The way I see it is that they bought millions of Rands worth of tech off the shelf to get past the fixed line problem. This causes several effects to ripple through the system. The first is that the software DOES HAVE certain features like shaping and, secondly, that the techies probably just switched the equipment on and rejoiced when the first data packets travelled through the air.
I bought a network drive a few months ago. I followed the quick installation guide and was up and running with RAID in less than an hour. BUT after some playing around I found that this was actually a fancy Linux machine with so many features that the RAID backup function was only a small part of its capabilities. This thing is so cool that you can even connect to torrent sites, queue, prioritize etc... all without a PC connected. But there are also features where you can limit your speed, access levels, block yourself out, time limit allocations etc... With these features switched on the network drive becomes a pain to use.
So my thoughts are that Neotel have the same type of equipment. Straight out of the box certain features are switched on that will block dataflow, shape the hell out of common ports, react violently with disconnections etc... They are just looking at the screens saying: "Eish!!". Under certain conditions the system is working OK-ish, but changing just a few factors screws it up for days or weeks.
I also have a small Cisco wireless router. It works great, well about 85%. If you just transfer small-ish files then you don't notice the dips in speed, but when you transfer large 1GB files the effect is so noticeable that the file tranfer actually times out. The router contains a small feature to spread data bandwidth on an equal basis between clients. So if more than 2 PCs use the connection (transferring large volumes of data) the router will block one client for sometimes more than a minute (causing crap) while the other client has full access. It does not spread the speed, it rather give large time slots with that feature enabled. Infact, with this feaure on my Cisco router looks very much like Neotel.
So I think techies view their Neotel hardware like some of the sci-fi movies view the technology of the ancients (think Stargate). It works but they don't really don't know why. Somewhere deep inside the settings is something that bottlenecks everything to "save" the system.
Here is my summary:
1) Neotel has FUP but not shaping: i.e. "We don't understand the system"
2) They are running hardware/software out of the box: i.e. "We don't understand the system"
3) "We are writing a usage counter application and it is going to take 2 years": i.e. "We don't understand the system"
4) We are getting constant disconnections almost as if some unknown software feature is causing it: i.e. "We don't understand the system".
5) Probably many more items I don't even want to visualize (including that they don't really have enough bandwidth available)
The usage monitor is an interesting thing for me to think about.
(1) They actually have some method to count data else they wouldn't have been able to bill me. Last month they were 200MB off and nearly spot on the previous month.
(2) If they can mesaure then there is some of feature that they use to get this data. my guess is it came with the off-the-shelf system. Probably the system generates an Excel spreadsheet, hence te reason (1) why you have to call and (2) why the data is so old. I can also picture how they bill thousands of clients running a ruler over a Excel printed paper speadsheet and typing it over to the financial system.
(3) Now the possible options to get the realtime usage can be even more scary.
(3a) The best option is to run an app on the server (or remotely querying) where the actual counting is done, either counting itself or hacking into the database and picking data as the requests are coming in. Simple SQL would be my choice. You can then run the entire reporting from a second server as not to load the main server too much.
(3b) Here is my "My name is Earl" version. Everyday (or every few hours or so) someone presses the report button on the big machine. It makes a nice and very BIG file in Excel format. They then take this file via floppy or USB flashdrive to another PC where they then import the data into the new super duper usage monitor where they strip the data from the spreadsheet, import it to the new database and where it is then made available over some HTML server app. This means that the data will be old by the time you get it.
If (3B) is currently happening it will prove to me that they have (1) no access to the bought in hardware/software and (2) that they have no idea what the hell is going on in the system. If they implemented (3A) they would have been done 2 years ago.
BTW, how does the system become congested over a weekend???
So wonderful hardware and software, maintained by children = failure.....
