Atomic Access Feedback

Atomic Access said:
We had a router hardware failure early in the morning (1 April 2021) that affected our Octotel customers. We had to visit the datacentre to resolve the problem, but we managed to get everyone back up before 8am. We are sorry about any downtime and will work tirelessly to ensure we make improvements so the same problem doesn't cause any issues in the future.
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Thanks gents, you can ignore my frantic support email then ;-)

Edit: just to say thank you for the phone-call and personal follow-up. 10/10 for customer service.
 
I’m updating this thread with an update to share that we (Atomic) recently launched fibre services on the Vumatel fibre network. If you are interested in our Vumatel packages they are listed on our site here, https://www.atomicaccess.co.za/vumatel/ and if you feel like switching (and are in the greater Cape Town or Cape Winelands area) please get in touch for a deal.

We have live customers on Vumatel’s GPON and Active Ethernet networks, and a fun fact that we are running DHCP as opposed to PPPoE
 
I was with Atomic for about 4 years, IIRC, and I figured I'd share a couple of thoughts.

The pros:
  • First-class support. Email them anytime and you'll get a response to your query very quickly.
    • I understand there was WhatsApp and Telegram groups as well but I can't be bothered with those things so I never tested them out. But support channels can only be a good thing.
  • I don't remember ever having issues with speed, except for a brief period when there was that weird DDOS thing.
The cons:
  • Atomic are slightly more expensive than the "larger" ISPs.
  • The whole "refer a friend and get 5% off" thing for me never sat quite right. Word of mouth is all good and well, and whenever someone asked I'd tell them what ISP I was with, but the two main problems that came out with that are:
    • Uh, they're slightly more expensive than (insert larger ISP here, Afrihost often came up for instance), so why are you recommending them exactly? The support is great, but honestly over the four years I was with Atomic I needed it about three or four times, once was when I moved house so I wanted to move my package, once was to cancel (see below for reasons), so only probably two support requests during that time. Fibre is pretty much a commodity, the days of ADSL where there were often clear distinctions in quality and features between ISPs are gone. So it's difficult to come up with a compelling reason why someone should pay R150 more per month.
    • Also, mention my name when you sign up because then I get 5% off my fibre introduces something of a ... difficult dynamic to the conversation.
I did encounter one weird thing though. I self-host a few services and I have them exposed to the internet at large and a DDNS client updating my IP address. Did this so I could access my stuff from anywhere, not just at home.
A friend of mine actually got onto Atomic independently, same fibre provider (Octotel) and I figured, cool! I should be able to stream media from my place to his no hiccups! Turns out - no dice. We were on the same subnet, could even see that we had the same gateway, but no traffic getting through between us.

To Atomic's credit, I reached out for an explanation at the time and Leonard described the reason for the issue, it was something they'd done on their side. He suggested setting up static routes to get the connection working, but we could never get it right, though I think that was just a limitation of the features of the router that my friend had. Just recently we've both switched to a different ISP (also both the same one) and now traffic comes back and forth no issue.

Ultimately I switched because of price.
Don't get me wrong, Atomic isn't excessively expensive and their service was great (apart from the weird issue described above). It's just a bit more expensive than the larger ISP competition.
I do actually think that it's important that there's lively competition in the market, and it's better to support smaller players so the large incumbents don't get too comfortable, etc. etc. And if 2022 hadn't been an absolute ****show of a year with skyhigh inflation, constant load-shedding, I would have been happy to stay.

Apart from that weird routing issue. That bugged me constantly. Not that I really needed it to work, it just annoyed me that it didn't.
 
newby_investor said:
I was with Atomic for about 4 years, IIRC, and I figured I'd share a couple of thoughts.

The pros:
  • First-class support. Email them anytime and you'll get a response to your query very quickly.
    • I understand there was WhatsApp and Telegram groups as well but I can't be bothered with those things so I never tested them out. But support channels can only be a good thing.
  • I don't remember ever having issues with speed, except for a brief period when there was that weird DDOS thing.
The cons:
  • Atomic are slightly more expensive than the "larger" ISPs.
  • The whole "refer a friend and get 5% off" thing for me never sat quite right. Word of mouth is all good and well, and whenever someone asked I'd tell them what ISP I was with, but the two main problems that came out with that are:
    • Uh, they're slightly more expensive than (insert larger ISP here, Afrihost often came up for instance), so why are you recommending them exactly? The support is great, but honestly over the four years I was with Atomic I needed it about three or four times, once was when I moved house so I wanted to move my package, once was to cancel (see below for reasons), so only probably two support requests during that time. Fibre is pretty much a commodity, the days of ADSL where there were often clear distinctions in quality and features between ISPs are gone. So it's difficult to come up with a compelling reason why someone should pay R150 more per month.
    • Also, mention my name when you sign up because then I get 5% off my fibre introduces something of a ... difficult dynamic to the conversation.
I did encounter one weird thing though. I self-host a few services and I have them exposed to the internet at large and a DDNS client updating my IP address. Did this so I could access my stuff from anywhere, not just at home.
A friend of mine actually got onto Atomic independently, same fibre provider (Octotel) and I figured, cool! I should be able to stream media from my place to his no hiccups! Turns out - no dice. We were on the same subnet, could even see that we had the same gateway, but no traffic getting through between us.

To Atomic's credit, I reached out for an explanation at the time and Leonard described the reason for the issue, it was something they'd done on their side. He suggested setting up static routes to get the connection working, but we could never get it right, though I think that was just a limitation of the features of the router that my friend had. Just recently we've both switched to a different ISP (also both the same one) and now traffic comes back and forth no issue.

Ultimately I switched because of price.
Don't get me wrong, Atomic isn't excessively expensive and their service was great (apart from the weird issue described above). It's just a bit more expensive than the larger ISP competition.
I do actually think that it's important that there's lively competition in the market, and it's better to support smaller players so the large incumbents don't get too comfortable, etc. etc. And if 2022 hadn't been an absolute ****show of a year with skyhigh inflation, constant load-shedding, I would have been happy to stay.

Apart from that weird routing issue. That bugged me constantly. Not that I really needed it to work, it just annoyed me that it didn't.
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Hi, thanks for your review and feedback. That routing issue can be solved by adding two /32 static routes, but we agree it's a bit annoying. The fibre networks set up their GPON OLTs to only forward traffic via the ISP gateway. You can also get around this by using IPv6 - we send an 'off-link' RA, so routers don't think they are on the same L2 broadcast domain.
 
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Any feedback on the YouTube troubles being experienced the last two days?
 
newby_investor said:
@Atomic Access please forgive me, I'm regretting my decision. RSAWeb sucks, their connectivity is average at best and support is impossible to reach. You guys were a cut above and I want to come back.

Is the process complicated? Do I just go through the website?
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@newby_investor Thanks for the support - we really appreciate it. Sure thing, just cancel your existing service so you know when that ends (normally a calendar month notice), and then use the order form on our site and we'll handle the rest.
 
chrisGolf said:
how is your international up/down? and your international latencies ? (I'm on afrihost, considering moving as well)
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Speeds are fine - my average for the last 7 days is 89Mb/s on a 100Mb line - that includes times when I'm actually using the line.

I don't really monitor latency as I don't do much that requires a low latency.

I do know my connection is stable now - I have no idea what Afrihost do - but my connection was always all over the show - sometimes I couldn't even connect to their own website, and getting help was/is a pain, as soon as your problem doesn't follow their support script, they stop responding. (literally sitting with the same issue once again as they refuse to remove my credit card from their site)
 
xrapidx said:
Speeds are fine - my average for the last 7 days is 89Mb/s on a 100Mb line - that includes times when I'm actually using the line.

I don't really monitor latency as I don't do much that requires a low latency.

I do know my connection is stable now - I have no idea what Afrihost do - but my connection was always all over the show - sometimes I couldn't even connect to their own website, and getting help was/is a pain, as soon as your problem doesn't follow their support script, they stop responding. (literally sitting with the same issue once again as they refuse to remove my credit card from their site)
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what did @AfriNatic say?
 
wingnut771 said:
what did @AfriNatic say?
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Stopped trying to get support from Afrihost in December already when they stopped responding on multiple platforms, including mybroadband - my neighbours ISP sorted out our issue in December (internet used to go down with loadshedding).

Just waited out my seven month sentence with them, which ended last month.
 
newby_investor said:
This was quite fun!

What do existing customers do with the code? Is it for new sign-ups only? Still a nice quiz anyway, I learned a thing or two.
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Hi

Existing customers can win Wifi6 routers. Details are on the Atomic Community Telegram group. Or you you can email [email protected] for details.
 
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