Hi all,
Shaun here. Want to clear up a few things from our end with you guys directly.
On de-prioritisation: for many years now we’ve barely enforced our shaping and deprioritisation terms on end users and have largely maintained a completely unshaped experience for everyone. This was perfectly acceptable to us but with recent technology changes, we have to reconsider this approach. We’ve had to begin to curb some of the very top-end of that utilisation, due to some users exceeding exceptionally large volumes of data, which have impacted everyone’s experience. With Telkom FTTH speeds we’re now seeing utilisation exceeding 3 to 4 terabytes of data on entry-level capped accounts (as an example) and just about all of this data happening in peak hours. There are also a few forum members who are intentionally running these types of accounts at absolute full speed on multiple fibre lines concurrently, in an effort to cause us network problems. These specific individuals will be well known to the forum due to their previous malicious actions, and unfortunately it really does only take a few to spoil it for many. Accordingly, we’ve had to build a new monitoring system to identify this type of activity and curb it immediately. It’s new on our end and there may certainly be errors. The intention here is two-fold: 1) stop WISPs from buying our cheap accounts and using them for their wireless backhaul for hundreds or thousands of clients at a time; and 2) curb the very top-end of utilisation where it is impacting on other users’ experience to such an extent that even we have decided to act on it.
I’ll make the commitment that if you feel you’ve been impacted by this in error, let me know on here by PM with your username and I will personally investigate it for you and liaise directly. Just be a little patient as my days are chockablock full right now, however I will make a concerted effort to spend some time on the forum over the coming days.
On the network upgrades we made: they were successfully completed on our end and all locations are operating back to normal again. We’re still not entirely happy with some of the work in Western Cape and we’ll be making some final changes towards the end of this month, but we don’t expect there to be any impact whatsoever to end users. This should happen seamlessly in the background and will be completed as a part of our ordinary network maintenance schedule.
Basically, if there are any consistent performance issues, let me know by PM so I can personally investigate it for you. The network is purring along on our end without a hassle so if you have an issue, it’s likely that one of our systems may have an error and I’d like the feedback directly so that we can tweak it accordingly. Also as the network stands right now, there are no performance related issues so if it’s not part of the network management module causing a hassle, then it could be line related. I’ll help where I can to identify these for you guys.
