Hi
There are a couple of issues at the moment. The first and most important one is that we have introduced a pop in jhb as well as Seacom bandwidth on our network. At the moment jhb is going over seacom capacity and everyone else is going over SAT-3. The rationale in doing this is to keep jhb traffic in jhb and cape town in cape town and eventually durban in durban which will improve local and international latency, it also gives us redundancy across cable systems and given the downtimes on the cable systems recently , redundancy is a necessary requirement.
The jhb breakout is still not working properly and jhb traffic is going jhb, cape town, durban and then international. Although SEacom is cheaper the latency is about 80ms worse than sat-3 and when you add on the extra routes, this makes it about 150 to 200ms slower. So cape town and durban will be faster than jhb until we can route directly out of jhb. We were hoping to get this working 3 weeks ago, but things like volcanoes preventing our equipment leaving london and general maintenance on both Seacom and SAT-3 forced us to delay the completion of this. Further we thought we had covered all bases but it turns out we had not which created outages for a portion of our clientbase. We are reviewing the plan and the cause of the problems.
We also assumed that our traffic was evenly distributed between cape town and jhb ( in fact we assumed we would have more traffic in cape town since we are based there and we advertise there ), however the converse is true, which is something we completely overlooked , which further puts a greater load on jhb customers. Finally the contention on the weekends is double that in the week because of the "free" weekends and it seems that the words uncapped/free in some peoples minds means switch on a download manager at midnight and leave it running , this is also something we never anticipated and it was the reason we included a free giggybank so that the discounted gigs could be saved and used at other times. We are either going to enforce a fair usage policy or move these users onto the new nightrider product that will be launched on Monday. This product is specifically targetted at users who can automated their downloads and will hopefully move some of the load off the weekend as it will give much better value to a "serial downloader".
When you make changes it is very rare to get it 100% first time. The reconfiguration of the network has resulted in significant improvements in the week and it is very rare not to get full line rate. It is quite interesting that people have sent me speedtest results showing 4Mb speeds on speedtest during the week, in fact someone showed me a 10Mb speetest, yet there has not been a single post saying: "I am getting 4096 on speedtest during the week on my 4Mb line who else is getting that from their provider" The weekends are below the service levels that you are used to and that we are happy with providing but we are working at rectifying this. When you compare these speedtests on the weekened which is a period of uncapped usage, the speed being achieved is still better than other uncapped services. In the end we will have a robust national network , with low latencies and full redundancy. As a side effect it may infuriate some of you guys on the weekend until we get it right, this is not our intention and if we could have anticipated these problems we would have avoided them.
Regards
Laurie
(fake smile, about to RAGEEEEEEE).
o well speedtests bellow.
