Cybersmart Problems !!

[Hogrod]

I thought as a gesture of good will, I'd test Cybersmart and see if they'd admit to the connection issues some have been experiencing over the past few days. I called (087 625 FAST) and asked if they knew about the problem Laurie reported to us. I spoke support staff in Cape town.
I asked about the problems reported such as poor connection speeds, timeouts on international sites, and whether there has been any reports of general internet related issues. He completely ignored my question and attempted to check if my ADSL port was working. ERMM sorry I did not ask that did I? Anyway after I repeated the question again he told me there were no problems over the weekend and no current general issues with internet access, connection speeds or timeouts. I asked him if he was sure about that. He confirmed again there were no issues related to slow connection speeds and timeouts.

WTF not only do they not talk to their customers the staff don't even talk to each other?

Perhaps someone else should call and we'll keep a tally of who at Cybersmart knows whats going on and who does not! I love it!

 

[Hogrod]

OH **** AM i GONNA MOER SOMEONE IF THEY ARE BLOCKING RAPIDSHARE!!!


WTF is up with ^ this?

Does anyone else have the same shyte?

I've been getting that all weekend randomly on US websites

 

[ZimboNick]

Cybersmart

So since Cybersmart's T&C's so clearly and explicitly state that we are not allowed to use any other ISP, are we just meant to put up with at best case a ****ty connection and at worst case no connection till Cybersmart decide to pull finger?!?! The service has been atrocious now for the last couple of weeks, and this is not acceptable, especially when I need access to the net for work. Am I going to get refunded for this month, or given a roll over of my remaining bandwidth because I can't use it properly? And we don't even get an explanation for this through official sources, no post on the support website, no apology email, nothing. This is Africa, so customer comes last I suppose, "put up or shut up". Appalling....

 

[psivius]

Just a couple of things

2. We have had problems since last Friday because an upgrade went awry. One circuit was supposed to be upgraded the other downgraded and for some unknown reason the one that was supposed to be upgraded was downgraded and the one that was supposed to be downgraded was upgraded.

No words...

4. We are still a bit short of international because we are waiting for additional capacity at the barrack street exchange. We have been given a timeframe of 2 weeks

So you've outgrown yourselves and are now scurrying about trying to get your act together at the cost of all your subscribers.

5.  As luck would have it a large number of clients were infected by some worm virus, which was further exacerbating problems. We have blocked port 25 now and you need to send mail through our mailservers so we can catch this problem at the source and before half our ip range gets blocked. Before someone complains that this is ridiculous, it is common practice in the rest of the world and a number of large providers do this , AOL off the top of my head.

I'm not sure about all of that but:
A worm. A likely story.

5. All of the above resulted in a huge influx of inbound calls, so over the last couple of days, waiting for support has been long ( more than 20 minutes in some cases ). This has been resolved now.

Are you actually wondering why this happened? How can you not inform your subscribers of such serious connection anomalies that users may experience on the network. Much as in the same way as point two, three and four, you should have been too embarrassed to have made this last statement. I have also not noted even a hint of an apology from Cybersmart for any one of all the problems listed.

We are not infallible. We make mistakes and last weeks ones were large and numerous. I am still putting out fires and rerouting things all over the show. Most importantly, i am trying to make sure this does not happen again. If you still have a problem, you are most welcome to email me directly on [email protected] .If you would like to vent your anger over the phone, you may phone 083 2750616, you may get my voicemail though, not because I don't plan to take your call, it just means someone has beat you to it and is already burning my ear.

And to think I was going start off my night only complaining about the fact that Cybersmart no longer has access to the news.saix.net server (All of a sudden in this thread I discover it's much worse than that).

After weeks of being blatantly lied to, they finally confessed. I've been told that Telkom has now blocked Cybersmarts access to the news server and thats all there is to it. No reason. Tough cookie, basically. Once again. No communication whatsoever.

So no news sever and no mail except for Cybersmart mail. We are no longer entitled to send mail via any other free outgoing mail service using their network. At this rate it seems Cybersmart is turning into nothing more than a medium sized VPN.

Absolute incompetence are the words that come to mind. For a company with a professional image and approach this is truly inexcusable. Those are lot of things to go wrong at any one time and each one of them deserved to be communicated to the subscribers.

Are any of these issues being addressed? In which direction is this company headed?

Your move Cybersmart. It will definitely be the deciding factor as to whether I stay or move on to a less restrictive environment as this is definitely not worth the savings you offer. In fact your pricing seems to be more inline with what you are able to provide at present and is not worth any more.

 

[Jacobl]

I agree

Since first posting this I have been monitoring the situation all day, and to be honest, it remains pathetic, International is virtually useless, here I mean waiting up to 10 seconds for a link to open. What can we say, I think pathetic would be in order

 

[Pyro]

Their blocked access to news servers is a big irritation It's one of the reasons I got their local package in the first place... If only they'd let me use the local and international at the same time through route sentry

 

[StevenC]

Amazing, 11 pm prompt, I can finally raid without disconnections or lag. 2 nights in a row.

Something you not telling us?

 

[SilverNodashi]

5.  As luck would have it a large number of clients were infected by some worm virus, which was further exacerbating problems. We have blocked port 25 now and you need to send mail through our mailservers so we can catch this problem at the source and before half our ip range gets blocked. Before someone complains that this is ridiculous, it is common practice in the rest of the world and a number of large providers do this , AOL off the top of my head.

Regards

Laurie

I'm sorry to say this, but that's the lamest excuse ever. WE now need to tell clients why their email on our servers don't work, and since they pay for our services, this looks bad. But, since you're the ONLY one who's now decided to go this route (don't meassure everything up to AOL, they ARE NOT that good, and they're by no means a standard), we simply tell our clients to cancel their accounts with you.