Cool Ideas Fibre ISP - Feedback

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paulosouthafrica

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@PBCool

Very glad to see you have joined us at Mybroadband,

I just wanted to state that I have been using your service for approximately a week now and it has been fairly solid. I know in a previous posting you have stated that you guys don't throttle or shape your connections.

I have not been using the connection very heavily and been quite happy, though I have noticed some slowdowns at certain points when doing some large downloads.

I wanted to ask if you guys currently feel there might be some bottlenecks in the system that you will be upgrading in the future? e.g. your international data link.

Just out of curiosity who do you guys use to supply your international data, is it Seacom, WACS, ESSAy, SAT-3?
 
I have been using Cool Ideas for a few months now and have only had an excellent experience. I will happily recommend them to anybody!
 
Hi paulosouthafrica, we constantly monitor all our backhaul and upstream links, once we start to reach around 80% of capacity we would upgrade that circuit. Currently we are peaking at about 60/70% of our capacity with Seacom at peak times in the evening. But dealing with Seacom in general can be a bit tricky as they get certain local transit from other local providers which we really don't want from their IP service. The deal we have with Seacom is full redundancy over WACS which they have agreements between themselves to provide each other with redundancy and they also provide the low latency routing to London via the WACS cable, this allows for sub 160ms latency from Johannesburg to London.

We are also in the process of setting up peering at LINX directly for more flexibility and visibility on the international side of things.

I hope this answers most of your questions?
 
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Thanks PBCool,

Lots of information that is very helpful in understanding the challenges as its not alway apparent to the end user how much goes on at the backend.
 
PBCool.

It seems as though our international bandwidth is not operating as of 4:19pm

I can ping local IPs but international IPs unable to ping to.
 
Which IPs?

Google's peering in NAP Africa JHB is currently offline, no ETR.
 
PBCool said:
Hi paulosouthafrica, we constantly monitor all our backhaul and upstream links, once we start to reach around 80% of capacity we would upgrade that circuit. Currently we are peaking at about 60/70% of our capacity with Seacom at peak times in the evening. But dealing with Seacom in general can be a bit tricky as they get certain local transit from other local providers which we really don't want from their IP service. The deal we have with Seacom is full redundancy over WACS which they have agreements between themselves to provide each other with redundancy and they also provide the low latency routing to London via the WACS cable, this allows for sub 160ms latency from Johannesburg to London.

We are also in the process of setting up peering at LINX directly for more flexibility and visibility on the international side of things.

I hope this answers most of your questions?
Click to expand...

Hi, if you're a company rep, could you please make your account into a company rep account, just PM rpm.
 
Thanks stroebs

Cant ping
Google 8.8.8.8
CNN 157.166.226.25

Can ping
4.2.2.2
openDNS: 208.67.222.222
 
Looks like multiple international cable failures, whole of Seacom is down it looks like.

We're routed over WACS at the moment, working fine.
 
Hi paulosouthafrica, yes there is apparently both a Seacom outage and a portion of WACS out. We will update as we get from them.
 
Looks like it is. Thanks for the updates Stroebs!

Out of curiosity where are you looking at seacom's uptime?
 
I noticed a steady decrease in quality of service leading too long wait times on web pages, this become even more noticeable when I moved from cool ideas to home connect web pages loaded almost immediately.
I'm just wondering if any one else has noticed bad quality service on cool ideas?
 
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dstvnothingon said:
I noticed a steady decrease in ping quality leading too long wait times on web pages, this become even more noticeable when I moved from cool ideas to home connect web pages loaded almost immediately.
I'm just wondering if any one else has noticed slow ping on cool ideas?
Click to expand...

Slow ping to where or what exactly?
 
What router does Cool Ideas provide with their packages?
 
ItsJustJack said:
How does this router do authentication? If it doesn't, can something like an Apple Airport Extreme be used in it's place?
Click to expand...

Depends on the network, either a PPPoE account or straight up DHCP client, both of which an Airport Extreme can do :)
 
Any news on when we can expect to hear about the no VOIP subscription?
 
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