Crystal Web (NEW ISP) ADSL Feedback

Status
Not open for further replies.
RoMark said:
May i ask what did you guys do ito the current upgrade/changes?

I honestly are amazed how my line has been performing through the night and still going on and on and on and...

In terms of hourly download average speed from 00:00 till 06:00, the lowest it went, was 398kB/s(between 04;00 - 05:00), the rest are between 400 - 418kB/s.
This is obviously on a 4Mbps line.
Click to expand...

Just like the Duracell Bunny! :D
 
Electric said:
This is my point DJ.
Why does the service work on other accounts but only works intermittently on CW?
I am specifically referring to Vodlocker and Gorrilavid for example.
Click to expand...

(please don't take my frankness in this post as confrontational - it's for transparency purposes only)

We've seen reports of issues in your specific area - could be related. Or it could be a whole host of other reasons related to us or unrelated to us. We've also had reports of good performance to vodlocker for example from other customers at other times.

Where we stand on this one is the follows:

These services don't really stream. They're a download. While we had international troubles it was certainly a problem. These services should be working far better now. You're having some issues we're investigating in your general area though, and it appears to be an underlying Telkom issue there. What your area needs is Metro ethernet to be honest. The latter issue could be related, and could be the cause of any issues to these sorts of sites.

But we cannot prioritise them properly on our end. We did look into it for you guys, and it's not feasible from our side for the aforementioned reasons. We cannot accept the financial burden of these guys running inefficient infrastructure - that's my transparent, bottom-line on this one, and I have drawn a line on this internally to be honest. There are better options out there than these sites in our opinion, and we have no problems prioritising them. But we're not going to setup a team to monitor for every IP change these guys make nor accept responsibility because their own hosts are shaping their throughput, or whatever other reason under the sun that these services sometimes misfire.

I cannot speak for other networks, but we prioritise proper streaming services for customers. If you want those "other" services to work well, send them a mail to request that they invest in proper streaming infrastructure from the outset. Get them to peer properly and get them to use proper CDN services available to them. Bottom line though is that these guys operate shady businesses, making money from click-type advertising scams, and are not interested in investing in proper networking infrastructure to make their own services better, and we're not now going to take that financial cost on board on their behalf. We're also not going to start negotiating anything with these guys whatsoever, for legal and ethical reasons. For every educated person out there like yourself, there's 20 uneducated people who click their advertising, get infected with viruses and spyware and then want us to explain to them how to remove spyware because their "internet has been hacked".

I know that these services have proliferated the XBMC user-base because of their Fusion integration, but there's a reason why Fusion and XBMCHub have teams of guys behind the scenes constantly updating things on their end - because it's not on a proper streaming CDN service and they're forever changing hosts, host locations, file servers, IP addresses and so on. For all we know that one video that a customer was complaining about to us was actually some daft moron in Venezuela who setup that particular file sharing VPS without auto-scaling.

As you may have picked up, I have some rather strong feelings about these services from a business perspective as an ISP. As a consumer I choose to use other services, but I certainly do understand why you're questioning us on them. But as a business we're not going to be investing anything into trying to prioritise these services further than we have already, which is to offer products that allow for using such services via http download, and to prioritise proper streaming protocols. We're not an extension of their support desk, which is actually quite a misnomer to call it that. They don't offer support - they just blame your ISP.

Shaun
 
RoMark said:
May i ask what did you guys do ito the current upgrade/changes?

I honestly are amazed how my line has been performing through the night and still going on and on and on and...

In terms of hourly download average speed from 00:00 till 06:00, the lowest it went, was 398kB/s(between 04;00 - 05:00), the rest are between 400 - 418kB/s.
This is obviously on a 4Mbps line.
Click to expand...

We made it awesome and we wanted you to experience it. This is where the responsibility thing comes in though. Accounts are going to perform well now - it's up to you to control your usage please. We do urge that you don't nail your line all day long. We don't have the capacity for that. If users do this, we will have to put in mechanisms to avoid it.

We're giving things back to you, trying to meet users halfway, trying to blow the notion out of the water that internet users are abusers, and we trust you guys will help us in that respect.

Happy to hear the good news though.
 
Thanks Shaun.

Just explain 1 final thing to me please; why if I switch to an alternate account does the video stream/download better?
And if I may ask, where do you propose I go to find an alternate streaming source that would be prioritized by yourselves?
If the answer is Netflix then I am confused as Netflix does not always have a large chunk of what I watch.
 
Electric said:
Thanks Shaun.

Just explain 1 final thing to me please; why if I switch to an alternate account does the video stream/download better?
And if I may ask, where do you propose I go to find an alternate streaming source that would be prioritized by yourselves?
If the answer is Netflix then I am confused as Netflix does not always have a large chunk of what I watch.
Click to expand...

In your area there's a known issue, and a certain other ISP appears to have bypassed the Telkom issue there. We're also looking into it.

As for your personal preferences in entertainment, I can't really answer that one for you. Netflix and Hulu are decent options in my personal opinion.

If you find a legal service who we can talk to, I'm happy to do so on your behalf to see what we can do. We've already been in discussions with a few because OTT streaming is what sparked the seed for this business. I love OTT streaming and wish it was more readily available locally and at decent costs.

If you have a suggestion as to how we can make things better in this respect, I'm very open to hearing them and looking into them, I promise.
 
Crystal Web said:
In your area there's a known issue, and a certain other ISP appears to have bypassed the Telkom issue there. We're also looking into it.

As for your personal preferences in entertainment, I can't really answer that one for you. Netflix and Hulu are decent options in my personal opinion.

If you find a legal service who we can talk to, I'm happy to do so on your behalf to see what we can do. We've already been in discussions with a few because OTT streaming is what sparked the seed for this business. I love OTT streaming and wish it was more readily available locally and at decent costs.

If you have a suggestion as to how we can make things better in this respect, I'm very open to hearing them and looking into them, I promise.
Click to expand...

Yes I for one have a Netflix Subscription and use the Hulu free service. I am however prepared to pay to watch all my series. The only reason i use services like vodlocker is because Hulu and Netflix might not air Hardcore Pawn for instance. But if anyone can find said service with almost anything on it I will subscribe immediately.
 
saa044 said:
Yes I for one have a Netflix Subscription and use the Hulu free service. I am however prepared to pay to watch all my series. The only reason i use services like vodlocker is because Hulu and Netflix might not air Hardcore Pawn for instance. But if anyone can find said service with almost anything on it I will subscribe immediately.
Click to expand...

Just view the buffering as edging .... :D
 
Or you might get the "look" when you choose not to and the missus finds out hey?
 
saa044 said:
Yes I for one have a Netflix Subscription and use the Hulu free service. I am however prepared to pay to watch all my series. The only reason i use services like vodlocker is because Hulu and Netflix might not air Hardcore Pawn for instance. But if anyone can find said service with almost anything on it I will subscribe immediately.
Click to expand...

Exactly my sentiments.
 
Crystal Web said:
Paul spoke with your daughter yesterday about this. Basically Telkom need to schedule a time to get on to the premises.

We follow this up every day though for you, and will do so again today. Expect a mail from Paul later once he's had a chance to investigate and shout at some Telkom people again.
Click to expand...

Okay thanks, however I'm not sure what kind of crappy problem solving was done in my absence.

Tell Paul that when he does problem solving with a non techie (the daughter) to check which PVC they're working on. :p

Anyway, unlike Saturday I've now got IP's but still no internet. Telkom have just been on the phone twice and they're now very concerned. Spoke to a guy called James and he's going to get a techie to go down to the exchange and swap out the port.
 
Don't go down that road.... the grumpy old fekker has just got back from his holiday.
 
Crystal Web said:
We made it awesome and we wanted you to experience it. This is where the responsibility thing comes in though. Accounts are going to perform well now - it's up to you to control your usage please. We do urge that you don't nail your line all day long. We don't have the capacity for that. If users do this, we will have to put in mechanisms to avoid it.

We're giving things back to you, trying to meet users halfway, trying to blow the notion out of the water that internet users are abusers, and we trust you guys will help us in that respect.

Happy to hear the good news though.
Click to expand...
Nope, I will play ball.

My download should finish in the next 50 minutes and then it should be back to normal.
I never schedule downloads during the day or evening.
All my stuff are scheduled between 00:00 - 06:00.
Unfortunately the Steam downloads came up and it was about 15GB.
 
Last edited:
Let me give you guys a few examples of the limitations we've hit in trying to offer certain services, and why we're doing what we're doing (without breaching any non-disclosures or confidentiality agreements):

OTT streaming. We're in advanced stages of negotiations with a legal streaming service. The sticking point is that they want us to cover the cost of the bandwidth. 500Mbps dedicated international throughput. Anyone in the know will tell you exactly what the costs involved are - huge!

News server access: we've partnered with the best news server provider in the country because we want to offer a premium news server account to customers. Other free news servers simply use proxies and antiquated technology to cache a few files locally. This is why you see poor speeds on these services quite often and why many files are never available. If you want to run a full, premium, local news server, you'll need multiple Gbps international throughput. The costs are ludicrous. The alternative is that we offer a poor service, free news server. That's not an option from where we stand.

International throughput: the upgrades on the backbone coincided with a general issue on the international side of things. It was not Cybersmart's fault, but ultimately as the ISP we must accept responsibility to you guys. It also coincided with our move to raw bandwidth capacity on our own network which we're still in the process of doing. Rather than capacity purchasing on the existing network with custom shaping and pricing, we're moving to our own network entirely. So all of these issues, upgrades and changes were happening at the very same time. And to be honest, the only issue customers have really experienced has been slow international throughput, another issue we've mostly resolved now.

All of this while trying to launch an ISP that involves a million other aspects. :D

So there's a quick and transparent update on where we are, where we're going, and what's been happening on our side. And that's just scratching the very surface of it all.
 
MrR said:
Haven't received new credentials either or are you still in the process of sending out everybody's?
Click to expand...

Please PM me with your details. Anyone who hasn't yet received the new credentials please do the same.
 
Ol' Mean Bastid said:
Okay thanks, however I'm not sure what kind of crappy problem solving was done in my absence.

Tell Paul that when he does problem solving with a non techie (the daughter) to check which PVC they're working on. :p

Anyway, unlike Saturday I've now got IP's but still no internet. Telkom have just been on the phone twice and they're now very concerned. Spoke to a guy called James and he's going to get a techie to go down to the exchange and swap out the port.
Click to expand...

Hey, now that's good news. That port has been giving you troubles for a while now. Hopefully this will feel like an upgrade now.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X