Afrihost Capped ADSL Feedback (MTN) - New beginning

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i.got~issues said:
Hi

Thanks for the offer... but I think I am not going to bother... accounts have been / are being downgraded to 1GB accounts and I will be moving on... only keeping the Afrihost mobile data accounts for now.

I am done with this.
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I totally understand where you are coming from. I think we'd definitely like to get your feedback on why your experience on Afrigreen is not what it should be. You may be seeing extra latency because our initial IPC is in Johannesburg, but you should still be seeing an overall improvement.

But totally respect your decision either way :(
 
AfriMan said:
Is this on Afrigreen or the current network?

Which title and platform are you struggling with?
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Normal network as usual. Still waiting on the Afrigreen info, so I hope that things get better once it arrives.

World of Warships, PoE, Heroes of the Storm, all unplayable.
 
AfriMan said:
I think it's definitely important to see our vision here.
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Rubbish. Why should your clients care about your "vision"? We pay the money, we want the service that we paid for. That's my "vision".

I think you are so busy with your own "vision", that you've completely lost sight of your clients' vision.

AfriMan said:
We want to deliver a better experience but this is a process of moving from where we are to where we want to get to.
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You are quite capable of providing a decent experience. You have before. I think it is rather a process of you minimising your expense on capacity to maximise profits.

AfriMan said:
You're absolutely welcome to be part of that b participating in the proof of concept testing (and most likely get a better short term experience) or stay where you are while we get those networks ready for you to be moved over, and in the meantime you should see a better experience as more users are moved over to populate the network as we iron out any remaining kinks.
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I pay the money, I should get the service I'm paying for. It should not be up to your client to have to care about testing your proof of concept, etc etc.
 
The Afrihost website is being unresponsive. Pinging it yields a regular result of 45ms. MTN site is also slow. Everything else is fine.

EDIT: Got quite a bit faster just after I posted this.
 
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My hosting packages with Afrihost are running quite slow, too, and FTP uploads are almost at a halt. I take it that the primary MTN data centres are under strain?
 
Seems every week day there's a 400-500ms latency increase from 8am-5pm. Really don't feel like dealing with this for much longer.
 
garp said:
Rubbish. Why should your clients care about your "vision"? We pay the money, we want the service that we paid for. That's my "vision".

I think you are so busy with your own "vision", that you've completely lost sight of your clients' vision.

You are quite capable of providing a decent experience. You have before. I think it is rather a process of you minimising your expense on capacity to maximise profits.

I pay the money, I should get the service I'm paying for. It should not be up to your client to have to care about testing your proof of concept, etc etc.
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I think there are a lot of assumptions here, and that why I think a shared vision is essential to a relationship between a service provider and client.

We are definitely not sacrificing your experience to make way for profits. We're actually spending much more on building a new network and I think any other ISP would have simply carried on carrying on, but we decided to invest in the future.

I think any new network is going to require client testing, there is simply no way to replicate tens of thousands of users with all their specific needs, services, time variations. Even moving over to MTN involved a lot of trial and error to understand user behaviour and make adjustments accordingly. Remember that this is not a blank slate network. We've done extensive testing prior to accepting clients onto the network, testing every conceivable service in every conceivable variation to iron out any kinks. There two parts to this, one is that we believe clients who share our vision also deserve to be part of the decision making process so that the network we move forward with is our network. Secondly, we also want clients who want to be part of that process, but those who don't want to are not forced to change over to the new network until they can see the feedback for themselves and decide if they want to stick with us, or go another way. I totally understand if any client doesn't want to follow us towards that vision and future, but I think many clients feel that an inclusive and open approach is what they expect from us as a company.
 
Sidious28 said:
+1 although mine seems to go straight into the evening as well.
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sveed said:
Seems every week day there's a 400-500ms latency increase from 8am-5pm. Really don't feel like dealing with this for much longer.
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It will depend on which region you are in. We generally see latency in the day in the East at the moment, but some latency in the South in the evenings, though this seems to be much better at the moment (in general).
 
giggity said:
The Afrihost website is being unresponsive. Pinging it yields a regular result of 45ms. MTN site is also slow. Everything else is fine.

EDIT: Got quite a bit faster just after I posted this.
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Seems fine to me, but will ask someone to test in Chrome as well from the website team :(
 
AfriMan said:
I think there are a lot of assumptions here, and that why I think a shared vision is essential to a relationship between a service provider and client.
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And I think you're out of touch with the reality of the commercial world. If I went to a client and told them "Sorry about our crappy service, but the really important thing is that you need to see our vision here" I would be thrown out of the door so quickly that it would hit me on the way out.
 
garp said:
And I think you're out of touch with the reality of the commercial world. If I went to a client and told them "Sorry about our crappy service, but the really important thing is that you need to see our vision here" I would be thrown out of the door so quickly that it would hit me on the way out.
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I think we're staying true to our vision and that's what will take us through this challenge, and whatever the next one will be, because our clients believe that we put our clients first and never sacrifice their interests in the name of profits. I can honestly say we never have.
 
AfriMan said:
I think we're staying true to our vision and that's what will take us through this challenge, and whatever the next one will be, because our clients believe that we put our clients first and never sacrifice their interests in the name of profits. I can honestly say we never have.
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I am your customer and I sincerely don't believe that...
 
Alright got my Afrigreen details, will test it out whole day and will let know in the end of the day in the Afrigreen thread!
 
AfriMan said:
I think we're staying true to our vision and that's what will take us through this challenge, and whatever the next one will be, because our clients believe that we put our clients first and never sacrifice their interests in the name of profits. I can honestly say we never have.
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But are you staying true to your clients' vision, or are you just obsessed with your own? Do you even care what your clients' vision is? Seems to me like you have a vision of somehow maximising your profits with complicated routing, caching and QOS schemes which will hopefully keep clients happy on the bare minimum of cost/capacity.

I have been through a few smaller companies that have been gobbled up by large corporates and usually the first issue they face is a complete turnaround of their corporate culture driven not by any explicit desire to change, but implicitly by the fact that the first thing the new owners demand is strict profit targets. Suddenly the possibility of causing any extra expenditure here and there in an effort to continue service excellence is wiped out by a faceless accountant in the holding company that slashes red lines through anything deemed even marginally superfluous. I don't know what's going on in AH, but from outside it's starting to look like that scenario.

I have long moved the accounts that I can easily from AH but, unfortunately, still have remote users that are on AH accounts so it is unavoidable that I have to deal with this.
 
garp said:
But are you staying true to your clients' vision, or are you just obsessed with your own? Do you even care what your clients' vision is? Seems to me like you have a vision of somehow maximising your profits with complicated routing, caching and QOS schemes which will hopefully keep clients happy on the bare minimum of cost/capacity.

I have been through a few smaller companies that have been gobbled up by large corporates and usually the first issue they face is a complete turnaround of their corporate culture driven not by any explicit desire to change, but implicitly by the fact that the first thing the new owners demand is strict profit targets. Suddenly the possibility of causing any extra expenditure here and there in an effort to continue service excellence is wiped out by a faceless accountant in the holding company that slashes red lines through anything deemed even marginally superfluous. I don't know what's going on in AH, but from outside it's starting to look like that scenario.

I have long moved the accounts that I can easily from AH but, unfortunately, still have remote users that are on AH accounts so it is unavoidable that I have to deal with this.
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I'm not sure a company can focus on it's client's vision. That would be a company that chops and changes it's values all the time. New business thinking, and what we've always believed, is that companies have to stick to the vision and values that got them to where they are, or consult with their stakeholders (like their clients) if they intend to change their vision.

Saying that we're obsessed with profits is just simply false and I don't know what we can do further to show you that is not the case. Again, that misalignment vision is sad, because there is no common belief that helps us move forward together. I also think the comments about corporate culture and expenditure are totally unfounded. If that were the case, there is no way that MTN would give us their support to venture out and spend on building a new network. But they understand our vision and our culture and trusted us to do what we need to do to grow with our clients, and they know that in the long term that is the true profit margin that companies should be aiming for. I truly believe that trying to please everyone ends up pleasing no-one, so our aim is to stick with our values and I believe that this will keep us true to our clients.
 
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