Nobody responding to emails - same old slow ADSL problem every time. please help

N

Nugg

Member
Joined
Dec 5, 2017
Messages
11
Reaction score
0
I have a problem that repeats every 3-5 months

My ADSL Speed slows down and it takes me a month of fighting and screaming to get it fixed, every time.

Only once a senior technical person from both Afrihost and Telkom are involved, it gets resolved.

I firmly believe that there is a rotation system at Telkom. Someone complains enough, they swap a working line with the irate customer's line at the switch. Once the senior telkom technician is involved, it is fixed very quickly. As in less than 2 hours.

Currently Afrihost is going through the "Ïgnore the Customer's emails" phase again.


Detail
Afrihost Ticket: GYP-889-34613
Telkom Ticket: 14ARK221117
Capped Unshaped 2Mbps ADSL line, managed by Afrihost

Speed test shows 1.96 Mbps when it's normal and drops down to 1.3Mbps or lower during the period after the problem starts
Problem occurs every 3-5 months and continues at roughly the same speed for the entire period until it's fixed (normally 1 month).
For the 3-5 month period when it's working, it runs smoothly and consistently at 1.96Mbps. Thus my theory above.
It last happened in early April and was resolved in early May. Hopefully you record the root-causes?

Troubleshooting
No other downloads are running on the PC nor via Wifi connections
Afrihost reset the line and I restarted the router
No changes were made on the router before the problem started
The fact that the speed is smooth and consistent for the 3-5 months when it does work, rules out most possibilities.
It is not the distance from the exchange to my house
Edit 6 Dec 06:30: A telkom technician called after the first day the telkom ticket was logged, and I explained the situation to him. he said he would call back but never did. I tried calling him multiple times after that but his phone was always off

Please don't get that angry-sounding woman to phone me again to try and explain that it isn't the same problem every time... She shouldn't be phoning any customers... I don't do ex-wife cosplay :D

Any suggestions are welcome, but I've probably tried them all already.

P.S.
Also please implement some kind of automated system to highlight when a customer has sent more than 2 email replies, but no replies are sent from afrihost. That's a good indication that there's a p'ed off customer somewhere.


Edit 6 Dec 19:50
So Afrihost assumed it's the distance issue, even though I told them it isn't. And they closed the ticket. Really earning your salary there guys..wooohoo way to go!
I'm not sure who currently ranks lower... the person who stole my phone yesterday, or Afrihost...

Edit 10 Dec: 08:12 - ticket age 19 days
This is the previous Afrihost and telkom reference numbers where they managed to fix it. Please use this to find the root-cause, since it is exactly the same symptom.
Fault reference: 40ARK030517
Afrihost reference: AH20170503-358293
Time of update: 2017-05-03 19:10:42

Called Telkom myself and escalated the issue and provided the necessary info
Escalation ref number 1039849
 
Last edited:
I have and issue with there sister company and i realise having them manage my line is useless because twice in one month i had an issue with not getting a connection! Line syncs up but i can't connect to any isp . Log issue with them they run through the check filter reset router check guest connection bla bla bla . So ya I log issue with them they then log with telkom 48 hours with out net. I think axxess and afrihost have lost the plot customer support sucks its slow and they don't like being told how to do there job when they could just listen.
 
I have an email ticket open from yesterday morning but no one is replying. Sent a pm to Afrifella who told me my LTE-A has data left so don't know why it's not working and that is it no reply after that.
 
Lower your expectations. This is Afrihost. Tickets don't get resolved in a day or two
 
Nugg said:
I have a problem that repeats every 3-5 months

My ADSL Speed slows down and it takes me a month of fighting and screaming to get it fixed, every time.

Only once a senior technical person from both Afrihost and Telkom are involved, it gets resolved.

I firmly believe that there is a rotation system at Telkom. Someone complains enough, they swap a working line with the irate customer's line at the switch. Once the senior telkom technician is involved, it is fixed very quickly. As in less than 2 hours.

Currently Afrihost is going through the "Ïgnore the Customer's emails" phase again.


Detail
Afrihost Ticket: GYP-889-34613
Telkom Ticket: 14ARK221117
Capped Unshaped 2Mbps ADSL line, managed by Afrihost

Speed test shows 1.96 Mbps when it's normal and drops down to 1.3Mbps or lower during the period after the problem starts
Problem occurs every 3-5 months and continues at roughly the same speed for the entire period until it's fixed (normally 1 month).
For the 3-5 month period when it's working, it runs smoothly and consistently at 1.96Mbps. Thus my theory above.
It last happened in early April and was resolved in early May. Hopefully you record the root-causes?

Troubleshooting
No other downloads are running on the PC nor via Wifi connections
Afrihost reset the line and I restarted the router
No changes were made on the router before the problem started
The fact that the speed is smooth and consistent for the 3-5 months when it does work, rules out most possibilities.
It is not the distance from the exchange to my house
Edit 6 Dec 06:30: A telkom technician called after the first day the telkom ticket was logged, and I explained the situation to him. he said he would call back but never did. I tried calling him multiple times after that but his phone was always off

Please don't get that angry-sounding woman to phone me again to try and explain that it isn't the same problem every time... She shouldn't be phoning any customers... I don't do ex-wife cosplay :D

Any suggestions are welcome, but I've probably tried them all already.

P.S.
Also please implement some kind of automated system to highlight when a customer has sent more than 2 email replies, but no replies are sent from afrihost. That's a good indication that there's a p'ed off customer somewhere.
Click to expand...

Sorry to hear about your poor experience here, Nugg. :( It's strange to me that this issue only rears it's head every few months. I can think of no exact reason that could cause this. As such, I've passed your ticket onto our Senior Support Team who seems to have worked with you before. I'm sure they'll be able to get to the bottom of this once and for all. :)
 
cavedog said:
I have an email ticket open from yesterday morning but no one is replying. Sent a pm to Afrifella who told me my LTE-A has data left so don't know why it's not working and that is it no reply after that.
Click to expand...

Sorry about the delay here. We definitely do our best to get to every query as quickly as possible. I've replied to your PM.
 
Obviously you didn't refer it to the right people. They assumed that it's the distance issue and promptly closed the ticket.
I have no words... except four letter words

It's simple..ok? get the same people from Afrihost and telkom to do what they did last time. Give them all the information I gave you, because they are jumping to conclusions and making assumptions

After the May issue, it worked consistently at the same speed for 6 Months
It's NOT a cable issue
It's NOT the distance from the exchange
 
Nugg said:
Obviously you didn't refer it to the right people. They assumed that it's the distance issue and promptly closed the ticket.
I have no words... except four letter words

It's simple..ok? get the same people from Afrihost and telkom to do what they did last time. Give them all the information I gave you, because they are jumping to conclusions and making assumptions

After the May issue, it worked consistently at the same speed for 6 Months
It's NOT a cable issue
It's NOT the distance from the exchange
Click to expand...

Out of a bit of a morbid interest, do you mind posting the line stats as reported by the router you have connected to the line.
 
Hi Geoff,

Thanks for the help. I'm not sure how to check the line stats on the router. The only data available is below.
The only other way seems to be via SNMP, but can't get that to give results with the MIBs I dloaded
router: TP Link TD-W8970

br_8_35_1
Test xDSL Synchronization Pass
ATM OAM Segment Ping Pass
ATM OAM end to end Ping Pass
pppoe_8_35_3_d
Test xDSL Synchronization Pass
ATM OAM Segment Ping Pass
ATM OAM end to end Ping Pass
Test PPP Server connection Pass
Test authentication with ISP Pass
Test assigned IP address Pass
Ping default gateway Fail
pppoe_8_35_4_d
Test xDSL Synchronization Pass
ATM OAM Segment Ping Pass
ATM OAM end to end Ping Pass
Test PPP Server connection Fail
pppoe_8_35_2_d
Test xDSL Synchronization Pass
ATM OAM Segment Ping Pass
ATM OAM end to end Ping Pass
Test PPP Server connection Fail
pppoe_8_35_0_d
Test xDSL Synchronization Pass
ATM OAM Segment Ping Pass
ATM OAM end to end Ping Pass
Test PPP Server connection Fail
pppoe_8_35_7_d
Test xDSL Synchronization Pass
ATM OAM Segment Ping Pass
ATM OAM end to end Ping Pass
Test PPP Server connection Fail
Diagnostics Complete
 
man... I just give up with Afrihost. They rely so much on their standard responses and standard procedures, yet they don't know how to read my emails. They see a keyword, jump to conclusions, send a standard response. Ask Telkom to do a standard response action to buy time until the next engineer has to take over....rinse and repeat. I've seen the pattern over the past 4 occurrences of this issue. They should just not do the ADSL line support, it's destroying their brand.

I know I'm NOT going with Afrihost when the Fibre in my area is ready.
 
What happened to the extra support staff that was promised?
 
Nugg said:
man... I just give up with Afrihost. They rely so much on their standard responses and standard procedures, yet they don't know how to read my emails. They see a keyword, jump to conclusions, send a standard response. Ask Telkom to do a standard response action to buy time until the next engineer has to take over....rinse and repeat. I've seen the pattern over the past 4 occurrences of this issue. They should just not do the ADSL line support, it's destroying their brand.

I know I'm NOT going with Afrihost when the Fibre in my area is ready.
Click to expand...

It sounds like there is definitely a difficult set of circumstances around your line - and please also bear in mind that the feedback we get is often verbatim as we get it from Openserve. If their team feels the distance makes the line inefficient, they may be unwilling to commit additional resources to investigate further if there is a small probability of success.
 
dj2381 said:
What happened to the extra support staff that was promised?
Click to expand...

we've had about 70 new staff join us in the last 3 months. However, we're still seeing rising numbers of queries daily, especially around fibre and Rain. We're still aggressively recruiting and training, and we expect to have another big batch of people starting shortly.
 
So it was eventually "fixed" but only because I followed up with Telkom and all it took was one call from me...

For interest's sake, the Telkom engineer told me that it's most likely due to an automated program that runs and checks all the dsl lines' SNR and automatically downgrades your speed if it finds that it's bad. Kinda like an Evil Santa. his checked out, after they removed me from the list my speed picked up to the usual excellence

Anyway, so what happened each time my line was working fine, was that they'd removed me from the Bad Santa program's list, but because Santa sees all, the Bad Santa invariably found me again at some point in time, and punished me.

Why Telkom thinks they are entitled to downgrade my speed and still charge me the same price and not even notify me, is probably due to the usual idiocracy

One question for those more technically inclined than me, If my line is running fine with a bad SNR and I don't notice any fluctuation in DL speed or internet experience, is it possible that my bad SNR is affecting anyone else?
 
Nugg said:
So it was eventually "fixed" but only because I followed up with Telkom and all it took was one call from me...

For interest's sake, the Telkom engineer told me that it's most likely due to an automated program that runs and checks all the dsl lines' SNR and automatically downgrades your speed if it finds that it's bad. Kinda like an Evil Santa. his checked out, after they removed me from the list my speed picked up to the usual excellence

Anyway, so what happened each time my line was working fine, was that they'd removed me from the Bad Santa program's list, but because Santa sees all, the Bad Santa invariably found me again at some point in time, and punished me.

Why Telkom thinks they are entitled to downgrade my speed and still charge me the same price and not even notify me, is probably due to the usual idiocracy

One question for those more technically inclined than me, If my line is running fine with a bad SNR and I don't notice any fluctuation in DL speed or internet experience, is it possible that my bad SNR is affecting anyone else?
Click to expand...

I know that this really sucks! :( This "Bad Santa" is an automated system called, ASSIA. Its primary purpose is to make sure your connection does not drop when your attenuation and SNR is not within the desired pentameters to give you a good connection. The general fix for when your lines SNR and attenuation stats are not looking good is to drop your line sync and this would reduce the amount of interference/noise on your line and would stop your connection from dropping.

The whole idea behind, ASSIA is make sure that you still have a solid connection, even though it is a little slow. They see this as being better than not having any connection at all.

To answer you question: No, your noise on your line would not effect anybody else other than your yourself.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X