Afrihost Uncapped ADSL Feedback (Pt3)

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Sayonara Afrihost.

It's been a fun ride while you actually provided the service you advertised, but the last couple of months was a bumpy ride to put it mildly. Not allowing full speed Steam downloads, changing your policy on uncapped from dynamic shaping 24 hours a day to "Permanent Testing" of shaping 18 hours a day has effectively turned this account into a streaming package. It's not good for anything else based on my usage.

Latency was better on 3 competitors by 30ms to both US and EU servers, ZERO packet loss on competitor networks and no lag spikes either...time to go.

If you ever return to the company I signed up with years ago and offer the product you advertise I will be back.

Cheers.
 
Raysmith said:
I think you are spot-on with your reference to the "over-selling". We are once again being strung along with promises of upgrades coming but, of course, no time-line! Us poor loyal customers down south (Cape Town) always seem to be last when improvements are made. AH please give us a break!
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We're definitely aware of our clients in the South, and to my memory we've done more frequent upgrades in the South than any other region, even though the North has the biggest network. The South seems to have a different usage trend and we're learning more about how each region behaves and how to optimise performance for those clients in the region.

There are definitely upgrades ordered and confirmed for the South, so there is no misinformation there. We're definitely committing the necessary resources to improve your experience.
 
bgotapen said:
I would like to know that too. It is one thing a thousand people jumping boat ( thus making the network less congested and afrihost does not have to spend more on fixing their network)

and a couple of thousand customers getting refunds due to afrihost's problems. (Which in my personal opinion should have happened automatically by afrihosts ceo) which will force them to make contingency arrangements.

I got this reply:



I completely ignored this email simply because when i received this email packetloss on my free 1gb afrihost account was at an average of 17%

It dawned on me that they will string me along for months and not fix anything. As this was a problem more than 5 months old.
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I think it's definitely not a question of not wanting to give client's a better experience or that we're just hoping that people will quit so we don't have to upgrade. That would be a very flawed model and we've all seen that work very badly for other companies that have used this method.

I think it's very important to note that demand has increased well beyond the number of clients, so essentially we have to commit to higher upstream costs while our revenues are not rising at the same rate. We're happy to do so as long as it's feasible. Giving out blanket refunds is certainly going to make it difficult to commit the necessary funds to ensure a better experience. We will find a way (as we have in the past) to reward our clients for sticking with us through tough times.
 
aktor said:
Here's an idea, Afrihost. How about refunding everyone affected by this, because let's face it - uncapped (at least in the south) has been completely unusable for at least the last month. Like seriously, I spent so much money on topping up my "emergency" capped account just to be able to browse and do BASIC things that aren't supposed to be affected on the uncapped accounts. (As a sidenote, my capped account works perfectly fine when the uncapped doesn't. Even turbocharges have little to no effect on my uncapped performance.)

I'm getting so tired of this. Fix your capacity issues already. You've been promising us for more than a year now, literally. The excuses are wearing thin. While we do understand why this is happening, we don't understand why you don't do something about it sooner - especially as we're paying and not getting our money's worth.
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As I've just posted on the previous post, I don't think any of us, especially our directors, don't wish we could do something like a blanket refund, but unfortunately we can't do that and still be able to install the additional capacity to give our clients a better experience. We feel the best use of those resources is to improve the network for all our clients. I'm pretty confident that the additional commitment we're making to upgrade the network is as significant financially.

I know we've been having issues for the last few weeks, but certainly not year. We had problems late last year which were resolved partially before the end of the year and fully resolved in Feb/March, when there was a known IPC shortage which many ISPs had commented on here on MyBB. Performance has been stable since then until now, so if you've had consistent issues, there could be other reasons behind this :(
 
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Afriman's losing the plot :/ Plurals don't get apostrophes.
 
Stochos said:
Now here is something for Afrihost to do; put their money where their mouth is.

Do they really have a commitment to customer service?

This is where the rubber meets the road. They built up a loyal customer base when they had capacity, they over sold/booked it and then could not fulfil their promise.

Instead of spamming us with mobile data deals; sort out your core ADSL business. Start by giving customers a refund. Upgrade your capacity and have the guts to not be greedy; turn away customers if you cannot deliver what was promised. This would be a first in SA. Something that Afrihost of a few years ago would have done. Instead it is turning into a Telkom, MTN, Vodacom....

Uncapped should mean uncapped.
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As I've mentioned, we are putting our money up, in terms of committing massive financial resources to upgrading our network. This is going to cost us several million rand, and is not matched by a growth in revenues. This is purely out of our commitment to ensuring our clients can get the best possible experience.
 
Orihalcon said:
Sayonara Afrihost.

It's been a fun ride while you actually provided the service you advertised, but the last couple of months was a bumpy ride to put it mildly. Not allowing full speed Steam downloads, changing your policy on uncapped from dynamic shaping 24 hours a day to "Permanent Testing" of shaping 18 hours a day has effectively turned this account into a streaming package. It's not good for anything else based on my usage.

Latency was better on 3 competitors by 30ms to both US and EU servers, ZERO packet loss on competitor networks and no lag spikes either...time to go.

If you ever return to the company I signed up with years ago and offer the product you advertise I will be back.

Cheers.
Click to expand...

I'm sorry to hear that you've decided to leave, but I totally understand if we are not meeting your needs and you've received better service or performance elsewhere.

I do believe it's only a matter of days, as per Greg Payne's statement to MyBB, before we see much better performance on the network. You are most welcome to drop me a PM to discuss and we can see if you're happy when our upgrades come through.
 
Anyone else in cape town get zero throughput on P2P since last night - even though client portal says that no shaping was applied?
 
jxharding said:
Anyone else in cape town get zero throughput on P2P since last night - even though client portal says that no shaping was applied?
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Yip , p2p transfer rates almost non existent since last night , checked with morning at about 5:30 in client zone and it showed "No Shaping Applied' but still p2p transfer was still dead :(
 
jxharding said:
Anyone else in cape town get zero throughput on P2P since last night - even though client portal says that no shaping was applied?
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We're definitely not blocking P2P. I was testing torrents last night and although performance was poorer than I've experienced when the network is at it's best, there was definitely throughput - at least in the North. Did you get any errors or diagnostic results I could see?
 
Authentication fail again.... Sigh (Posting using 3G)

Luckily when the service does work (90% of the time) the service levels are as expected so I'm not going to jump ship just yet
 
AfriMan said:
...install the additional capacity to give our clients a better experience. We feel the best use of those resources is to improve the network for all our clients. I'm pretty confident that the additional commitment we're making to upgrade the network is as significant financially.
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Well, I'm glad an upgrade in on the way. But will it be enough this time? (referring to previous upgrades which only ensured stability for a relatively short period before everything went to pieces again). Do you have an ETA? Are we talking days, weeks, months, hours?
 
I've just received notification of a major Telkom outage in Johannesburg. It looks like the major links for the wider Joburg region are giving problems and many clients will not be able to authenticate. We're still investigating, but Telkom have posted as follows:

WF13302661 2014-10-22 09:37 Germiston Rosebank,Pretoria and NEW DOORNFONTEIN Link - we have links that are down ADSL users, Dialup users, SpaceStream users, Leased Line users, WiMax users, WiFi users, All users will experience no connectivity. All users will experience no connectivity.
 
Segg said:
Authentication fail again.... Sigh (Posting using 3G)

Luckily when the service does work (90% of the time) the service levels are as expected so I'm not going to jump ship just yet
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We've just received word that Telkom is having an issue in the JHB area. It seems like several major network links are down :(
 
aktor said:
Well, I'm glad an upgrade in on the way. But will it be enough this time? (referring to previous upgrades which only ensured stability for a relatively short period before everything went to pieces again). Do you have an ETA? Are we talking days, weeks, months, hours?
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We definitely hope so, it is definitely being carefully planned, but we'll monitor on our side and see if we get the performance we expect.
 
How is the afrihost news server performing on MTN?

And can somebody confirm the news server details please.

Thanks
 
AfriMan said:
We're definitely not blocking P2P. I was testing torrents last night and although performance was poorer than I've experienced when the network is at it's best, there was definitely throughput - at least in the North. Did you get any errors or diagnostic results I could see?
Click to expand...

I can PM you my details if you want to have a look, Im not too concerned when it happens once in a while, but i'll check again tomorrow morning.
It happened last week as well, when I logged in with a different ISP provider it worked fine 200kB/s- back on afrihost - totally zero.
 
AfriMan said:
I think it's definitely not a question of not wanting to give client's a better experience or that we're just hoping that people will quit so we don't have to upgrade. That would be a very flawed model and we've all seen that work very badly for other companies that have used this method.

I think it's very important to note that demand has increased well beyond the number of clients, so essentially we have to commit to higher upstream costs while our revenues are not rising at the same rate. We're happy to do so as long as it's feasible. Giving out blanket refunds is certainly going to make it difficult to commit the necessary funds to ensure a better experience. We will find a way (as we have in the past) to reward our clients for sticking with us through tough times.
Click to expand...

http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthr...back-(Pt3)?p=13614838&viewfull=1#post13614838


I was told by people that runs south africa's internet your network was way over capacity. I was told the information was incorrect. (aka lies)

Turned out to be the truth... you are now getting more IPC capacity.

So how is right when you have oversold your product to the extent that you did to NOT refund people who had extremely bad or almost no internet connectivity?

Saying people should stick with you means nothing IF THEY PAY YOU.

And this isn't 1/10000th of the concern because I am still having packet-loss on your network on the FREE 1gb account.

You told me it was telkom they rolled up at my house, replaced a massive part of my line and the issues still persist (just on your network/accounts)

Your customer support "escalated it " to mtn but so far i have heard F-all about a fix or solution. I have gotten a reply that mtn has " resolved the issue" but they did not and as far as i am concerned my bloody ticket is STILL OPEN


I am sorry afrihost but that is utter and total RUBBISH. I emailed your ceo but alas he does not answer emails because he probably has better things to do that run his own company.
 
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