Minimum service standards

C

codemonkey

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In this article http://www.mybroadband.co.za/nephp/?m=show&id=5678;
the CEO of IBurst says: “License conditions stipulate certain minimum service standards and make operators liable for contraventions. Consumers are therefore at risk of paying unlicensed operators for a sub-standard service.”

Oh, the irony. I wonder if anyone from IBurst cares to comment on these supposed minimum service standards. I doubt whether they will. Taking an educated guess, based on the general tone of the posts in this thread, I'd say that according to IBurst, they did their job if you can connect, speed is a luxury.
 
Everything with Iburst seems to be a luxury.

I am at pains to say this, but I've now started to discourage my clients from sighning up with iBurst and have rather encouraged them to sign up with Telkom.

From slow speeds to a incredibly bad accounts departpents, I'm sad to say, Iburst are a far cry from matching even Telkoms service.
 
You have to admit though, that this month and January, we experienced excellent PINGS and low latency. We're still getting great local and Intl PINGS, and speed is up to standard. Far less complaints than a few months ago.

iBurst are definitely working on whatever went wrong.
 
GBM what drugs are you on?

Give me some too, so I don't have to constantly explain to people why their connections timeout?

http://www.iburst.co.za/default.aspx?link=blogs_comment
High Packet Loss...
Ed | Wednesday, February 14, 2007 | 17:00
Hi all

Just an update....

Looks like it is again with the upstream provider, and we have escalated to them. We await feedback. As soon as I have heard something I will post again.

I would be interested to know if there are any others that are experienncing the same problem.

Thanks
Ed
 
who.is.michael said:
Give me some too, so I don't have to constantly explain to people why their connections timeout?

http://www.iburst.co.za/default.aspx?link=blogs_comment
High Packet Loss...
Ed | Wednesday, February 14, 2007 | 17:00
Hi all

Just an update....

Looks like it is again with the upstream provider, and we have escalated to them. We await feedback. As soon as I have heard something I will post again.

I would be interested to know if there are any others that are experienncing the same problem.

Thanks
Ed
Click to expand...

I think the improvement might have been after this incident. There was that improvement thread, but I never noticed much and didn't look at the time frames so I might be wrong, but I'm sure there was a period where people were generally experiencing an improvement. Seemed to be mostly in JHB though.

What I am frustrated with now is that once capped timeouts seem much more frequent. From online gaming to even complete timeouts when browsing... its very irritating, exactly why I did not want to get capped this month.
 
Look again it got worse, there were two days two weeks ago when it was great no timeouts, pings really low and the BW throughput was great. But I've noticed that it follows the usual iBurst pattern - they tend to "fix" the issues on Thursday and Monday it’s ****ed again.

Usual crap!
 
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I actually don't often use my connection very early in the morning, or on weekdays (business hours) either, but when I do I am pretty shocked...

That is something that has always existed on the iBurst network, and no matter what they do about ping times etc, things will degrade on weekdays, and they need to get right to the cause of that. Whether its a lack of bandwidth or tower overloading, it really should stop. ADSL doesn't have the same problem to nearly the same degree...
 
Hmmm, I use my connection every day and at any time lately it's been acceptable so I can't complain, I just hope that saying that won't trigger a spell of timeouts and lagged speeds.
 
If you think that your iBurst connection sucks, never get yourself Vodacom 3G HSDPA. People complain of poor performance, especially timeouts to webpages. Speeds average at about 300-400kb/s, even when living 1km from the tower. A colleague of mine complained of speeds as low as 70kb/s!

And we thought iBurst had problems? :rolleyes:
 
Vodacom is worse than iBurst in the CBD

Hi there GBM

Tend to agree with you on that, in Loader St on the border to Green Point, it's terrible - it best to use GPRS and now that's frustrating!

But I must add a few months ago Vodacom was brilliant, actually got the advertised speed everywhere in town.

Think the issue is that there is such a huge demand for decent internet access in Cape Town, that the wireless providers struggle to maintain bandwidth throughput.

Just wish Telkom and NeoTel and Eskom would get their act together, so we could get some decent speed and international latency.

How is this for cheek from iBurst?

According to iBurst these “rogue wireless Internet Service Providers (ISPs) providing Internet access to consumers in contravention of the Telecommunications Act put extreme pressure on South Africa’s scarce radio spectrum.”

An additional concern is that these operators are selling inferior services which iBurst call “unreliable, saturated and high latency ADSL lines.”

Now this “unreliable, saturated and high latency ADSL lines” sounds a lot like my iBurst connection.

If they wouldn’t artificially inflate their prices and deliver a decent “broadband” service with some kind of client service and accounting department that has some basic calculus skills - then these “rogue wireless ISP’s” wouldn’t stand a chance and will completely disappear – It’s their own greed and ignorance and lack of service that has caused this.

I like iBurst, just providing some positive criticism, which is due!
 
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How can they talk about others "greed" when they are just as bad on that point as the rest.:sick:

Prices need to drop and drop soon from all these greedy sa companies.:rolleyes:
 
Now that MTN have lowered their prices, IBurst is the second most expensive provider, just after Vodacom. (Price per MB)

You would think this would stir them into action. But I predict we won't hear any comment on this from IBurst. It's all good and well that Ed replies to certain queries, but completely ignores the ones that don't have "pleasant" answers.

The reason people aren't complaining as much anymore is that they have probably given up and moved, or, like me, are just counting the days left on the contract.

Suggestion to the marketing folk at IBurst: Instead of thinking up ever more creative ways of conning people into signing up for your overpriced, sub-standard service, have a poll on your website to gauge the satisfaction levels of your current subscribers. And don't make the same half-baked attempt like your so-called support blog. Announce it in your news letter (the Feb Update is a shocker btw) and require the respondents to log in before responding. Also reward the users that respond with 500MB of data, to show that you are committed to hearing what they have to say and making changes for the better.

Alternatively, just keep practicing the Voodoo that is known as marketing and rope in 30000 more suckers to replace the other suckers that have learned the hard way.

I feel better now, thanks.
 
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