Cool Ideas Fibre ISP - Feedback

[PBCool]

Goood day MyBB !!

First time poster , First time CoolIdeas Fibre customer ! I made a post over at carb, but the guys recommend i post it here to get some more visibility and traction !

@PBCool is apparently some kinda internet wizard Struggling with my 200/200 Fibre package and international speeds in general. Support indicated some issues with an EDGE router that was resolved this morning.

http://carbonite.co.za/showthread.php?173478-Fibre-Network-Contention-Ratios

So i got my fibre a while ago and was over the moon ! However, considering myself as a "power internet user" I expect nothing but the best quality and performance from my network provider which leads me to the next few questions!

I am looking for people who have fibre and trying to gather a bit of intel! So if you have fibre, please respond here in the using template if possible to try and create a better view on our local South African network landscape!

I am currently on a 200/200 mbit unshaped and uncapped package, however only getting about 5% of that speed internationally at present... GG so lets see what everyone gets! Either there is something wrong or the provider is just not able to provide

To get started head on over to http://beta.speedtest.net and fill in the details below.

Fibre Provider: Vumatel
ISP: CoolIdeas
Line Speed: 200/200 unshaped/uncapped

Looking forward to your responses !
CP out

Peace out !

Drop me a PM with your account details?

 

[Ancalagon]

PBCool it may have saved your support desk some work if you had sent out notifications via SMS or even email.

Reason being, last night I was watching Netflix when suddenly my stream got degraded to SD quality. My internet was working but super slow. So, I initially thought perhaps I was being throttled. I immediately fired off an email to your support guys for them to investigate.

Now, I didn't think to check twitter or anything to see whether there was a wider outage or whether it was just my account. I assumed it was just my account. If I had known that there was a network issue, I would not have logged a fault.

Now I have logged a fault and one of your staff has to investigate it, even when the issue is now resolved. It's a waste of their time. So, perhaps look into some kind of notification mechanism to avoid us customers wasting your staff's time.

My ticket ID is COOL-20170911-36029 - you can close it if you want.

 

[PBCool]

Would be very useful if they would tell us what changes they are making. The whole cloak and dagger approach leaves a very sour taste

The changes we are making is relative to our carrier to London which I have mentioned before, this will be in a few weeks. We will then switch back to our default outbound as it was before.

 

[darrencon]

We don't shape anything and there is always download capacity available, do you have an example?

Sorry I just dont agree. If I download the exact same file in a datacentre, I get 11Mbps and currently on my home network I get less than 1Mbps on a 100Mbps fibre connection?

It starts at around 5Mbps and almost immediately it starts to to drop. And yes it is on a wired network with no other downloads.

I will pm you my ref number for the support call I logged as it has the information

 

[Looney]

Again it's around feasibility, we track the amount of calls that come in at certain times, we basically get zero calls after 8PM, we cant be sending everyone SMSs simply because if we send them out at 1am we would have a chunk of our customers cancelling. So as much as I hear you and this requires some more thought. What we are working on is a more, opt into SMS notifications via portal or opt out.

But it's not a simple task unfortunately.

PBCool, would it not be feasible to at least have a chat support (doesn't have to be 24/7) but this could be very useful (see CrystalWeb). I'v read from quite a few people that getting through to someone at Cool Ideas is very difficult (waiting in a queue). I think that if you implemented chat support then it would be a lot easier for clients to get in touch with someone to report an issue.

 

[CRE4MPIE]

PBCool, would it not be feasible to at least have a chat support (doesn't have to be 24/7) but this could be very useful (see CrystalWeb). I'v read from quite a few people that getting through to someone at Cool Ideas is very difficult (waiting in a queue). I think that if you implemented chat support then it would be a lot easier for clients to get in touch with someone to report an issue.

I think the way you can log tickets with CISP is fine as it is. I think customers just need to understand what the expected SLA's are for the priority tickets they log.

An alternative could be to have an afterhours number ( roaming mobile ) for people on afterhours support. In the past i know some ISP's did this with varying levels of success. They might not neccesarily be able to fix the issue right away, but at least the irate customer on the other gets heard and notified of any existing issues.

Sending out an notification on mail when there ARE network issues is critical though - keeping customers in the dark is the quickest way to get your inbox filled with support tickets. Just say , we are experiencing an issue and working on it with a guestimate ETA. Boom !

CP out

 

[Looney]

I think the way you can log tickets with CISP is fine as it is. I think customers just need to understand what the expected SLA's are for the priority tickets they log.

An alternative could be to have an afterhours number ( roaming mobile ) for people on afterhours support. In the past i know some ISP's did this with varying levels of success. They might not neccesarily be able to fix the issue right away, but at least the irate customer on the other gets heard and notified of any existing issues.

Sending out an notification on mail when there ARE network issues is critical though - keeping customers in the dark is the quickest way to get your inbox filled with support tickets. Just say , we are experiencing an issue and working on it with a guestimate ETA. Boom !

CP out

The issue with logging tickets is that there is no immediate response from anyone to say they will look into it. You have to wait until someone gets back to you. Having a chat system the way CrystalWeb does, will allow a customer to log on, chat to someone on support, log the fault with them and then wait till it gets resolved.

Having a chat system doesn't require them to sit in the office all day/night. They can easily do that from the comfort of their own home. But at least they will be available if a customer needs to get hold of them.

 

[Loppas]

Sorry I just dont agree. If I download the exact same file in a datacentre, I get 11Mbps and currently on my home network I get less than 1Mbps on a 100Mbps fibre connection?

It starts at around 5Mbps and almost immediately it starts to to drop. And yes it is on a wired network with no other downloads.

I was experiencing a similar issue, but it turns out the tcp receive window was being restricted on my windows 7 or something like that.

Before where i was getting at most 1.5MB from an international site on a single threaded download, i now get about 11-13MB.

 

[PBCool]

PBCool it may have saved your support desk some work if you had sent out notifications via SMS or even email.

Reason being, last night I was watching Netflix when suddenly my stream got degraded to SD quality. My internet was working but super slow. So, I initially thought perhaps I was being throttled. I immediately fired off an email to your support guys for them to investigate.

Now, I didn't think to check twitter or anything to see whether there was a wider outage or whether it was just my account. I assumed it was just my account. If I had known that there was a network issue, I would not have logged a fault.

Now I have logged a fault and one of your staff has to investigate it, even when the issue is now resolved. It's a waste of their time. So, perhaps look into some kind of notification mechanism to avoid us customers wasting your staff's time.

My ticket ID is COOL-20170911-36029 - you can close it if you want.

Again the SMS thing we are looking at but on an opt in and out thing. Always remember we don't shape or throttle, this isn't just something I say

 

[PBCool]

I think the way you can log tickets with CISP is fine as it is. I think customers just need to understand what the expected SLA's are for the priority tickets they log.

An alternative could be to have an afterhours number ( roaming mobile ) for people on afterhours support. In the past i know some ISP's did this with varying levels of success. They might not neccesarily be able to fix the issue right away, but at least the irate customer on the other gets heard and notified of any existing issues.

Sending out an notification on mail when there ARE network issues is critical though - keeping customers in the dark is the quickest way to get your inbox filled with support tickets. Just say , we are experiencing an issue and working on it with a guestimate ETA. Boom !

CP out

Yeap so not everyone checks email all the time, if they check it the following morning it doesn't help either. So SMS is the way to go for instant notifications, but it needs to be managed and done in an OPT in manner.

 

[PBCool]

I was experiencing a similar issue, but it turns out the tcp receive window was being restricted on my windows 7 or something like that.

Before where i was getting at most 1.5MB from an international site on a single threaded download, i now get about 11-13MB.

Windows 7 is the first Windows OS with TCP scaling, it should be on auto and do a decent job.

 

[PBCool]

The issue with logging tickets is that there is no immediate response from anyone to say they will look into it. You have to wait until someone gets back to you. Having a chat system the way CrystalWeb does, will allow a customer to log on, chat to someone on support, log the fault with them and then wait till it gets resolved.

Having a chat system doesn't require them to sit in the office all day/night. They can easily do that from the comfort of their own home. But at least they will be available if a customer needs to get hold of them.

Scale is a bit difficult, it doesn't help having to be able to instant chat but you need 10 people manning the instant chats when there are hundreds of session requests, we are considering this as a service but not for mass comm reasons.

 

[Loppas]

Windows 7 is the first Windows OS with TCP scaling, it should be on auto and do a decent job.

It should but on mine windows scaling heuristics was restricting it for some reason, so i disabled it and noticed a significant improvement in speeds.

 

[CRE4MPIE]

For some reason my tcp global autotuninglevel was disabled ( Windows 10 ). Flipped the switch and speeds instantly improved across the board for international. Any improvement is a good improvement.

 

[Looney]

Scale is a bit difficult, it doesn't help having to be able to instant chat but you need 10 people manning the instant chats when there are hundreds of session requests, we are considering this as a service but not for mass comm reasons.

I don't mean that the support agents have to resolve the issues straight away, they will be there for customers to have someone to log a fault with. How many tickets do you guys receive daily? I doubt that there will be hundreds a day after hours. Also, a support agent is technically capable of handling more then one customer at a time by having more then 1 chat window open. All the support agent will do is get as much info from the client as possible and then log the fault with the relevant parties straight away. Perhaps it's a quick fix that can be resolved quickly or perhaps it will take longer.

Now I'm not sure how CrystalWeb does this, but if I had to implement this, then I would offer after hours support from 6pm - 12am (most people are asleep by that time anyway). 3 support agents working 2 hour shifts. They work from the comfort of their own homes.

Perhaps 3 agents won't be enough, perhaps you will need more to work 2 hours over time. However I do think that it is well worth it.

 

[ajan]

The issue with logging tickets is that there is no immediate response from anyone to say they will look into it. You have to wait until someone gets back to you. Having a chat system the way CrystalWeb does, will allow a customer to log on, chat to someone on support, log the fault with them and then wait till it gets resolved.

Having a chat system doesn't require them to sit in the office all day/night. They can easily do that from the comfort of their own home. But at least they will be available if a customer needs to get hold of them.

With my short time with CW, I can tell you for a fact that live chat is useless. I much prefer some form of Netop/higher up to make announcements, than a support staff "logging a issue". In most cases a support staff is just ticket logging slave with the same power of the customer, who is just there to calm the customer down. Nothing will aid to the fix in any way.

Or perhaps a proper assurance system that can detect faults and automatically report to a webpage for the public, as difficult as it sounds.

 

[sand_man]

For some reason my tcp global autotuninglevel was disabled ( Windows 10 ). Flipped the switch and speeds instantly improved across the board for international. Any improvement is a good improvement.

Chalk and cheese... Nice...

 

[Looney]

With my short time with CW, I can tell you for a fact that live chat is useless. I much prefer some form of Netop/higher up to make announcements, than a support staff "logging a issue". In most cases a support staff is just ticket logging slave with the same power of the customer, who is just there to calm the customer down. Nothing will aid to the fix in any way.

Or perhaps a proper assurance system that can detect faults and automatically report to a webpage for the public, as difficult as it sounds.

It's better then not having any after hours support.

 

[PBCool]

It's better then not having any after hours support.

We unfortunately need to focus on methods that are scalable if you commit to a certain communication method and it doesn't work well it makes it difficult to decommission etc. Business decisions need to be feasible and long term, so it will be considered and tested internally etc over a period of time.

I appreciate all the feedback but we discuss all of these things at length internally on an ongoing basis.

Can someone log into the coolzone and see if you have the option to receive SMS notifications?

 

[Archer]

Can someone log into the coolzone and see if you have the option to receive SMS notifications?

Yip it's there