Afrihost Fibre Feedback

[Johnatan56]

We did announce price increases recently - these were sent by email and also published here on MyBB:

https://mybroadband.co.za/news/adsl/250997-afrihost-price-increases-announced.html

It should be either R10 or R20 per product, depending on the price of the individual product (which is VAT inclusive).

No I didn't.

I did not realize you would increase contracts where the price was agreed upon to begin with when I saw that article and I did not receive a mail stating otherwise.
Can I also now change the contract, saying I'd rather want it to be 2 months now? It's just a number in the agreement that was made, same as the price.

 

[AfriMan]

View attachment 512519
No I didn't.

I did not realize you would increase contracts where the price was agreed upon to begin with when I saw that article and I did not receive a mail stating otherwise.
Can I also now change the contract, saying I'd rather want it to be 2 months now? It's just a number in the agreement that was made, same as the price.

The terms and conditions (which form part of the contract) do allow for changes with sufficient notice. The price changes were mailed a month prior to implementation to all clients and also published - we can't really do more to bring this to every client's attention

 

[Johnatan56]

The terms and conditions (which form part of the contract) do allow for changes with sufficient notice. The price changes were mailed a month prior to implementation to all clients and also published - we can't really do more to bring this to every client's attention

I am a client, I wasn't mailed. Suffice to say, the moment the contract ends I am moving it away. Did the same with Cell C.

 

[AfriFella]

I am a client, I wasn't mailed. Suffice to say, the moment the contract ends I am moving it away. Did the same with Cell C.

I'm sorry to hear that, Johnatan56.

 

[Luke7777]

To be quite honest, I didn't get the email either. Saw the price change when I incorrectly got invoiced for Simfy. Emailed, got reply back the same day, but by that time I already found the notice on MyBB. To leave because of a R20 hike and the lack of an email, then you're just looking for an excuse to go

Their inability after more than 9 months to provide any info around rollover data is of a bigger concern to me than R10 or R20 and an email

 

[AfriMan]

To be quite honest, I didn't get the email either. Saw the price change when I incorrectly got invoiced for Simfy. Emailed, got reply back the same day, but by that time I already found the notice on MyBB. To leave because of a R20 hike and the lack of an email, then you're just looking for an excuse to go

Their inability after more than 9 months to provide any info around rollover data is of a bigger concern to me than R10 or R20 and an email

The email was definitely intended to go out to all clients, but there is a small failure rate on bulk emails

We are definitely working on the rollover features on fibre. The change requires complex dev work, as I understand it. But it is definitely on our radar.

 

[Johnatan56]

To be quite honest, I didn't get the email either. Saw the price change when I incorrectly got invoiced for Simfy. Emailed, got reply back the same day, but by that time I already found the notice on MyBB. To leave because of a R20 hike and the lack of an email, then you're just looking for an excuse to go

Their inability after more than 9 months to provide any info around rollover data is of a bigger concern to me than R10 or R20 and an email

I leave because if they can't even stick to a price, what's next? I picked them because I calculated the price over two years, them vs. competitors vs. paying installation costs directly. That R10pm makes it match other providers. If they increase again, then they'll be more than some others.

The purpose of why I signed a fixed-price contract is so that I don't have to worry about price changes. In the time that I was with Afrihost, their costs have actually decreased as the IPC cuts were between 25 and 32%, also OpenServe decreased the costs for line rental.

That R10/R20 increase directly offsets the IPC cost decreases they passed on: https://mybroadband.co.za/news/fibre/212110-afrihost-cutting-openserve-fibre-prices.html
Not counting that all their licensing costs decreased due to the exchange rate, around a 10% decrease.

Yet the price still goes up. That's why I am leaving the moment the contract is up.

The email was definitely intended to go out to all clients, but there is a small failure rate on bulk emails

We are definitely working on the rollover features on fibre. The change requires complex dev work, as I understand it. But it is definitely on our radar.

How can you have a small failure rate? That makes no sense. I've dealt with working with systems that deliver bulk mail, if one client doesn't receive the mail, then there would be a P1 issue to check on that.

Yeah, that feature change has been nearly a year from what I've gathered, I have no confidence in your dev team to deliver it before 2025, especially after they can't even get bulk mail right.

 

[AfriMan]

I leave because if they can't even stick to a price, what's next? I picked them because I calculated the price over two years, them vs. competitors vs. paying installation costs directly. That R10pm makes it match other providers. If they increase again, then they'll be more than some others.

The purpose of why I signed a fixed-price contract is so that I don't have to worry about price changes. In the time that I was with Afrihost, their costs have actually decreased as the IPC cuts were between 25 and 32%, also OpenServe decreased the costs for line rental.

That R10/R20 increase directly offsets the IPC cost decreases they passed on: https://mybroadband.co.za/news/fibre/212110-afrihost-cutting-openserve-fibre-prices.html
Not counting that all their licensing costs decreased due to the exchange rate, around a 10% decrease.

Yet the price still goes up. That's why I am leaving the moment the contract is up.



How can you have a small failure rate? That makes no sense. I've dealt with working with systems that deliver bulk mail, if one client doesn't receive the mail, then there would be a P1 issue to check on that.

Yeah, that feature change has been nearly a year from what I've gathered, I have no confidence in your dev team to deliver it before 2025, especially after they can't even get bulk mail right.

You're quoting part of the story. While IPC may have decreased, that doesn't affect pricing for fibre and mobile networking, only Telkom products, which are no longer the majority of the traffic on our network. Data Centre fees for hosting our network kit (especially with us installing additional capacity and redundancy) are costly and rising. And human costs rise annually with increases, additional staff and training, etc. Licensing costs may be slightly more favourable because of exchange rates, but they still generally increase. Hardware costs also increase continually despite the favourable exchange. So in general, it's pretty obvious that prices generally go up, not down. We've absorbed those costs for a long time. With the recent VAT increase, we had to make a tough decision - and pretty much every other ISP followed suit in the month that followed.

Really don't see the issue here

 

[Johnatan56]

You're quoting part of the story. While IPC may have decreased, that doesn't affect pricing for fibre and mobile networking, only Telkom products, which are no longer the majority of the traffic on our network. Data Centre fees for hosting our network kit (especially with us installing additional capacity and redundancy) are costly and rising. And human costs rise annually with increases, additional staff and training, etc. Licensing costs may be slightly more favourable because of exchange rates, but they still generally increase. Hardware costs also increase continually despite the favourable exchange. So in general, it's pretty obvious that prices generally go up, not down. We've absorbed those costs for a long time. With the recent VAT increase, we had to make a tough decision - and pretty much every other ISP followed suit in the month that followed.

Really don't see the issue here

I'm on OpenServe fiber, it definitely affects the pricing. Also line prices decreased, wasn't passed on.
Data Center fees do not increase substantially, that's utter nonsense. Only things that have increased recently are prices of memory. Plus, this is not part of my internet costs, those are for those doing hosting, unless you're counting for caching, then you're saving money as it's cheaper than the international costs.
Licensing costs don't generally increase, would love to know what licenses you're using so I can be sure to avoid those.
VAT one makes me laugh. That definitely is passed on and I don't have a problem with that, it doesn't increase the bottom line cost of your business, just the customer's products. Unless you're saying you want to double charge that VAT?

I know you're trying to save face for the company, but no, what you're saying is utter BS. I'd love to take a look at your financials reports, but doesn't seem you publicly trade shares/post financials, they'd definitely point to an increase in profits over the last year.

 

[AfriMan]

I'm on OpenServe fiber, it definitely affects the pricing. Also line prices decreased, wasn't passed on.
Data Center fees do not increase substantially, that's utter nonsense. Only things that have increased recently are prices of memory. Plus, this is not part of my internet costs, those are for those doing hosting, unless you're counting for caching, then you're saving money as it's cheaper than the international costs.
Licensing costs don't generally increase, would love to know what licenses you're using so I can be sure to avoid those.
VAT one makes me laugh. That definitely is passed on and I don't have a problem with that, it doesn't increase the bottom line cost of your business, just the customer's products. Unless you're saying you want to double charge that VAT?

I know you're trying to save face for the company, but no, what you're saying is utter BS. I'd love to take a look at your financials reports, but doesn't seem you publicly trade shares/post financials, they'd definitely point to an increase in profits over the last year.

I'm sorry, I understand you've chosen to be upset about this - but you're making a ton of assumptions that are simply untrue and I think it's a little irresponsible to throw around allegations based on very tenuous speculation. You're implying that we're inventing upstream costs so that we can increase our margins - why would we do that? It would be a silly business decision.

 

[Johnatan56]

I'm sorry, I understand you've chosen to be upset about this - but you're making a ton of assumptions that are simply untrue and I think it's a little irresponsible to throw around allegations based on very tenuous speculation. You're implying that we're inventing upstream costs so that we can increase our margins - why would we do that? It would be a silly business decision.

Huh? You're a business, the point is to maximize profit. You don't have to invent stuff, I am saying that you're attempting to pacify it based on nonsense rather than being upfront about it.

 

[AfriGenie]

Huh? You're a business, the point is to maximize profit. You don't have to invent stuff, I am saying that you're attempting to pacify it based on nonsense rather than being upfront about it.

We will always do our best to ensure that each of our Client's receives the best possible product and experience. As AfriMan has pointed out there have been a number of fees that have gone up recently that we've been absorbing for some time. There is a point where this no longer is feasible and we have to increase the prices of our products. This was a difficult decision to make, but one we felt was necessary.

 

[clickingbuttons]

Been experiencing slow speeds on my Afrihost fiber package on TTconnect again.

DL: 15.74 mbit
UL: 91.04 mbit

No point logging a support call. They reply two weeks later if you're lucky anyway.

Just gonna change to Cool Ideas.

Thanks but no thanks Afrihost.

You guys literally did 0 to get the line installed by TTconnect, I had to do everything, all the phonecalls, all the follow ups, all the appointment making.

I'm paying 1500 a month for what? 15 mbit if I'm lucky?

Stay away people, stay far far away.

 

[acp]

Been experiencing slow speeds on my Afrihost fiber package on TTconnect again.

DL: 15.74 mbit
UL: 91.04 mbit

No point logging a support call. They reply two weeks later if you're lucky anyway.

Just gonna change to Cool Ideas.

Thanks but no thanks Afrihost.

You guys literally did 0 to get the line installed by TTconnect, I had to do everything, all the phonecalls, all the follow ups, all the appointment making.

I'm paying 1500 a month for what? 15 mbit if I'm lucky?

Stay away people, stay far far away.

I've experienced something similar to you over the past couple of weeks with Afrihost (DL: 10 / UL: 100 - should be the other way around). The support experience has been one the worst I've encountered. Without going into much detail: I was assured by AH for weeks on end that this is being looked after by the 'supervisor' of the fibre team @ Afrihost, but needless to say other than generic and senseless requests for tests and a mere shrugging of the shoulders that nothing's wrong on AH side... she was about as useful as an ashtray on a motorbike...

If you're with Vumatel and prepared to give it one last shot, try to contact them directly to re-provision your ONT or get Afrihost to request the Vuma ticket to do this. Then follow-up with Vuma direct. This solved it for me after weeks of absolute Afrihost fail. Afrihost logged line-fault tickets to Vuma who sent technicians to test my line and ONT twice finding NO FAULTS - Vuma then pointed back to Afrihost saying that it is an account profiling issue; Afrihost then pointed fingers back to Vuma saying it is not their problem as all looks fine on AH end, leaving me with what felt like dial-up speeds.

Regardless of who's fault it was, I signed-up for fibre via Afrihost under the impression that you have one single point of contact and that the ISP logs and troubleshoots all issues, whether ISP or fibre-provider related. I was very wrong - like in the good old Telkom ADSL days, you're better off doing this yourself.

Things only started moving when I started escalating personally within Vumatel and boy were they operating in stark contrast to Afrihost. Vuma's skilled and helpful technicians called me personally and helped to troubleshoot and within a few minutes it was resolved. They even followed-up twice to check if all is still in order.

The issue I have is that Afrihost was supposed to do this coordination and troubleshooting with Vuma, not me - or that's impression that I signed-up under??

The 'root cause' might have been some back-haul upgrades Vuma did over the last couple of weeks that might have left some accounts with incorrect speed profiles.

Note that I'm speculating that your situation is similar to mine, however if you're with another fibre provider, the plot certainly thickens around Afrihost's involvement.

EDIT: I see now that you're on TTConnect - that certainly implicates Afrihost a little more assuming that TTC does not have any issues like Vuma had.

 

[AfriFella]

Been experiencing slow speeds on my Afrihost fiber package on TTconnect again.

DL: 15.74 mbit
UL: 91.04 mbit

No point logging a support call. They reply two weeks later if you're lucky anyway.

Just gonna change to Cool Ideas.

Thanks but no thanks Afrihost.

You guys literally did 0 to get the line installed by TTconnect, I had to do everything, all the phonecalls, all the follow ups, all the appointment making.

I'm paying 1500 a month for what? 15 mbit if I'm lucky?

Stay away people, stay far far away.

Hi there. I'm really sorry to hear about your poor experience over the last while. This is definitely not the kind of thing we want anyone to have to go through and I'm sad to hear that you're thinking about switching providers.

If you have any outstanding support requests, please feel free to PM me and I'll do my best to help you get this resolved as quickly as possible and make things right again.

 

[AfriFella]

I've experienced something similar to you over the past couple of weeks with Afrihost (DL: 10 / UL: 100 - should be the other way around). The support experience has been one the worst I've encountered. Without going into much detail: I was assured by AH for weeks on end that this is being looked after by the 'supervisor' of the fibre team @ Afrihost, but needless to say other than generic and senseless requests for tests and a mere shrugging of the shoulders that nothing's wrong on AH side... she was about as useful as an ashtray on a motorbike...

If you're with Vumatel and prepared to give it one last shot, try to contact them directly to re-provision your ONT or get Afrihost to request the Vuma ticket to do this. Then follow-up with Vuma direct. This solved it for me after weeks of absolute Afrihost fail. Afrihost logged line-fault tickets to Vuma who sent technicians to test my line and ONT twice finding NO FAULTS - Vuma then pointed back to Afrihost saying that it is an account profiling issue; Afrihost then pointed fingers back to Vuma saying it is not their problem as all looks fine on AH end, leaving me with what felt like dial-up speeds.

Regardless of who's fault it was, I signed-up for fibre via Afrihost under the impression that you have one single point of contact and that the ISP logs and troubleshoots all issues, whether ISP or fibre-provider related. I was very wrong - like in the good old Telkom ADSL days, you're better off doing this yourself.

Things only started moving when I started escalating personally within Vumatel and boy were they operating in stark contrast to Afrihost. Vuma's skilled and helpful technicians called me personally and helped to troubleshoot and within a few minutes it was resolved. They even followed-up twice to check if all is still in order.

The issue I have is that Afrihost was supposed to do this coordination and troubleshooting with Vuma, not me - or that's impression that I signed-up under??

The 'root cause' might have been some back-haul upgrades Vuma did over the last couple of weeks that might have left some accounts with incorrect speed profiles.

Note that I'm speculating that your situation is similar to mine, however if you're with another fibre provider, the plot certainly thickens around Afrihost's involvement.

EDIT: I see now that you're on TTConnect - that certainly implicates Afrihost a little more assuming that TTC does not have any issues like Vuma had.

Hi acp. I know that you've had a really frustrating experience with regards to your connection. I think it's always important to troubleshoot to find the cause of a problem before assuming that there is any kind of backhaul issues which is more often not the case. I do understand that, in your case, this was the problem and I'm sorry that it took so long to determine, but from what you have said in your post, our Fibre Team did troubleshoot with you, log request with Vuma and sent out technicians to assist. I'm really sorry about the delay, and that you had to follow up personally, but I'm glad to hear it was resolved in the end. Please feel free to always PM us in the future so we can help fast track any queries and improve your experience.

 

[Gimli_]

No IPV6 address available on fibre???

Must say I had a great Openserve/Afrihost fibre install experience, I made a post about it in the fibre networks forum.

I'd like to know now what the situation is with not offering IPV6 in South Africa. We are so far behind the rest of the world wrt. ipv6 adoption, with only 0.3% of google queries from south africa being done in ipv6, while their global average is at 22%

Is it still the case that Telkom/Openserve is the culprit to blame because of bad management, or are the ISP's partly to blame as well. Why are we not able to apply for an IPV6 address on our home fibre connection?

Please Afrifella, will you do some asking around and feed back to us, or if the question was answered in another thread, please direct me to it.

Much appreciated

 

[Johnatan56]

Must say I had a great Openserve/Afrihost fibre install experience, I made a post about it in the fibre networks forum.

I'd like to know now what the situation is with not offering IPV6 in South Africa. We are so far behind the rest of the world wrt. ipv6 adoption, with only 0.3% of google queries from south africa being done in ipv6, while their global average is at 22%

Is it still the case that Telkom/Openserve is the culprit to blame because of bad management, or are the ISP's partly to blame as well. Why are we not able to apply for an IPV6 address on our home fibre connection?

Please Afrifella, will you do some asking around and feed back to us, or if the question was answered in another thread, please direct me to it.

Much appreciated

OpenServe doesn't offer it due to going through IPC. I am unsure of the other providers, they should if Teraco allows it as near all of them peer through it.

EDIT:

“We are IPv6 ready!” AFRINIC and Teraco on joint training for Network Access Providers
[Aug 29th, 2013]

Teraco Data Centre Environments co-hosted AFRINIC’s training programme in Johannesburg

Teraco Data Centre Environments co-hosted an IPv6 training with AFRINIC (The African Network Information Centre), the Regional Internet Registry (RIR) for Africa, on 20 – 23 August 2013. AFRINIC is responsible for the fair distribution and management of Internet number resources such as IP addresses throughout the African region.

“As part of our support to the community within NAP Africa, a neutral layer two Internet peering exchange (IX) point, and our commitment to improve telecommunications in Africa, we made the decision to host the training programme,” says Michele McCann of Teraco Data Centre Environments. The programme in August involved 24 network engineers from the NAPAfrica peering community.

Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is the latest version of the Internet Protocol (IP), the communications protocol that allows each devices to be connected to the Internet. IPv6 was developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to deal with the long-anticipated problem of IPv4 address exhaustion. IPv6 is intended to replace IPv4, which still carries the vast majority of Internet traffic.

“In line with our capacity-building strategy we offer since 2005 trainings free of charge on Internet Number resource Management and IPv6. We are targeting network engineers, systems administrators, managers as well as decision makers” states Adiel Akplogan, the CEO of AFRINIC, “The training programme ensures that participants actually practice configuring and troubleshooting IPv6 networks and services, and provides them with the knowledge and skills to be able to do real deployments on their own networks”.
https://companies.mybroadband.co.za...-joint-training-for-network-access-providers/

Vuma doesn't seem to.
https://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthread.php/907957-Vumatel-Fibre-ISP-for-IPv6
Cool Ideas is a good rep to ask.

 

[acp]

Hi acp. I know that you've had a really frustrating experience with regards to your connection. I think it's always important to troubleshoot to find the cause of a problem before assuming that there is any kind of backhaul issues which is more often not the case. I do understand that, in your case, this was the problem and I'm sorry that it took so long to determine, but from what you have said in your post, our Fibre Team did troubleshoot with you, log request with Vuma and sent out technicians to assist. I'm really sorry about the delay, and that you had to follow up personally, but I'm glad to hear it was resolved in the end. Please feel free to always PM us in the future so we can help fast track any queries and improve your experience.

Thanks - I do appreciate the efforts the social team is making to keep the communications open, but here's the thing:

An example of the incompetence on the AH support side:
Your so-called fibre supervisor/team-lead repeatedly asked me to test the speed when connected directly to the ONT via LAN cable and send speed tests - this I did REPEATEDLY; the speeds remained slow.
She then concluded that the AH network team has to 'troubleshoot my router'... :wtf: !!!!!
If the test via LAN cable directly to the ONT rendered the slow speeds with the router switched off and unplugged, what on earth does my router have to do with this??
That was the sum total of the 'Afrihost fibre team troubleshooting with me'.

The requests logged to Vuma was because AH believed there was something wrong on the line - this was not the case and was made abundantly clear right from the start, by myself and by Vuma and the Britelink technicians after round 1 testing. Yet AH mindlessly logged more tickets and Vuma/Britelink dispatched more technicians who once again confirmed that there was no issue on the line or equipment.

The 3rd round ticket to re-provision was after AH tried the same tactic for weeks on end always giving the same result and believe it or not, they were about to do exactly the same: dispatch yet another technician to test the line.
I contacted Vumatel directly and someone on their team explained some alternatives to me which I had to take back to Afrihost because they had to initiate the request. From the start, all my hints and suggestions that this was either a Vuma or Afrihost account profiling issue and NOT a line/equipment issue were blatantly ignored.

My suggestion to Afrihost would be that in stead of always defending your position, take a long, hard look into how situations like these are handled and use the opportunity to improve and up-skill your support teams to have them actually listen to customers as opposed to arguing with them and mindlessly following standard steps that often make absolutely no sense.

In addition, after 11 months, still no way to accurately track capped fibre data.

 

[AfriMan]

Must say I had a great Openserve/Afrihost fibre install experience, I made a post about it in the fibre networks forum.

I'd like to know now what the situation is with not offering IPV6 in South Africa. We are so far behind the rest of the world wrt. ipv6 adoption, with only 0.3% of google queries from south africa being done in ipv6, while their global average is at 22%

Is it still the case that Telkom/Openserve is the culprit to blame because of bad management, or are the ISP's partly to blame as well. Why are we not able to apply for an IPV6 address on our home fibre connection?

Please Afrifella, will you do some asking around and feed back to us, or if the question was answered in another thread, please direct me to it.

Much appreciated

We are definitely in support of moving to IPv6, and we've moved to 6 for our internal network. As I understand it (and people smarter than me should feel free to chip in) most websites are not accepting IPv6 addresses and it requires complex NAT to switch between 4 and 6 to ensure smooth connectivity. So we as an ISP are not switching our public IP's to IPv6 or offering that until we believe clients will have a good experience.