Sinbad
Honorary Master
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Surely once you have FTTH you can cancel your voice and adsl lines altogether?
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Question of the Day: If you were buying a TV today, which brand would you choose?
Official Crystal Web ADSL performance feedback thread Part 2...
- Thread starter Crystal Web
- Start date
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Surely once you have FTTH you can cancel your voice and adsl lines altogether?
Yes, but to get it installed is another story I'm sure Telkom would like to tell
The reality is that South Africans - ALL South Africans (with poorer South Africans being the most severely impaired)- are being ripped off when it comes to communication. Service levels are lower than they should be and prices are exorbitant (relative to service levels), but the high costs to communicate are structural and filter down the industry. Trying to improve the quality and levels of access to the Internet has been a passion of mine for quite some time and long before deciding to go the setup an ISP route is something both DJ and I put a lot of personal energy into - forming Crystal Web is one way of doing so.
For R799 we would like to be able to offer a customer a lot more - 20 rather than 10 Mbps uncapped (with an allocation at which shaping applies) with some mobile data and so on. However the input costs are too high (with the well documented problems in the labour market and the high costs related to last mile access) and so it is only through a lot of innovation that we can improve things - sadly if there was more innovation higher up the food chain things would improve a lot more quickly - and there is an exercise of keeping people excited about alive possibilities.
A further problem is that high costs of communication are compounded with the fact that home consumers are pushed towards spending a disproportionate amount of their "entertainment" component of disposable income on pay television services and a disproportionate amount on voice calls and short message services such that all and all it is the Internet (which unlike pay TV and voice and SMSes continues to innovate, expand and empower people) - ultimately SA consumers are paying too much money to large companies with a vested interest against empowering consumers.
What we as a company try to do is to act as a positive force and use the purchasing power which we have to improve quality - rather than lower pricing, because the price war approach which ISPs embarked on has caused a quality problem - so there needs to be a tick-tock cycle to borrow from Intel. And Crystal Web (and DJ and I outside of "office hours") puts considerable energy into getting things right - even if it would be against our business plan, because we will then spend hours rewriting the business plan. We understand that there is a continuous and complex balancing exercise.
The trouble is that if you try to please everyone somebody isn't going to like it (Murphey's 5th law [I think its the 5th]) and what I can disclose - because it doesn't breach confidentiality - is that somebody doesn't like what we are doing for our customers. Sadly while we have had some wonderful sentiment from some awesome competitor colleagues in the industry, not everybody is happy and some fairly unpleasant things are happening in the background as promised things aren't delivered - or are delivered later than promised - to us. There have also been some fairly good and significant changes to the back ends of the ADSL network which do cause some odd problems which we work to resolve but need to isolate customers as well.
This is why we invite criticism and query and really do want hard data to work with and we actually appreciate posts like this because it is often possible ammunition in the fight for improving things. It is good to have customers say - "while we understand the fact of non-disclosure, we want our ISPs to be able to tell us more" because it is only through a culture being embraced by "demand" that suppliers will move in that direction.
I think the only time DJ or I become offended is when our integrity as people is spuriously attacked - I am many bad things and don't take myself particularly seriously but that core of humanity that is integrity is something I do take seriously. At heart we endeavor to treat our customers with uttermost respect - which is why the term "abuser" is one that offends us when used spuriously. We have a particular love for MyBB members (which is why MyBB members who make this place unpleasant for other people - company reps aren't people
- annoy me)
For R799 we would like to be able to offer a customer a lot more - 20 rather than 10 Mbps uncapped (with an allocation at which shaping applies) with some mobile data and so on. However the input costs are too high (with the well documented problems in the labour market and the high costs related to last mile access) and so it is only through a lot of innovation that we can improve things - sadly if there was more innovation higher up the food chain things would improve a lot more quickly - and there is an exercise of keeping people excited about alive possibilities.
A further problem is that high costs of communication are compounded with the fact that home consumers are pushed towards spending a disproportionate amount of their "entertainment" component of disposable income on pay television services and a disproportionate amount on voice calls and short message services such that all and all it is the Internet (which unlike pay TV and voice and SMSes continues to innovate, expand and empower people) - ultimately SA consumers are paying too much money to large companies with a vested interest against empowering consumers.
What we as a company try to do is to act as a positive force and use the purchasing power which we have to improve quality - rather than lower pricing, because the price war approach which ISPs embarked on has caused a quality problem - so there needs to be a tick-tock cycle to borrow from Intel. And Crystal Web (and DJ and I outside of "office hours") puts considerable energy into getting things right - even if it would be against our business plan, because we will then spend hours rewriting the business plan. We understand that there is a continuous and complex balancing exercise.
The trouble is that if you try to please everyone somebody isn't going to like it (Murphey's 5th law [I think its the 5th]) and what I can disclose - because it doesn't breach confidentiality - is that somebody doesn't like what we are doing for our customers. Sadly while we have had some wonderful sentiment from some awesome competitor colleagues in the industry, not everybody is happy and some fairly unpleasant things are happening in the background as promised things aren't delivered - or are delivered later than promised - to us. There have also been some fairly good and significant changes to the back ends of the ADSL network which do cause some odd problems which we work to resolve but need to isolate customers as well.
This is why we invite criticism and query and really do want hard data to work with and we actually appreciate posts like this because it is often possible ammunition in the fight for improving things. It is good to have customers say - "while we understand the fact of non-disclosure, we want our ISPs to be able to tell us more" because it is only through a culture being embraced by "demand" that suppliers will move in that direction.
I think the only time DJ or I become offended is when our integrity as people is spuriously attacked - I am many bad things and don't take myself particularly seriously but that core of humanity that is integrity is something I do take seriously. At heart we endeavor to treat our customers with uttermost respect - which is why the term "abuser" is one that offends us when used spuriously. We have a particular love for MyBB members (which is why MyBB members who make this place unpleasant for other people - company reps aren't people
- annoy me)
Electric
Honorary Master
Ditch the uncapped imo.
It's just a capped product anyway.
It's just a capped product anyway.
prices are exorbitant (relative to service levels and performance) FTFY
It's actually Murphy's 4th law. Murphy's 5th law is that someone will always correct you if you quote the 4th law wrong.
I used to run a 10mb connection and was able to get HD - so you are correct
When is the end of the week? Friday or Sunday?
howardb
Expert Member
Terrible, terrible, terrible!
Max 20kb on a 4MB line - only trying to d/l a 30MB PDF at the moment and it keeps timing out. Web pages are slow, as is e-mail.
A few days to go then pulling the plug on CW.
We usually pull about 500-700GB a month on the business unshaped packages, however November has only allowed us about 340GB so far on CW (per the portal info) - the boss is fuming and not at all impressed, especially since the pricing is higher than we were paying previously with another ISP.
On signing up, the expectation (based on the initial hype, info, etc.) was "unshaped" and "unthrottled" on business uncapped, being able to "experience uncapped internet bliss" - I understand there have been issues this month but honestly cannot continue like this at R700pm - we honestly got better speeds from a non-business account after hours, at R249pm!
We are also limited to a 4MB as the exchange in our area cannot handle higher speeds at this stage... so really no other options to increase the speeds.
We have received your invoice/billing for December and can advise that we will not be paying it. We will also discontinue
using the account from 30 Nov... now just have to find another option before Monday.
If and when the issues are sorted out, we *may* consider CW again. Will certainly keep an eye on this thread for future possibility.
PS: on a positive note, the interactions with your live chat support were excellent - no issues there.
Max 20kb on a 4MB line - only trying to d/l a 30MB PDF at the moment and it keeps timing out. Web pages are slow, as is e-mail.
A few days to go then pulling the plug on CW.
We usually pull about 500-700GB a month on the business unshaped packages, however November has only allowed us about 340GB so far on CW (per the portal info) - the boss is fuming and not at all impressed, especially since the pricing is higher than we were paying previously with another ISP.
On signing up, the expectation (based on the initial hype, info, etc.) was "unshaped" and "unthrottled" on business uncapped, being able to "experience uncapped internet bliss" - I understand there have been issues this month but honestly cannot continue like this at R700pm - we honestly got better speeds from a non-business account after hours, at R249pm!
We are also limited to a 4MB as the exchange in our area cannot handle higher speeds at this stage... so really no other options to increase the speeds.
We have received your invoice/billing for December and can advise that we will not be paying it. We will also discontinue
using the account from 30 Nov... now just have to find another option before Monday.
If and when the issues are sorted out, we *may* consider CW again. Will certainly keep an eye on this thread for future possibility.
PS: on a positive note, the interactions with your live chat support were excellent - no issues there.
Basjohn
Expert Member
You seriously expect 500-700GB a month? Seriously? You need to be looking at much higher tier packages than even CWs, 2k+ business accounts for that sort of expectation.
howardb
Expert Member
Well, we average 500GB per month, sometime less, sometimes more, peaking at just under 700GB during the busiest month we ever had. Not sure what you mean by higher tier packages - all the ISP's we've used offered business packages and that's what we signed up for.
We tried a couple of non-business ADSL uncapped packages when our data transfers fell mostly into the SA after hours times, and this worked well for us at the time. Once we started requiring more bandwidth during the SA working hours, we switched to business ASDL uncapped.
When you say "seriously", well yes, the per GB prices have dropped substantially over the years, and R1 per GB is already available (I think it was ITNT?), so I can't really see what the issue is with that - 500GB per month is then around R500, so R700 is reasonable imo
A bit more context, the boss was fuming as we will probably not be able to transfer what we need to before month end and meet some deadlines, not because we didn't pull enough data. This month, if I quickly tally up the allocated files, we are looking at just over 400GB (excluding any last minute jobs), so here's hoping there are no further issues on the networks the next few days.
As for expectations, maybe I do expect too much then... if individuals are reported as pulling well in excess of 1TB per month on sub-R500 non business accounts, then I expect the business account (always charged at a higher premium) to accommodate at least half of that
I don't think that's unreasonable at all - if it is unreasonable, then I apologise and will fall in line with all the other SA consumers who let themselves get ripped by SA company mentality...
Hectic
Executive Member
I've pushed my account very hard since Monday, up to yesterday.
By hard I mean basically 24/7 downloads.
It was mostly limited to 800kbps (100kB/s) for most of the time and then released from 00:00 - 07:00. and again 13:00 - 14:00.
Every time I released the throttling it went full speed.
This morning I checked for packet loss and for the first time time since I joined CW, no packet loss at all.
I actually checked if my other capped accounts did not kick in.
This was the only constant issue I had with CW and now it is gone.
No packet loss on local or international.
I'm not sure who to thank, as CW basically blamed this on Telkom infrastructure, but whoever fixed this, CW or Telkom, thank you.
I've never streamed, but joined the free Hulu Plus trial for a month and I streamed at 420kB/s on my 4Mbps line without any issue. As I understand it, that is in HD?
If my account constantly preforms like this, I have found my ISP home.
I really feel for the guys that are not experiencing the bliss. I have been at two ISPs where I had the same problems.
I hope everyone will share my CW experience sooner than later.
It really is awesome atm.
Thank you for the effort CW.
Edit:
testmydotnet result.
Usually it gave me an average of 1.3Mbps download, now I'm getting full line speed.
By hard I mean basically 24/7 downloads.
It was mostly limited to 800kbps (100kB/s) for most of the time and then released from 00:00 - 07:00. and again 13:00 - 14:00.
Every time I released the throttling it went full speed.
This morning I checked for packet loss and for the first time time since I joined CW, no packet loss at all.
I actually checked if my other capped accounts did not kick in.
This was the only constant issue I had with CW and now it is gone.
No packet loss on local or international.
I'm not sure who to thank, as CW basically blamed this on Telkom infrastructure, but whoever fixed this, CW or Telkom, thank you.
I've never streamed, but joined the free Hulu Plus trial for a month and I streamed at 420kB/s on my 4Mbps line without any issue. As I understand it, that is in HD?
If my account constantly preforms like this, I have found my ISP home.
I really feel for the guys that are not experiencing the bliss. I have been at two ISPs where I had the same problems.
I hope everyone will share my CW experience sooner than later.
It really is awesome atm.
Thank you for the effort CW.
Edit:
testmydotnet result.
Usually it gave me an average of 1.3Mbps download, now I'm getting full line speed.
Last edited:
OMB
Mountain Man
yep, things are looking way better than the past few weeks
Haha, I read that as "weakened".
ItherNiT
Expert Member
Loving my speeds at the moment!
My month has been pretty good, except for the warframe updates, that used http dl.
Consider me a happy chappy
My month has been pretty good, except for the warframe updates, that used http dl.
Consider me a happy chappy
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