List of congested exchanges?

Pornolio said:
Well last night was a pleasant surprise for me... Bellville North which has been full of crap lately ... was actually perfect last night. I dont know if enough people moaned / complained that they maybe did something about the exchange, or if people were just not active on their adsl lines last night... Either way... my traceroutes to my first ISP hop from home was literally 10 ms.

In the last 2 months, I have seen shocking results like 800 ms just to get to the my first router hop. Anyone in Bellville North experience the same results / performance I have described above ?
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For me it was mostly fine, though for a short while around 8:30 I had 250ms latency to the 1st hop.

I guess we just lucky it wasn't that bad the whole evening. I've noticed that when there are steam updates, I usually have high latency when everyone in my area's steam automatically download these updates.
 
Hmm in that case, I am not going to get my hopes up... Will keep on trying this week and see if it wasnt just a "good night "
Everything felt normal last night, but yea, not gonna assume they fixed the issues.
 
Add me to the list too.

I'm also connected to the Bellville North (Bellville North 3 according to Telkom). About a month ago my latency got really bad. Sometimes going up as high as 800ms to the first hop, regardless of ISP.

Last night it looked fine, I had 10ms pings to the first hop until around 8pm - then it went up to 500ms.

I logged numerous faults with Telkom, and the usual procedure is.

- On hold for 15 minutes
- They ask you to do a bunch of tests, turn off your modem, turn on your modem, run a speedtest, change linespeed from 4mb to 2mb to 1mb and back to 4mb, etc.
- Then the fault is handed over to a technician
- Technician ignores all the 'how to contact you' or 'how to get access to the premises' instructions and shows up two days later unannounced at your door.
- Technician tests a few things, says he can see there is a problem, and hands over the fault to the cabling department
- Two days later you get an SMS saying 'We retested your line and found that the problem is now resolved' and your call is closed.
- You start again at step 1, and no, you can't re-open the old fault.

Of course nothing changes, my latency is still horrible in the evening. The last technician I spoke to admitted that there is capacity issues at the Bellville North exchange. I asked if they could move me from Bellville North 3 to 5, but apparently they are all over capacity. The guy said they now have a specialist looking at what to do. Either they're going to upgrade the capacity or add a new DSLAM in the exchange.
 
Fark, it seems that Telkom's ADSL infrastructure is falling to pieces. Widespread issues. Big drive to increase subscribers, but little to no capacity. What a balls-up.
 
Megaton said:
Add me to the list too.

I'm also connected to the Bellville North (Bellville North 3 according to Telkom). About a month ago my latency got really bad. Sometimes going up as high as 800ms to the first hop, regardless of ISP.

Last night it looked fine, I had 10ms pings to the first hop until around 8pm - then it went up to 500ms.

I logged numerous faults with Telkom, and the usual procedure is.

- On hold for 15 minutes
- They ask you to do a bunch of tests, turn off your modem, turn on your modem, run a speedtest, change linespeed from 4mb to 2mb to 1mb and back to 4mb, etc.
- Then the fault is handed over to a technician
- Technician ignores all the 'how to contact you' or 'how to get access to the premises' instructions and shows up two days later unannounced at your door.
- Technician tests a few things, says he can see there is a problem, and hands over the fault to the cabling department
- Two days later you get an SMS saying 'We retested your line and found that the problem is now resolved' and your call is closed.
- You start again at step 1, and no, you can't re-open the old fault.

Of course nothing changes, my latency is still horrible in the evening. The last technician I spoke to admitted that there is capacity issues at the Bellville North exchange. I asked if they could move me from Bellville North 3 to 5, but apparently they are all over capacity. The guy said they now have a specialist looking at what to do. Either they're going to upgrade the capacity or add a new DSLAM in the exchange.
Click to expand...

Sounds exactly like my experience... I have been through the same steps you mentioned with my calls also being closed stating my line works fine ... Good to know I am not the only one moaning at them.
 
HTC_guy said:
im a sad panda :cry:
Click to expand...
Us too...add us to the list. :cry:

We have noticed some connectivity issues(line dropping) the last few weeks but just had to reset the router and then all was fine for abit...but speeds appalling etc. Friday night, get home...this time Inet is dead no matter how many times we reset the router.
Call Telkom saturday, she tells me they cant see my router so it must be stuffed, Sunday run off and spend a few hundred getting a new one. Install new one,same problem, inet dead :mad: .Call the fluckers, log fault and now we are waiting...

We are a 4mb line and only noticed when we installed the new router we have been bumped to a 6mb line, dont know if this has anything to do with our issues...it really p#sses me off as so far this little issue has cost us over 500 bucks..for a new router we didnt need and the cost of adsl that we cant use! grrrr.
 
Im in Meyersdal on Kingfisher Crescent and my exchange is also congested. It also took me about three months for Telkom to admit it was congestion.
 
Megaton said:
Add me to the list too.

I asked if they could move me from Bellville North 3 to 5, but apparently they are all over capacity. The guy said they now have a specialist looking at what to do. Either they're going to upgrade the capacity or add a new DSLAM in the exchange.
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Uhm, the graphs I have seen of Bellville North 5 suggests its not out of capacity, its running at around 10Mbps and 15Mbps MAX most of the time. But them not wanting to move you confirms what I have got too, except in my case the techy said he know they won't move me even if he ask to.
 
Tinuva said:
Uhm, the graphs I have seen of Bellville North 5 suggests its not out of capacity, its running at around 10Mbps and 15Mbps MAX most of the time. But them not wanting to move you confirms what I have got too, except in my case the techy said he know they won't move me even if he ask to.
Click to expand...

I had one technician say he would move me, but then the call was closed, and I have not been able to get in contact with the same technician again. All the others I've spoken to have told me that 5 is just as congested as 3, either they're misinformed, or they have some other reasons for not wanting to move users. I guess I'm going to try harder to get them to move me.

I have also spoken to MWeb about the issue, they have to field lots of calls about this issue. The answer they got from Telkom was that it is congested because of the 3 month special offer they're running and that it should be better after it's over. I'm not so sure about that.
 
My line has been surprisingly good tonight.

Latency:

2irp8aq.jpg


There was a spike, but that was because I was downloading something. What is strange though is that it seems my line capped at 2mbit.

Traffic:

2lbdw5f.jpg
 
Well, telkom tech called me yesterday and said there was nothing wrong with our line( almost like the fact that we didnt have internet was all in my head) and I must call my isp, closed the report. Get home and the line is working but we were back to dropping the line every 25mins(i was timing) and had to reset the router...call Telkom back and ask them to reset the port and downgrade my line back to 4mb. Now all seemed fine, could browse last night but this morning, back to dropping the line. :mad:

Suppose I must call back today and log another fault. Telkom has us by the short and curlies and I really dont know what else to do or what to tell them to actually make them GIVE.A.DAMN. and get my line working like it should be and expect it to be for what i bladdy pay every month.
 
Ha! I'm getting 3-4Mbps on 3G so I think after 8 years it's goodbye ADSL. Fortunately I no longer game online, otherwise this would have been a difficult decision to make...

Oh and Telkom? F**k you, you greedy b*****ds!
 
Comet said:
Im in Meyersdal on Kingfisher Crescent and my exchange is also congested. It also took me about three months for Telkom to admit it was congestion.
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We are on the 867-XXXX echange. Ours is heavily congested. What is your exchange?
 
Right looks like I might have my issues sorted out for now.

1st what I did, I went to a telkom shop and ordered a second line, using the closer 2 for free install and 384k dsl on it. That was about 2 weeks ago.
Today the line was installed, after checking with a contact I am now on the new Bellville north 5 imax dslam (woohoo).

My current line was on Bellville north 4, syncs at max 4megs on G.DMT, and routes through ESR-3. The new line syncs wierd numbers ect, but routes through ESR-4.

So now, I am cancelling the old line and moving my 4meg dsl to the new one. Lucky for me, I couldn't give a hoot about my tellephone number changing, had random people calling me on it all the time anyways. So 2 flies with 1 slap.
 
MickeyD said:
So you are shifting the blame for Telkom's lack of demand forecasting and poor capacity planning from Telkom to the ISPs/subscribers?

Poor form, old chap.
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Consumer1: Give us uncapped
Telkom: It isn't sustainable at present
Consumer1: We don't care
MWEB: Here is uncapped
Telkom: This isn't going to work out so well ....
Consumer1: WIN!
Consumer2: Fail, I can't get any traffic
Telkom: Backhaul is congested
Consumer1: Fix it then
Telkom: That will take time

Business cases of this size take more than a few months to be approved. I doubt Telkom has received sufficient demand forecasting from MWEB to have been able to prevent the current problems.
 
ranger said:
Consumer1: Give us uncapped
Telkom: It isn't sustainable at present
Consumer1: We don't care
MWEB: Here is uncapped
Telkom: This isn't going to work out so well ....
Consumer1: WIN!
Consumer2: Fail, I can't get any traffic
Telkom: Backhaul is congested
Consumer1: Fix it then
Telkom: That will take time

Business cases of this size take more than a few months to be approved. I doubt Telkom has received sufficient demand forecasting from MWEB to have been able to prevent the current problems.
Click to expand...
No traffic measurements? No network management? Surely they must know what exchange areas have high traffic?
 
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