I've just replied to your PM.
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Afrihost Business Uncapped Feedback - 2
- Thread starter The_Unbeliever
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I've just replied to your PM.
Essentially you've sold a product too cheap that gives the customer too much... and now Afrihost can't cope with the demand they've created? For that mistake Afrihost must fit the bill!
cortexenslaver
Senior Member
This that you give away has never benefited ME, the business client. Uncapped clients do NOT benefit at ALL from this. We are jsut expected to take it, shut up, and then WAIT. It would have been nice to receive a small gesture from Afrihost the last time you guys ran out of capacity, and it surely warrants it this time, as now even BUSINESS clients are having to suffer while you "make it better for all" by OPTIMISING the network.
BTW, from Wikipedia:
Traffic shaping is of interest especially to Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Their high-cost, high-traffic networks are their major assets, and as such, are the focus of all their attentions. They sometimes use traffic shaping to optimize the use of their network, sometimes by intelligently shaping traffic according to importance, other times by discouraging uses of applications by harsh means.
The bold is where AH seems to lose itself, and not understand correct usage of industry terms, or the ENGLISH language (for that matter).
I think we've discussed and debated the difference for weeks now.
It was discussed yesterday in another thread if you'd like to review the conversation there http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthr...back-(MTN)?p=13746412&viewfull=1#post13746412
That's really not the case. We've based our assumptions on the increase in clients matching increase in demand where the reality is that demand (from existing clients) is growing much faster. Essentially, the same amount of clients, paying the same amount, are demanding more bandwidth and this creates contention for bandwidth. So we are adding more capacity, at our own cost, to meet the demand, even though we're not receiving additional revenues from existing clients (in the way of price increases) to cover those upstream costs (which is in the millions of rands, just to put this into perspective).
AH doesn't have the capacity to fulfill the demand, that's not our problem, it's yours, the bill for the IPC upgrades has nothing to do with any paying customers, saying that you fit the bill and we don't was never part of the contractual agreement anyways, we pay for a service and you provide that service, whatever it costs the company to fulfill that service is the company's own expense not ours.... *my 2 cents*
I can understand this and it is a valid point but without any solid evidence to back this up, it makes it a hard pill to swallow....
you could just be saying this to increase prices next year, or you could have plucked this out of the sky, we will never know without any solid facts.....
I think you've asked many times for us to see it from the client's perspective. I think it's only fair that you see it from the business perspective. If you don't want to, then you are most welcome to form your own opinion. We're giving you the information that leads to our decision making and informs how we manage our systems. My 2c is that it's always worth knowing what goes on in the background.
As a private company we're not obliged to publish our financials, so I'm being very open to share our cost constraints and our business model. IPC costs a lot of money, and it's not a once off cost, this is an ongoing financial commitment that literally changes the entire cost model for the product.
I agree with you 100%, it's always good to know what's going on in the background, you said that IPC is going to be upgraded, excellent, but saying that customers don't fit the bill wasn't on....it shouldn't have even been mentioned....
cortexenslaver
Senior Member
Still missing the point...
It doesn't matter about the last point, that's just added info.
What about the initial point made in direct response to the comment quoted?
"How exactly does that benefit BUSINESS CLIENTS???? What do WE get for the degraded service and impact to OUR BUSINESSES????"
Sorry dude, I never asked for you to publish anything, was just making a point...anyways, no hard feelings....
No worries. You can take it from me that the financial commitment we've made to make upgrades is very significant, and will have a big impact - but we're doing it gladly to give our clients the best experience.
Did you read the posts though?
We know that the current situation isn't ideal, but P2P and downloads are degraded in order to stop the network from becoming any worse. If we were to open it up, contention would go through the roof and latency would become completely unstable.
We want to provide the best experience possible, by doing what we're doing we're able to do so. And again, upgrades are on the way - so we can put this all behind us soon.
It would be awesome to provide a complete failover solution for our Business clients but the simple truth is, it't just not a viable option without raising the costs considerably.
I understand what you're saying about a gesture. I think the focus is on improving your experience and value, and the costs involved. I think the biggest gesture is that we're willing to invest a massive amount of money to improve the network without seeing a similar increase in revenues from existing or new clients.
Think you need to fire your business analysts, and possibly the authors of the current business model! I'm not versed in business planning, but, even the smallest bit of research in internet users trends will reveal that bandwidth usage per user has exploded over the last 5 years, and will continue to do so. Remember you are selling an 'eat-as-much-as-you-want' buffet product(uncapped, unshaped)... and in the background companies have got everything connected over those ADSL lines... PC's, smartphones, servers, OS updates... and then multiply that by the business staff count(say 20 users)... and boom that's alot of bandwidth! Even in the home user context demand has spiked... streaming, gaming, smartphones, social media and the whole family's connected!
Seriously I'm shocked that Afrihost didn't build the massive increase in demand into the business plan! That word 'assumptions' scares me in the context of big business! Business should do research and make informed decisions... not make assumptions!
Unless I've missed Afrihost admitting to shaping on business and capped accounts prior to this post surely this is a very important statement in the face of what has been said previously.
Edit: Nevermind, I see there was a debate around semantics in the capped thread.
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Any forecasting or planning involves assumptions. We've got 14 years in the ISP game, and many of our team have even more experience from the business world. Working from hard data alone would be we'd have to change our network daily based on yesterday's reports. It simply does not work that way, and would not be viable in any kind of sense. We make assumptions based on accumulated data and trends and factors we can reasonably predict. You may be looking at your office or household needs but we're talking about a network of hundreds of thousands of users who are constantly changing, adding and removing users, and also changing their habits according to their own requirements. I think you may be underestimating the level of complexity that goes into this.
Having said that, we'll continue to learn and getting better at predicting what our clients need before they need it. I think we've already seen improvement and the reaction to demand increases and catering for them.
requiem
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They are shaping P2P and downloads. They will continue to deny it.
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