Cool Ideas Fibre ISP - Feedback

[Muttley]

I hear you, but I guess you havent read all my comments. Btw, when you experience the same issues that I have for almost a month, you might not be with the same thinking Anyway if you have some info or a solution please bring it on rather then just criticizing us here

Thanks

Unfortunately, I can't fix Vumatel.. If I could, I have no doubt that many of the problems mentioned here would not exist.

 

[macedon]

Unfortunately, I can't fix Vumatel.. If I could, I have no doubt that many of the problems mentioned here would not exist.

Marlin, I guess you did not understand my point here... i dont blame Cool Ideas directly, and to be honest @PBCool has always provided me with TOP level support, always punctual and professional and always answered my emais and forum posts immediately. @PBCool is the best and he has put up with me even though sometime out of frustration I say more than what I should. However I said that I cannot say the same for the rest of the Cool Ideas team, as I always have a complete opposite experience.

Now when it comes to changing ISP's thats very easy to do and If it wasnt for Paul I would have changed already, and yes I know that might not fix my problem because it is very likely that its Vumatel;s issue, however at the end of the day, we are paying the premium to the ISP in this case Cool Ideas, so whether the problem is Vumatel or something else it doesnt really matter, the ISP should take care of it and resolve accordingly and not blame Vumatel and everyone else etc.. I believe PAul has agreed with me on that and I just hope that in future they take more of the support in their hand so that they can be effective when resolving problems, rather than being like Telkom and Afrihost for instance a while back with the ADSL lines, when everyone was blaming the other party and we were just struggling and not getting any resolution of problems.

Again I will repeat I also think that Cool Ideas is the best in the business and I hope @PBCool continues to provide us with this level of support

Thanks for the understanding

 

[EveDawg]

We should try and think of a way how we can get Vumatel to this “party”. Maybe start something in the “Fibre Networks” thread?
It is impossible to deal directly with Vuma. There is no ways on this earth that they will log a fault. They have extremely well trained staff at the call centre. Trained not in networking but trained in how to convince the complainant that it is not a Vuma issue but that it is the ISP.
I had problems the end of last year. Eventually PBCool managed to log a fault with Vuma. Thereafter I got two calls from Vuma to try and convince me that the line is perfect and asking if they can close the ticket. I insisted that they attend to the ticket. Couple of days later Vuma came and swapped out the CPE and SFP. I am certain the new exactly what the problem was but even after the “fix” would not admit that it was their fault. They test the line via a tablet. They have no diagnostic that they can plug into your CPE. They did not have a clue what they were looking at when I showed them Wireshark results.

 

[macedon]

We should try and think of a way how we can get Vumatel to this “party”. Maybe start something in the “Fibre Networks” thread?
It is impossible to deal directly with Vuma. There is no ways on this earth that they will log a fault. They have extremely well trained staff at the call centre. Trained not in networking but trained in how to convince the complainant that it is not a Vuma issue but that it is the ISP.
I had problems the end of last year. Eventually PBCool managed to log a fault with Vuma. Thereafter I got two calls from Vuma to try and convince me that the line is perfect and asking if they can close the ticket. I insisted that they attend to the ticket. Couple of days later Vuma came and swapped out the CPE and SFP. I am certain the new exactly what the problem was but even after the “fix” would not admit that it was their fault. They test the line via a tablet. They have no diagnostic that they can plug into your CPE. They did not have a clue what they were looking at when I showed them Wireshark results.

Agreed, but I think that the ticketing system or a fault logging from the ISP side should be integrated with Vumatel so that when there is an issue both Vumatel and the ISP can see the ticket and be aware of the problem and resolve accordingly. ISP's should get this problem solved with Vumatel in terms of logging calls and network related issues, going forward as it seems most of the internet issues are related to Vumatel's network, yet they are not directly involved.
And yes Vumatel's support is not existant, because all they look at is local speed, if you get good local speeds they dont care at all... even when I didnt have an internet at one stage they just told me call your ISP. So its like a ping pong match where we "the client" are the ball

 

[Bedford]

I agree with you Macedon. Maybe we need to start bombing their twitter or something.

 

[requiem]

We should try and think of a way how we can get Vumatel to this “party”. Maybe start something in the “Fibre Networks” thread?
It is impossible to deal directly with Vuma. There is no ways on this earth that they will log a fault. They have extremely well trained staff at the call centre. Trained not in networking but trained in how to convince the complainant that it is not a Vuma issue but that it is the ISP.
I had problems the end of last year. Eventually PBCool managed to log a fault with Vuma. Thereafter I got two calls from Vuma to try and convince me that the line is perfect and asking if they can close the ticket. I insisted that they attend to the ticket. Couple of days later Vuma came and swapped out the CPE and SFP. I am certain the new exactly what the problem was but even after the “fix” would not admit that it was their fault. They test the line via a tablet. They have no diagnostic that they can plug into your CPE. They did not have a clue what they were looking at when I showed them Wireshark results.

Of course. According to Vuma they simply provide the fibre link to your house.

If it doesn't work then it is the fault of your ISP.

How can you argue with logic like that

 

[RogueTr00per]

@PBCool, my ONT is being installed by Century City Connect on Wednesday morning. How soon after that can I be up and running with you guys? I ordered a router from you, what type of router would this be? Sorry, I forgot if it's been mentioned before...

 

[PBCool]

@PBCool, my ONT is being installed by Century City Connect on Wednesday morning. How soon after that can I be up and running with you guys? I ordered a router from you, what type of router would this be? Sorry, I forgot if it's been mentioned before...

It all depends on how long it takes CC and Frogfoot take to configure and handover the line. The default router is a WR840N

 

[coop]

Agreed, but I think that the ticketing system or a fault logging from the ISP side should be integrated with Vumatel so that when there is an issue both Vumatel and the ISP can see the ticket and be aware of the problem and resolve accordingly. ISP's should get this problem solved with Vumatel in terms of logging calls and network related issues, going forward as it seems most of the internet issues are related to Vumatel's network, yet they are not directly involved.
And yes Vumatel's support is not existant, because all they look at is local speed, if you get good local speeds they dont care at all... even when I didnt have an internet at one stage they just told me call your ISP. So its like a ping pong match where we "the client" are the ball

When I was in the UK a few years ago, we had similar problems with BT blaming the ISP and vice versa. In my case, the ISP was AAISP. They put in place a system that would ping the public IP of all of their customers. Thew pings would run once a second (but less frequently would probably work fine also).

The resulting latency data was put into a database which included the customers city and area. Using the aggregated data, they could often prove to BT that the problem affected a whole area. @PBCool could CISP doe something similar ? I think CISP now have a large enough customer base for this methodology to work.

 

[Tinuva]

When I was in the UK a few years ago, we had similar problems with BT blaming the ISP and vice versa. In my case, the ISP was AAISP. They put in place a system that would ping the public IP of all of their customers. Thew pings would run once a second (but less frequently would probably work fine also).

The resulting latency data was put into a database which included the customers city and area. Using the aggregated data, they could often prove to BT that the problem affected a whole area. @PBCool could CISP doe something similar ? I think CISP now have a large enough customer base for this methodology to work.

+1

However something you ned to keep in mind, in the UK the ISPs have more control over the customer routers, where in SA customer still use whatever they please, so many a time, routers are not pingable at all (customers believe blocking pings = security).

So there might be still room for errors for this in SA.

 

[PBCool]

+1

However something you ned to keep in mind, in the UK the ISPs have more control over the customer routers, where in SA customer still use whatever they please, so many a time, routers are not pingable at all (customers believe blocking pings = security).

So there might be still room for errors for this in SA.

Yeap exactly most routers these days are shipped with ICMP disabled. But not a bad idea.

 

[boyequal]

Yeap exactly most routers these days are shipped with ICMP disabled. But not a bad idea.

I'd be willing to share information. Especially since my connection is working just fine, and could be used as a baseline against those having problems?

 

[Bedford]

Yeap exactly most routers these days are shipped with ICMP disabled. But not a bad idea.

I would be open to allowing ICMP traffic, if it would help get this sorted!

 

[eddief1]

When I was in the UK a few years ago, we had similar problems with BT blaming the ISP and vice versa. In my case, the ISP was AAISP. They put in place a system that would ping the public IP of all of their customers. Thew pings would run once a second (but less frequently would probably work fine also).

The resulting latency data was put into a database which included the customers city and area. Using the aggregated data, they could often prove to BT that the problem affected a whole area. @PBCool could CISP doe something similar ? I think CISP now have a large enough customer base for this methodology to work.

It's a tricky one for sure, most people want full access to their routers and tend to frown upon managed routers/services like Vodacom does for FTTH.

However having been involved with a WISP where they had full access to the Ubiquity router at the customer proved invaluable. They were not only able to ping, etc to diagnose problems but having visibility into the customer's WIFI portion helped tremendously when the customers slow speeds were actually caused by local interference on 2.4ghz. Having the ability to push firmware updates to the routers was also a big bonus as security issues in linux were found and improvements to the firmware were made...most people dont even bother with this.

If we didn't have access to the customer router in the above scenario many support calls which were sorted out in less than 5 minutes would have resulted in a truck roll.

Would be nice if the ISP's found a common ground where both the end user and ISP had certain visibility

 

[Tinuva]

First ISP that goes on a big drive to get _most_ customers to leave ICMP open, will be able to get huge successes with this monitoring system. Would be a hefty project to take on though, mostly having to do outbound communication to all customers.

 

[image132]

@PBCool Did you get my PM?

 

[Zassie]

Yeap exactly most routers these days are shipped with ICMP disabled. But not a bad idea.

I don't know how "correct" this would be in terms of the actual setup.
But couldn't Cool Ideas just ping the main "Area Router" on Vumatel side?

Surely there is a central place that an area of people connect to to get to the next step?

Why not just ping those?

 

[PBCool]

I don't know how "correct" this would be in terms of the actual setup.
But couldn't Cool Ideas just ping the main "Area Router" on Vumatel side?

Surely there is a central place that an area of people connect to to get to the next step?

Why not just ping those?

There is no such layout, on the Vumatel trenched side there is only "one" router on their side, if you do a trace you will see your gateway (router) then Vumatels edge device then ours. This is the same no matter where you are on the network.

On the Aerial side you would see your router, then ours as it's a layer2 network.

 

[PBCool]

@PBCool Did you get my PM?

I did just been a bit chaotic this week, will come back to you shortly.

 

[Zassie]

There is no such layout, on the Vumatel trenched side there is only "one" router on their side, if you do a trace you will see your gateway (router) then Vumatels edge device then ours. This is the same no matter where you are on the network.

On the Aerial side you would see your router, then ours as it's a layer2 network.

Ahah, i see i see! Thanks for the clarification ^.^