BitCo Consumer Review

Pitbull said:
Have one technician have a on call cell number and only to be used in extreme network failures. No speed enquiries and crap but if a connection does go down for extended periods of time.
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+1

Agreed, perhaps not a cell number, but rather respond to support emails, even if only for a few hours on Saturday and a few on Sunday.

Working in an environment where I am on standby 24/7/365, people do tend to pick up the phone and call for absolutely ridiculous issues that have no effect on business performance..

The support technician can evaluate whether or not immediate action is required.
 
To keep up with the competition after hours support is needed. That said after I complained I was given a "gold" reference number and was able to contact a tech the following weekend when I had connection issues. Though haven't needed it since..

But for the price we pay you would expect at least somebody to take a call.

C'mon Garth - all these extra sign ups via MyBB - an after hours tech ain't too much to ask is it? :D
 
After hours support... a must.

ruhanstander said:
Agreed, perhaps not a cell number, but rather respond to support emails, even if only for a few hours on Saturday and a few on Sunday.
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Afterhours support is a must when you are dealing with consumers. There must be tech support in place for business SLAs at BitCo why not leverage that capacity and offer after hours live chat or email support via a ticket system, my current ISP does this and they must have a few thousand, if not ten's of thousands of subscribers.
 
Elro said:
To keep up with the competition after hours support is needed. That said after I complained I was given a "gold" reference number and was able to contact a tech the following weekend when I had connection issues. Though haven't needed it since..

But for the price we pay you would expect at least somebody to take a call.

C'mon Garth - all these extra sign ups via MyBB - an after hours tech ain't too much to ask is it? :D
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I thought they did have a 24/7 support desk as per their website

" Our Promise

Innovation: Our company was founded with a vision for commercialising new technologies.
Technical leadership: We have a strong and passionate technical team. They take pride in developing and delivering communications solutions that will help you prosper.
Results-focused: We listen to what you want and gear our offerings towards solving these real business problems.
Practical Solutions: A team of highly skilled software developers spares nothing to turn great ideas into practical solutions that add real value.
Excellent service: Our 24/7 help desk ensures swift and efficient response to any queries or problems.
Comprehensive Infrastructure: We own our own network and infrastructure and operate independently.
Absolute integrity: We believe in straight dealing and doing what is right. We know that integrity is the foundation of sustained success."
 
Hi Guys,

Thanks for all the comments & feedback

I am going to try answer as many questions as I can in this single post and will go back and comment on any points I don’t cover below

Support:

We are still a newcomer to the residential market and our Metro Ethernet offering has always been targeted towards business customers, we have historically focused on creating a support department for business customers and their unique set of requirements, we acknowledge that business and residential customer have very different requirements and we are going to be taking some pro-active steps as below:

We are in the process of completely separating business and residential support by having two separate dedicated call centres fielding the support enquiries, our escalation procedure will remain the same and the main change will be the client facing representatives and their specific skill set’s.
BitCo’s infrastructure department is online 24/7 maintaining the core network, this team is dedicated to have our network online and in the event of a failure 24/7 a team is dispatched to the nearest point of failure within 2 hours (Most Typical examples would be Fibre Breaks , Power Failures, Lightning strikes ETC…)
We currently only provide support for general enquiries during business hours but will shortly be extending this to accommodate residential customers.

I will give you frequent updates as and when we action each item above

Slow Internet Speeds in Parts of JHB on 27/09/

On Saturday the 27th of September we experienced a Fibre Break on one of the core distribution high sites for Johannesburg, this break happened at 11:15am and a team was immediately dispatched to site and identified the fibre had been damaged by road workers. Our network team worked closely with the Fibre contractors to repair the break at 15:51pm.
During this time specific parts of our network would have been re-routed via redundant routes back to our core infrastructure, This could result in slower broadband speeds depending on the location of your services. General web browsing should not have been affected as our network prioritization would ensure general browsing and Voice calls receive full priority over the network during the time of a failure.
This would have affected Parts of JHB, Midrand & Centurion.
Once we receive a formal incident report I will provide some more info on the actual fault.

BitCo FUP

Our infrastructure team and network division have had a meeting regarding the FUP and optimisation and confirmed they will be selecting a hand full of users to test the new FUP for us. This FUP will continue to use the leaky bucket algorithm with some optimisation on the overall policy which is believed to significantly improve your overall experience without allowing for network abuse
We will have the test running for approximately 2 weeks before providing feedback and outlining the changes to the policy
Users should start receiving E-mails during the course of this week if you are selected for the trial based on your line utilisation profile

Mike
 
Elro said:
BTW what's the turnaround on line upgrade? 5 to 10 mbs?
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Hi Elro,

The turn around time can be anything from 2-5 days depending on the technical parameters required for the upgrade

Our team should give you regular updates once your order is processed for upgrade

Send me a PM if you have any issues?

Mike
 
I imagine it's tough with the rapid growth in residential. Nice to know we are still being listened to, thanks Mike.
 
click here... said:
Nope, I'm actually the end-user and I only got the speeds signed up for as of this morning. BTW the wholesale provider provided our organisation with excellent service, and I would like to extend my sincere gratitude and thanks to him.
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Thanks for the response.

I have had a chat to the wholesale provider in Bloem and provided a report and update and the delay with the back haul upgrade, would you mind to PM me your name and contact details so i can give you a call to provide the info to you directly.

Unfortunately i cant find your details as services have been provided on a wholesale basis

Mike
 
Elro said:
I imagine it's tough with the rapid growth in residential. Nice to know we are still being listened to, thanks Mike.
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:) We are taking it all in, we appreciate the feedback and will continue to refine the home broadband offering to be the best available
 
Viashen said:
Hi Mike

Appreciate the help. I honestly can't handle this throttling much more :-(

2 Episodes of a series and i'm Throttled again. This is with no downloads at all. Purely streaming :-(

http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/3796616252
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Hi Viashen,

I believe the proposed changes to the FUP should resolve this issue without affecting services.

Lets continue with the trial and i will provide frequent updates for everyone

Regards,
 
HI Mike,

After my last correspondence with you I had no feedback from anybody. I am now annoyed.
This is my speed results after your FUP kicked in. http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/3796635523
Speed and ping inconsistent glitches etc....
This will be my last plea to fix the problem, if not fix by Friday please start arrange for cancelation.
 
No-Rules said:
HI Mike,

After my last correspondence with you I had no feedback from anybody. I am now annoyed.
This is my speed results after your FUP kicked in. http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/3796635523
Speed and ping inconsistent glitches etc....
This will be my last plea to fix the problem, if not fix by Friday please start arrange for cancelation.
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Hi No-Rules,

i have just sent you a PM so we can compare results, i have done a very in-depth investigation into your link and find no problems with the link.

We need to run through a series of diagnostics before i dispatch a technical representative to come do on site testing.

looking into your line i see constant 2Mbps usage since 20:37

Lets chat directly and will provide feedback once we come to a resolution

Mike
 
FUP...

BitCo said:
BitCo FUP

Our infrastructure team and network division have had a meeting regarding the FUP and optimisation and confirmed they will be selecting a hand full of users to test the new FUP for us. This FUP will continue to use the leaky bucket algorithm with some optimisation on the overall policy which is believed to significantly improve your overall experience without allowing for network abuse
We will have the test running for approximately 2 weeks before providing feedback and outlining the changes to the policy
Users should start receiving E-mails during the course of this week if you are selected for the trial based on your line utilisation profile

Mike
Click to expand...

Thanks Mike, Khanyisile said she had escalated my email query with deals with all of my posts here too. I am not sure to whom she has escalated. Can you provide me any update on when I may get an answer? My cellphone number is on the email I am available to talk.

I will not be considering signing up much further until the FUP starts to incorporate streaming as an "ordinary internet service", which it now is if we like it or not.

Thanks
John
 
Why does your technical team not know of the issues over the weekend?

I sent an email on Saturday to support at 15:39 regarding the slow speeds and received an email back yesterday at 17:27:

"Dear Matt

I had a look at this at this moment and found that your link is being shaped to comply with our fair usage policy.


regards

Your ticket status is 'Waiting on Client'."


This is not the first time I have had a reply without checking when the issue was and what the problem actually was. Also, a 72 hour response time is ridiculous when you acknowledge problems happened over the weekend.
 
Downloading Middle Earth : Shadow of Mordor.. been FUP'd since last night .. 22 hrs to go :D
 
I should really ask for an increase to take me up to 10 (5) mbs
 
fluKe said:
Why does your technical team not know of the issues over the weekend?

I sent an email on Saturday to support at 15:39 regarding the slow speeds and received an email back yesterday at 17:27:

"Dear Matt

I had a look at this at this moment and found that your link is being shaped to comply with our fair usage policy.


regards

Your ticket status is 'Waiting on Client'."


This is not the first time I have had a reply without checking when the issue was and what the problem actually was. Also, a 72 hour response time is ridiculous when you acknowledge problems happened over the weekend.
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Yeah these type of replies from Bitco irritate me as well, I logged a complaint about packet loss i'm receiving while gaming sometime ago... Then they reply almost a week later (and as luck would have it I'm running a download on that specific day) and advise me that they've just checked the link, and can see I'm running a download, and thats what causing the packet loss in game(facepalm).

It feels like they just want to get the customer off their back without actually sorting the problem.
 
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