Afrihost Support

[jeanres]

I have to ask the question. why do business uncapped users not get better / faster support than normal Afrihost uncapped client, surely as a "business" customer you depend on your internet more than a normal uncapped user?

 

[AfriMan]

Business DSL is a product which is just as important to us as any of our other products. Many private clients use Business DSL, just as many businesses prefer Capped or Home Uncapped for various reasons. We definitely do not want to treat our clients differently on this basis.

Your query is important to us and we are unfortunately getting an unusually high volume of queries at our support centre today. Ideally, ALL our clients should receive awesome service - not just the ones who pay more.

We're truly sorry. I am trying to assist you via PM so I hope you will accept my help

 

[jeanres]

You are making un-educated guesses via pm, that why I requested a call.

 

[Paul Hjul]

I have to ask the question. why do business uncapped users not get better / faster support than normal Afrihost uncapped client, surely as a "business" customer you depend on your internet more than a normal uncapped user?

You are making a fairly odd assumption as to internet dependence. ADSL is a best effort consumer product - both locally and globally. While it does enjoy much of the resilience built into Internet systems it does have multiple single points of failure and so forth. If you have an internet dependence need you need to secure redundancy which Afrihost offers via their mobile offerings. In the last 6 months the greatest causes of ADSL connectivity failure I've experienced has been thanks to our Eskom and in both instances I have been able to roll over because of the Afrihost mifi device - - which is awesome redundancy because it doesn't depend on power being present so a business equipped with a few laptops and a mifi can continue even during a power failure without needing to spend a fortune on batteries and a generator.

A business ADSL offering is still a "consumer" product. The business is a consumer in exactly the same way as a home user is. ISPs in SA have introduced business products as a slightly better quality product and apart from Telkom I don't think company registration is a requirement for any of the ISPs (possibly MWEB I haven't actually checked). In the case of Afrihost that primary improvement is in the shaping sphere [it is kind of like having turbocharge running automatically for you]. These products still fall under the various consumer protection laws and are open to anybody to acquire - unlike many business products in other industries which are reserved for business use and lack the consumer protection mechanisms etc ....

Internet dependent business tends to involve data centres, fibre to the location and so on. However by using a mixture of mobile data and ADSL web consumption dependent businesses can continue and that is really good for small enterprise development in SA. What Afrihost in my view is missing on this front is an "internet dependence" bolt on which allows a customer of that product to receive additional support to ensure connectivity as well as a mobile redundancy solution that provides "uncapped" mobile at the speed the customers ADSL connection allows for when ADSL is not functioning as well as has provisioning on non-MTN ADSL networks (SIAX for example) in the event of a network failure. I have a 5Gb MiFi offering and its great but if I was needing redundancy for connectivity purposes I'd like to be zero billed for connectivity over mobile if my ADSL fails - and the paradox is that I'd be happy to pay for it.
Of course such planning should only happen after they figure out how to get IPoAC operating such as to enable communication with natural satellites - an IP6 implementation being necessary for forward planning.
Of course one Afridog is fully in force Afrihost should be able to experiment and introduce an RFC for IPoAACM (IP over Afrihost Awesome Canine Movements) and they shouldn't skimp off on getting IPConnect in PE