NEOTEL Pathetic Service

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hitech247

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Let me make this clear .....

Never .... Never .... and Never again ! - use Neotel for mission critical applications.


Since we have joined Neotel, we have had 4 (FOUR) different account managers.
Changes that we have asked for over a month ago ... has not happened.

Still, they want us to pay them around R30 000.00 a month for a 10MB Neointernet.

Now we have reached a critical stage where no one will be able to phone our helpdesk .... all because Neotel has been sleeping. Costing our company lots of money per day.
 
Sorry mate 30k is a lot for you to put up with ish
 
I think you will be better off going to Internet Solution. Neotel is busy falling apart - sad, but true...
 
I have never dealt with such useless people in my live before .. Their support sucks
 
Heavyd said:
I have never dealt with such useless people in my live before .. Their support sucks
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Who is you accounts manager? Send me a PM. Perhaps I can hook you up with my account manager.

My experience with Neotel cannot be more different from yours. Last 6 months we have been adding sites all over the country and I have only received excellent service from them.
 
My account manager is fine . Their Enterprise Service support in India is crap. Do you have another support contact ?
 
Heavyd said:
My account manager is fine . Their Enterprise Service support in India is crap. Do you have another support contact ?
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Sorry, I don't. My I just speak to my account manager and he sorts everything out and escelates and slaps whoever needs one. I really cannot complaint about their service.
 
On to our 5th account manager, the last 2 have been useless. Took them 2 weeks to respond to my emails asking why we are still being charged the old rate, only to be told that we need to sign a 24 month contract to get the new rates.
What a load of crock.

Any recommendations? Anyone have an account manager that isn't useless and willing to negotiate?
 
So, who of you had fun yesterday at Neotel hosting? What a joke, I have never seen a catastrophic outage like this before: UPS room is on fire and engineers cut power to the whole data-centre. Redundant power-feeds did not work and tons of equipment went down hard with SANs crashing, network elements resetting configuration and Neotel scrambling for hours to get service up.

No formal response yet (the last time we had this, it took 3 weeks to get a post-mortem report which contained no information we did not already know). The indian call-centre is useless as they have no idea what happens on-site. When escalation managers use the "it's holidays and we are under-staffed" excuse.

Although Neotel proudly claims to be a "tier3" data-centre, this is certainly not the case. By design, irrespective of the outage, a tier3 data centre would not have to be shut down (unless it is hit by a flood and racks are 2 metres under water).
 
MagicDude4Eva said:
So, who of you had fun yesterday at Neotel hosting? What a joke, I have never seen a catastrophic outage like this before: UPS room is on fire and engineers cut power to the whole data-centre. Redundant power-feeds did not work and tons of equipment went down hard with SANs crashing, network elements resetting configuration and Neotel scrambling for hours to get service up.

No formal response yet (the last time we had this, it took 3 weeks to get a post-mortem report which contained no information we did not already know). The indian call-centre is useless as they have no idea what happens on-site. When escalation managers use the "it's holidays and we are under-staffed" excuse.

Although Neotel proudly claims to be a "tier3" data-centre, this is certainly not the case. By design, irrespective of the outage, a tier3 data centre would not have to be shut down (unless it is hit by a flood and racks are 2 metres under water).
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WTF - How does this not make news?
 
Electron1 said:
WTF - How does this not make news?
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I am also surprised, outage was yesterday from 11:30am till almost 4pm. There was major chaos (our engineers struggled to get into the DC as there was a long queue) and from experience you will probably not find any feedback from Neotel about this (I described our experience in detail on my blog and had Neotel legal all over me, but since everything is factual, they can not do much).

What puzzles me the most is that in all outages we experienced, our monitoring has picked up issues before Neotel engineers where aware of it (we use NewRelic - it rocks) - but an outage of the magnitude below is horrible (we are moving back to IS as Neotel's 'enterprise hosting' services are certainly not enterprise class).

neotel-outage.jpg

The outage also affected our office fibre-links (also supposedly redundant) and I am not sure if the issues also affected consumer services (i.e. LTE).
 
Tried to Google for any info on outage. Nothing, Nada.
Where can i find your blog?
 
Electron1 said:
Tried to Google for any info on outage. Nothing, Nada.
Where can i find your blog?
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I was promised detailed feedback last night within 24 hours (so I would expect something to turn up by COB tomorrow). My comments regarding 11 months hosting two racks with Neotel are here (it is a long read, but factual read). In my long running history in IT, I have never come across staff as apathetic as them - and this goes all the way to exco level. The blog post was written after failing to mediate for more than 3 months with all levels of staff, but an impasse was reached when you get told over the phone to F-OFF by senior staff.
 
I hope your move goes well, Neotel don't seem to be very capable of providing top class service.
My experience with them is on a much smaller scale, just have one of my customers on their NeoBroadband fibre.
Their FUP is stupid, supposedly 300Gb on a 1Mb line, their T&C's state they can throttle when you reach 50% (so 150GB is where they start, although account manager insists it is 300GB where they start to throttle). If you do a speed boost, the FUP remains at 150GB.
They are also so inflexible, would not consider a temporary 3 month speed boost, insisting a full year contract is signed.
I can only hope that Vodacom will improve the management as their red tape is just as bad if not worse than Telkoms.
 
Electron1 said:
I can only hope that Vodacom will improve the management as their red tape is just as bad if not worse than Telkoms.
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Vodacom/Vodafone will sweep in and will fire pretty much all senior- and mid-level management. The staff on the ground (network engineers) are very capable but are held back by their managers and the "Tata-mothership" - hardly anything can be done without getting feedback from India - hence all the red tape. Having previously worked on the Vodacom Business system I think that Vodacom will have to throw out pretty much everything from Neotel (billing, NOC, incident management etc) to work efficiently and this might be a major issue.

Also on the back of Neotel's incorrect billing, many customers will be faced with the surprise of increased invoices (in some cases by 200-300%) due to incorrect metering of bandwidth and power for years (so in essence Neotel burned cash for years without noticing).
 
Although I do not hope it will happen, I predict another disaster occur in the DC on 8th January as Neotel just announced a 10 hour "emergency change" to replace the UPS which burned up 10 days ago and now requires by the sounds of it complete rewiring and having a large portion of the DC run on a generator - this seems to affect all services (hosting, bandwidth, firewall, metro)
 
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