IPC very soon, ad we should start seeing improvement. Since all the upgrades were ordered at the same time, we don't expect that the rest of the IPC should be too far behind.


When will the North region see IPC upgrades? Takes me 30 minutes to download a 12mb program via HTTP.
 
Some blistering speeds again this morning:

Download Speed: 1396 kbps (174.5 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 537 kbps (67.1 KB/sec transfer rate)
Latency: 24 ms
20/10/2014 09:29:33

Keep strong guys, only 2 weeks to go!!
 
When will the North region see IPC upgrades? Takes me 30 minutes to download a 12mb program via HTTP.

I don't have a date for the North, but all upgrades were ordered t the same time, so I'm hopeful it means the North could go live anytime now.
 
Good Morning

I see that some clients are still having a poor experience, but the great news is that we've already seen IPC go live in the EAST and we're currently seeing excellent performance in the region.

This bodes well for the remaining regions to get more IPC very soon, ad we should start seeing improvement. Since all the upgrades were ordered at the same time, we don't expect that the rest of the IPC should be too far behind.

IPC updates and it didn't take months?

Color me impressed, you said you would deliver and you did. Well done.
 
Dear Gian,

It is with regret that I pen this letter. I feel it is important to let you know why I have decided to terminate my relationship Afrihost. Until recently, I have been a strong supporter of Afrihost, its products, service and innovative thinking. The many accolades on your mantelpiece are testament to that.

When the Afrihost uncapped business DSL product, started performing at 20% capacity on Friday 17 October 2014, I noted the message on your website dashboard;
17 October 2014 10:00am We are seeing increased demand in the North region (Johannesburg, Pretoria and surrounding areas), which may affect DSL performance for clients in the region. While affected clients may experience slow speeds, we expect latency to continue to be stable for priority realtime services such as browsing, streaming and gaming. Our engineers are working hard to ensure that we provide the best possible experience and we will continue monitor traffic throughout. We apologise to affected clients for any poor experience and wish to assure them that we have ordered additional capacity from Telkom, and the upgrade is imminent. We believe this will make a significant improvement to performance and DSL experience will return to normal.
Various forum threads confirmed that all your Gauteng clients were experiencing the same results that I was, and still are. A call to your telephone support confirmed that your Gauteng DSL users were being throttled due to lack of capacity. It is interesting to note how Afrihost labels this as “increased demand” and iOS software updates, laying the blame at their customer’s feet and diverting responsibility from themself. Let’s call a spade a spade, this fiasco is due to bad management and lack of foresight. Decent monitoring of your network and a little bit of forward thinking would have had the capacity in place before “increased demand” crippled your service.

All your clients using your business DSL products should not have been affected by this “increased demand” and lack of capacity. Your clients choose to pay the premium for your business products primarily because they expect no throttling (or shaping) in any way or form. Your business products are also marketed and priced as such.

The fact that Afrihost without word or warning, modified the product that I pay for by implementing 80% throttling is unacceptable, as such I am cancelling my agreement with Afrihost as of today.

Regards,

I'd definitely like to take the opportunity here to acknowledge that I understand your anger and frustration, ad we've definitely done our best to be open and upfront about the challenge we face regarding available capacity and resources.

I think the main point of contention is the notion that we're taking on clients and not planning for the additional demand, and that is not the case. Yes, there is continued growth, but usually this is in line with demand. However, the rate at which demand is increasing is much higher than the rate at which clients are being taken on. This is a very difficult proposition for us, because it essentially means that we need to increase resources without in equivalent rise in revenues from new clients. However, we are absorbing that cost to give our clients a better experience.

Also, we have not changed the Business rules or product specifications. We've optimised and made traffic management more efficient across the entire network (all products) but Business remains an unshaped and unthrottled product.

We should see improvement very soon when the balance of our IPC upgrades go live (the East has already been upgraded).
 
It appears Cape Town connectivity to our servers in Cape Town is being routed via Joburg this morning. With 150ms-500ms latency and huge packet loss. So glad we cancelled. Can't wait for the end of the month.

PS:
In fact, even speedtest seems to think we are in Joburg. What is going on?
 
Anybody in the East experiencing line speed again? Not that I don't trust Afrihost. :D
 
I think the main point of contention is the notion that we're taking on clients and not planning for the additional demand, and that is not the case. Yes, there is continued growth, but usually this is in line with demand. However, the rate at which demand is increasing is much higher than the rate at which clients are being taken on. This is a very difficult proposition for us, because it essentially means that we need to increase resources without in equivalent rise in revenues from new clients. However, we are absorbing that cost to give our clients a better experience.

Blaming clients for using more only stretches so far. IPC costs have been on a downward spiral. These savings were never passed on to Business Account clients.

Also when considering costs, does Afrihost ever factor reputational risk into their cost assessments? The reputational damage caused by this fiasco will cost many times, many times the cost of these upgrades. Some people will hang on, some people will stay. But who is really going to trust Afrihost in the future?
 
Why do you keep mentioning this type of thing as if clients are not paying and you are doing them a favour?

AGREED.

Notice also how this has now been their stock comment when asked about compensation for "non-delivery", as if we (Business Clients) should be grateful for the promise of future stability... yet no mention, or acknowledgement of the sacrifice made by the client in AH's time of need?

They NOW have to absorb cost, as they were messing around for 2 months, side-stepping and "spinning" the obvious state of their capacity (IPC). In the interim, they have lost more revenue than they would like to admit, as more and more clients cancel.
 
Why do you keep mentioning this type of thing as if clients are not paying and you are doing them a favour?

Because it's mostly the existing client base demand more bandwidth, but paying the same rates (if not lower when we've dropped prices fro VDSL bundles for example). So instead of raising prices, we're absorbing the cost.
 
Ran pathpings throughout Sunday and it's definitely consistent. Didn't even see any improvement after 11PM which normally resulted in better latency in-game.

Did you drop me the results on an email? I think you were chatting to our new rep, AfriGenie, but I'll double check with him as well.
 
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