Cool Ideas Fibre ISP - Feedback

[n1c]

Do you notice it more in the evenings? Because by the graphs you've shown seems like you experience the same issue as everyone else in Claremont, which is high packet loss during the peak period.

Yeah the graphs definitely tell a story of night-time-packet-loss. Ran some speed tests during the day yesterday and they weren't great either. Row 93/94/95 here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16rzVo64z-rP2qMAEil5LwqTgqEGGPxBEgp-0XUew1Pk/edit#gid=0

 

[n1c]

Sure, we'll leave it as a standard feature. As a point of interest, do you have packet loss issues and which network are you on?

In case that big spike on the 21st is throwing things off here's filtered for >22nd.

 

[image132]

Wow, it actually looks worse now than when I had the probe installed at your place.

For interests' sake do a TCP iperf to trcvmh01 as well during those times, would be interesting to see what TCP throughput you can get with that amount of loss.

So, basically the same test just remove the "-u"

BTW, speedtest.net doesn't work for me through the proxy in Chrome because it tries to use websockets which isn't supported in squid yet. How did you do these speedtests ?

Yeah sorry I probably should have clarified those speedtests were done without the proxy since like you said they don't work with it.

I'll run the TCP test tonight for you. Last night was particularly bad, that speedtest was the worst I've ever seen my line perform and twitch was only pulling about 80KB/s. I'm assuming everyone started downloading something last night?

How has Octotel not noticed this especially with more and more people in Claremont complaining about it. Ugh, frustrating.

 

[Looney]

Does this magical proxy only improve twitch streaming or can it improve general streaming?

 

[TheRoDent]

Does this magical proxy only improve twitch streaming or can it improve general streaming?

It's a general http/https proxy so anything using that should improve.

 

[Looney]

It's a general http/https proxy so anything using that should improve.

Awesome, gonna try set it up on my Shield tv later and see if it makes a difference.

 

[Butterfly777]

I live in Sea Point and need MINIMUM 10/10 for my teaching job. The landlord had Octotel previously installed and is currently deactivated. Need to have it connected. From the latest feedback I am concerned I won't get 10/10 during peak times even if order a 20/20 to 100/100 line. My question : Is 10/10 minimum a realistic expectation? I am willing to pay for a higher line to get this speed. (Max 100/100 though - Cannot afford more than that right now) - Just want minimum 10/10. I'm chatting to RSA Web as their prices are low - do they have acceptable service levels? Thanks eveyrone. I'm so grateful that broadband exists to help us discuss these things. PS Why is Octotel going to court? Does anyone know?

 

[ArtyLoop]

I live in Sea Point and need MINIMUM 10/10 for my teaching job. The landlord had Octotel previously installed and is currently deactivated. Need to have it connected. From the latest feedback I am concerned I won't get 10/10 during peak times even if order a 20/20 to 100/100 line. My question : Is 10/10 minimum a realistic expectation? I am willing to pay for a higher line to get this speed. (Max 100/100 though - Cannot afford more than that right now) - Just want minimum 10/10. I'm chatting to RSA Web as their prices are low - do they have acceptable service levels? Thanks eveyrone. I'm so grateful that broadband exists to help us discuss these things. PS Why is Octotel going to court? Does anyone know?

I'd advise you to rather avoid Octotel at this time. I've had to have ADSL installed to be able to work.

 

[image132]

I live in Sea Point and need MINIMUM 10/10 for my teaching job. The landlord had Octotel previously installed and is currently deactivated. Need to have it connected. From the latest feedback I am concerned I won't get 10/10 during peak times even if order a 20/20 to 100/100 line. My question : Is 10/10 minimum a realistic expectation? I am willing to pay for a higher line to get this speed. (Max 100/100 though - Cannot afford more than that right now) - Just want minimum 10/10. I'm chatting to RSA Web as their prices are low - do they have acceptable service levels? Thanks eveyrone. I'm so grateful that broadband exists to help us discuss these things. PS Why is Octotel going to court? Does anyone know?

Sea Point doesn't seem to have many issues with Octotel. Right now from what I can tell the majority of the issues stems from congestion in and around the Southern Suburbs. However this is South Africa, nothing is guaranteed so your mileage may vary. If you need 10/10 for your job I'd personally go a bit faster so you aren't maxing your line and you'd have a bit of wiggle room should you need it so 20/20 sounds fine. As for RSAweb I have no experience with them and asking in a Coolideas thread about another ISP is a bit of slap in the face

If you are referring to the court case artyloop brought up a while ago someone explained it was because Octotel trenched in a gated off area where another fiber provider had exclusive rights and they are now taking Octotel to court.

Hope you come right and everything works out for you.

 

[ArtyLoop]

Sea Point doesn't seem to have many issues with Octotel. Right now from what I can tell the majority of the issues stems from congestion in and around the Southern Suburbs. However this is South Africa, nothing is guaranteed so your mileage may vary. If you need 10/10 for your job I'd personally go a bit faster so you aren't maxing your line and you'd have a bit of wiggle room should you need it so 20/20 sounds fine. As for RSAweb I have no experience with them and asking in a Coolideas thread about another ISP is a bit of slap in the face

If you are referring to the court case artyloop brought up a while ago someone explained it was because Octotel trenched in a gated off area where another fiber provider had exclusive rights and they are now taking Octotel to court.

Hope you come right and everything works out for you.

you need to be careful here.. the Octotel network degrades so much at night that Telegram barely works, and that was on an 100/25 package.
As someone who has used many different tech, I can promise you now, ADSL and LTE are more reliable, more dependable than Octotel's crap! I am not joking, I am dead serious.
I have one regret in my life and that was cancelling my LTE contract with Telkom. That thing was a stalwart, it only ever had issues when everyone else countrywide went off, when Telkom crashed, usually a once a year occurence.

 

[abudabi]

.. the Octotel network degrades so much at night... ,

The entire network ?

 

[ArtyLoop]

The entire network ?

My entire area. And by accounts and people I've spoken to, other areas outside of Blouberg. There are some areas apparently where it works OK but I have me suspicions that those are clients who wouldn't know their arse from their elbow in other words they are not aware of the issues because they just use stuff that doesn't battle like Netflix

 

[Phinix]

It is rather curious. The proxy server sits on an IP range exactly like we give out to clients, and it sits next to our handoff routers from Openserve etc, and follows the same path internationally as end users.

From what I've been able to determine, justin.tv (Twitch's previous name) peers at LINX (the London Internet Exchange) where we directly peer too.

Streams are served by hosts such as video-edge-c67aac.lhr03.no-abs.hls.ttvnw.net which I'm unable to traceroute or ping to past justin.tv's peering point at LINX, so they are filtering that for some reason.

PBCool and are going to see if de-peering them at LINX and using HE directly for transit to them makes a difference.

The other obvious difference that the proxy does make is that it's TCP stack is heavily tweaked, it uses proper congestion control etc, all the beautiful things of a Linux box. And it then relays the stream over low latency to you as the end-user where retransmissions and packet loss makes very little difference to throughput but that is not the issue in your case as your single and multithreaded speedtests easily max your line.

You did mention before that it works 100% on a VOX's account. Could you provide me a traceroute to video-edge-c67aac.lhr03.no-abs.hls.ttvnw.net just for comparative purposes ?

@TheRoDent here is the trace on CISP without the proxy:

Tracing route to video-edge-c67aac.lhr03.no-abs.hls.ttvnw.net [185.42.206.186]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1    <1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  router.asus.com [192.168.1.1]
  2     *        *        *     Request timed out.
  3    14 ms     4 ms     5 ms  192.168.10.5
  4     2 ms     2 ms     3 ms  192.168.11.6
  5     4 ms     2 ms     3 ms  154.0.4.161
  6   145 ms   142 ms   143 ms  154.0.4.158
  7   144 ms   142 ms   142 ms  154.0.5.18
  8     *        *        *     Request timed out.
  9  lhr01-br01.justin.tv [195.66.225.174]  reports: Destination net unreachable.

Trace complete.

And here it is on Vox:

Tracing route to video-edge-c67aac.lhr03.no-abs.hls.ttvnw.net [185.42.206.186]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1    <1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  router.asus.com [192.168.1.1]
  2     *        *        *     Request timed out.
  3     4 ms     2 ms     2 ms  telkom-upload-vlan-barrack-ipc.vox.co.za [41.193.121.9]
  4     2 ms     2 ms     2 ms  vox-upload-teraco-cpt-barrack-ipc.vox.co.za [41.193.121.10]
  5     9 ms     4 ms     2 ms  vox-b2b-pts-barrack-ipc-int.vox.co.za [209.203.1.41]
  6     5 ms     3 ms     7 ms  41.193.120.5
  7   145 ms   146 ms   146 ms  vox-ldn-telecity-wacs.vox.co.za [196.41.24.174]
  8   145 ms   145 ms   146 ms  te0-0-0-3.rcr21.b015533-1.lon01.atlas.cogentco.com [149.14.144.65]
  9   146 ms   145 ms   145 ms  be2867.ccr22.lon01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.56.241]
10   146 ms   145 ms   145 ms  be2352.rcr21.b015534-1.lon01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.37.42]
11     *     twitch.demarc.cogentco.com [149.14.147.18]  reports: Destination net unreachable.

Trace complete.

And yes, on Vox - for what ever reason - twitch has always streamed perfectly.

 

[SeaSickMama]

@TheRoDent here is the trace on CISP without the proxy:

Tracing route to video-edge-c67aac.lhr03.no-abs.hls.ttvnw.net [185.42.206.186]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1    <1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  router.asus.com [192.168.1.1]
  2     *        *        *     Request timed out.
  3    14 ms     4 ms     5 ms  192.168.10.5
  4     2 ms     2 ms     3 ms  192.168.11.6
  5     4 ms     2 ms     3 ms  154.0.4.161
  6   145 ms   142 ms   143 ms  154.0.4.158
  7   144 ms   142 ms   142 ms  154.0.5.18
  8     *        *        *     Request timed out.
  9  lhr01-br01.justin.tv [195.66.225.174]  reports: Destination net unreachable.

Trace complete.

And here it is on Vox:

Tracing route to video-edge-c67aac.lhr03.no-abs.hls.ttvnw.net [185.42.206.186]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1    <1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  router.asus.com [192.168.1.1]
  2     *        *        *     Request timed out.
  3     4 ms     2 ms     2 ms  telkom-upload-vlan-barrack-ipc.vox.co.za [41.193.121.9]
  4     2 ms     2 ms     2 ms  vox-upload-teraco-cpt-barrack-ipc.vox.co.za [41.193.121.10]
  5     9 ms     4 ms     2 ms  vox-b2b-pts-barrack-ipc-int.vox.co.za [209.203.1.41]
  6     5 ms     3 ms     7 ms  41.193.120.5
  7   145 ms   146 ms   146 ms  vox-ldn-telecity-wacs.vox.co.za [196.41.24.174]
  8   145 ms   145 ms   146 ms  te0-0-0-3.rcr21.b015533-1.lon01.atlas.cogentco.com [149.14.144.65]
  9   146 ms   145 ms   145 ms  be2867.ccr22.lon01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.56.241]
10   146 ms   145 ms   145 ms  be2352.rcr21.b015534-1.lon01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.37.42]
11     *     twitch.demarc.cogentco.com [149.14.147.18]  reports: Destination net unreachable.

Trace complete.

And yes, on Vox - for what ever reason - twitch has always streamed perfectly.

No mistake back in the ADSL days Vox was the best for me but you paid for what you got there.

 

[MDE]

@PBCool and @TheRoDent is the iperf server on trcvmh01.cisp.co.za down. Cant run any iperfs to it. Traceroute is fine.

 

[image132]

you need to be careful here.. the Octotel network degrades so much at night that Telegram barely works, and that was on an 100/25 package.
As someone who has used many different tech, I can promise you now, ADSL and LTE are more reliable, more dependable than Octotel's crap! I am not joking, I am dead serious.
I have one regret in my life and that was cancelling my LTE contract with Telkom. That thing was a stalwart, it only ever had issues when everyone else countrywide went off, when Telkom crashed, usually a once a year occurence.

As do you about over generalizing their network. You clearly have a vendetta against Octotel. You've apparently canceled your line with CISP and Octotel yet here you sit waiting for any chance to condemn and burn them to the ground.

I get that you're pissed that fiber wasn't everything you wanted it to be but just because you and I are having issues it doesn't mean everyone in all of Cape Town is as is proof by the thread you started. Proved by Joeline, hell my own sister I convinced to get CISP + Octotel. She lives maybe 45min away from me, has 0 issues. I've been to her flat and tested her internet.

If all my years of dealing with telkom and the internet has taught me one thing its that no two areas are the same when it comes to the internet.

 

[Butterfly777]

Sea Point doesn't seem to have many issues with Octotel. Right now from what I can tell the majority of the issues stems from congestion in and around the Southern Suburbs. However this is South Africa, nothing is guaranteed so your mileage may vary. If you need 10/10 for your job I'd personally go a bit faster so you aren't maxing your line and you'd have a bit of wiggle room should you need it so 20/20 sounds fine. As for RSAweb I have no experience with them and asking in a Coolideas thread about another ISP is a bit of slap in the face

If you are referring to the court case artyloop brought up a while ago someone explained it was because Octotel trenched in a gated off area where another fiber provider had exclusive rights and they are now taking Octotel to court.

Hope you come right and everything works out for you.

I have Cell C LTE Fixed Wireless but my speeds are so poor. At night it even disconnects while I teach! And I only need 2/2 for this particular job. Maybe I should switch to Telkom LTE? Thanks. I'll investigate. Chatted to RSAWEB (Sorry, I didn't know where to post this as the posts were mainly about Octotel) and found out that they are sister companies with offices in Sea Point. Owned by the same umbrella company, RAMP. They are literally one office floor apart from each other.

 

[ArtyLoop]

As do you about over generalizing their network. You clearly have a vendetta against Octotel. You've apparently canceled your line with CISP and Octotel yet here you sit waiting for any chance to condemn and burn them to the ground.

I get that you're pissed that fiber wasn't everything you wanted it to be but just because you and I are having issues it doesn't mean everyone in all of Cape Town is as is proof by the thread you started. Proved by Joeline, hell my own sister I convinced to get CISP + Octotel. She lives maybe 45min away from me, has 0 issues. I've been to her flat and tested her internet.

If all my years of dealing with telkom and the internet has taught me one thing its that no two areas are the same when it comes to the internet.

I agree with what I highlighted in BOLD.

But let me remind you, I got, and still get BETTER SUPPORT and honest answers when dealing with Telkom and Vox Telecom. With CISP I have had to rely on feedback and pot in the dark answers. TelkomZA on this forum does a fantastic job of sorting things out and giving me honest answers as to what might be wrong. Hence I was so eager to get back onto ADSL. And boy, what is this FTTH CRAP... when a VDSL line synched at 20Mbit can kick this thing's butt any time of the day.
The thing is, its been over a month, and I have no clear answer as to whether Octotel are fixing this issue or not.
Nobody has come here to test this crappy line, nothing has been done, aside from being told it will be sorted "any day now (TM)".
If I did my job like this I'd be on the street but somehow Octotel has a license to be slapgat. It works both ways.

 

[Butterfly777]

Sorry, it was more of an Octotel post and then added in RSA Web bit. I agree that different areas perform differently.

 

[image132]

I have Cell C LTE Fixed Wireless but my speeds are so poor. At night it even disconnects while I teach! And I only need 2/2 for this particular job. Maybe I should switch to Telkom LTE? Thanks. I'll investigate. Chatted to RSAWEB (Sorry, I didn't know where to post this as the posts were mainly about Octotel) and found out that they are sister companies with offices in Sea Point. Owned by the same umbrella company, RAMP. They are literally one office floor apart from each other.

I can't make that decision for you but you've seen wireless internet can be just as fickle as wired.

I can only tell you what I told @AfricanTech when he asked for advice about the same thing. Sadly getting internet in SA is a lottery. Based on whether your area is congested or not and since that information isn't public its really really hard to give anyone a definitive answer about whether they will get good internet or not. I'm not even sure if the companies themselves know half the time. The congestion however extends beyond just fixed providers, wireless towers too get congested.

Best I can give you is that from what I've seen almost no one from Sea Point has been complaining about Octotel.