Official Crystal Web ADSL performance feedback thread Part 2...

Are you satisfied with your Crystal Web account?

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Spizz said:
I have to say, as a new customer, this thread is actually quite counter productive to the presented reputation as CW being number one for support.

It's all a bit North Korea imo, and although I can understand to a point that you want to handle support through the appropriate channels, we have become used to receiving support from a customer rep aimed at serving our rather large and influential community.

Your keeping it in house and adopting a 'don't hang your dirty washing out in public' attitude is rebounding on me as a customer and I don't like how you are treating the community. Sorry, but there it is. Why can't you appoint a rep to deal with myBB and social media? Afrihost and Mweb have been doing it very well for years, why can't you? If you provide the service you say you do, then where's the problem?
Click to expand...

:erm: :confused:

We have a rep on myBB - and a second rep is running as well
and I post on MyBB extensively

In fact the only coverage problem lately has been MyBB articles not seeking our comment. We probably should look at paying for press releases but need to adopt that as part of a broader media strategy to grow into.

Things are a little swamped at the moment on a few fronts but there has never ever been a "don't hang your dirty washing out in the public" attitude and in fact if you look at our Customer Relationship Agreement unlike other providers whose contracts prohibit customers (I kid you not) from doing so ours gives customers the right

There is a lot of value in dealing with most things out of the public eye - particularly for the customer - and when dealing with individual issues it is impossible to do so in public because customer information is sensitive.

Right now the following problems exists:
[1] There was a major failure on the provisioning system on the 31st of May / 1st of June which was repaired by 10h15 on the 1st of June. This lead to approximately 60 accounts being unable to authenticate. Save for half a dozen customers I haven't been able to confirm this is resolved.
[2] A considerable number of people gave signup requests between the 29th May and 1st June which resulted in the provisioning team being inundated with work and a serious backlog problem arose on the morning of the 1st June.
[3] Mostly as a result of [1] and [2] the support queries flowing in on the morning of the 1st June caused a massive problem on the support desk. The desk is now functioning but a backlog of certain duplicated tickets is still being worked through. Also a few dropped tickets arise and need to be attended to (usually be me).
[4] In order to prepare the business to upscale - expansion is very much afoot - several changes to the ticketing and chat systems were necessary. The billing portal kicked in at the end of last month.
[5] Some of the changes on the backend allow us to roll out customized products. This has had to be put on hold.
[6] There was an increase in capacity in Johannesburg and Durban last week which had a 1 day teething problem. Johannesburg is very healthy on IPC using the last 48 hours data.
[7] There is a need to increase the capacity in Cape Town. Unfortunately there is a constraint on this and an installation is needed to accomplish that. The constraint affects several providers and is a general problem in the ecosystem that is the Internet in South Africa. We received good news on that front and the two week eta announced last week is still on track.

We are having to monitor the situation with regard to Cape Town. There are complications arising from the fact that the Cape Town capacity constraint is both on the pipe we control for our customized products and on the other pipes certain of our basic and home capped products work through. Naturally there are commercially sensitive and non-disclosable aspects to this. The other problems are backlog related and a little bit of a consequence of a spike in demand for service (as opposed to demand for network capacity).
 
to follow up:
The Steph rep account has not been actioned upon by MyBB
I can create an account named "Gladys - Paul's Rep Account" but I doubt it will be actioned upon timeously and it is taxing to maintain the two accounts
 
Paul Hjul said:
:erm: :confused:

We have a rep on myBB - and a second rep is running as well
and I post on MyBB extensively
Click to expand...

I know you are active. But perhaps we both need to ask ourselves why I have this perception of your support network and the reps on myBB particularly? I'm only reading the thread every day remember, and there seem like there's more than a few unhappy customers and accusations levelled at support.

Paul Hjul said:
In fact the only coverage problem lately has been MyBB articles not seeking our comment. We probably should look at paying for press releases but need to adopt that as part of a broader media strategy to grow into.

Things are a little swamped at the moment on a few fronts but there has never ever been a "don't hang your dirty washing out in the public" attitude and in fact if you look at our Customer Relationship Agreement unlike other providers whose contracts prohibit customers (I kid you not) from doing so ours gives customers the right

There is a lot of value in dealing with most things out of the public eye - particularly for the customer - and when dealing with individual issues it is impossible to do so in public because customer information is sensitive.
Click to expand...

Of course, yet the other ISPs manage to find a level where the support is right on the button even though the network might not be. For example, I actually felt bad asking Mweb Guy how I go about cancelling my account.

Paul Hjul said:
Right now the following problems exists:
[1] There was a major failure on the provisioning system on the 31st of May / 1st of June which was repaired by 10h15 on the 1st of June. This lead to approximately 60 accounts being unable to authenticate. Save for half a dozen customers I haven't been able to confirm this is resolved.
[2] A considerable number of people gave signup requests between the 29th May and 1st June which resulted in the provisioning team being inundated with work and a serious backlog problem arose on the morning of the 1st June.
[3] Mostly as a result of [1] and [2] the support queries flowing in on the morning of the 1st June caused a massive problem on the support desk. The desk is now functioning but a backlog of certain duplicated tickets is still being worked through. Also a few dropped tickets arise and need to be attended to (usually be me).
[4] In order to prepare the business to upscale - expansion is very much afoot - several changes to the ticketing and chat systems were necessary. The billing portal kicked in at the end of last month.
[5] Some of the changes on the backend allow us to roll out customized products. This has had to be put on hold.
[6] There was an increase in capacity in Johannesburg and Durban last week which had a 1 day teething problem. Johannesburg is very healthy on IPC using the last 48 hours data.
[7] There is a need to increase the capacity in Cape Town. Unfortunately there is a constraint on this and an installation is needed to accomplish that. The constraint affects several providers and is a general problem in the ecosystem that is the Internet in South Africa. We received good news on that front and the two week eta announced last week is still on track.

We are having to monitor the situation with regard to Cape Town. There are complications arising from the fact that the Cape Town capacity constraint is both on the pipe we control for our customized products and on the other pipes certain of our basic and home capped products work through. Naturally there are commercially sensitive and non-disclosable aspects to this. The other problems are backlog related and a little bit of a consequence of a spike in demand for service (as opposed to demand for network capacity).
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Thanks for the info. I'm not trying to be a d!ck, I'm a customer and really want CW to work like it says it does on the tin.
 
The major problem is that people got used to Shaun being here at beck and call for a long time.

While nice, he does have a business to run and having to answer dof questions from certain users on policies on an endless loop seems to have taken it's toll (albeit temporarily I hope).

I do see the need for privacy, but it is nice to get a comment every now and then on the general status of things when numerous people complain about the same issue. Paul just did that above and it gives everyone the heads up about the status quo. This is why I appreciate this ISP.

The provisioning thing is the biggest slip up I have seen them make and unfortunately does not make a good first impression. Sorting it out in a timely manner also did not seem to happen for some clients - a double whammy bad impression.

What I can reinforce for the new clients is that since I have signed up with CW right from the beginning is this: They have been trustworthy from the get go and I have never been happier on an ISP. I am a gamer and somewhat heavy downloader. My internet has never been better :) Some advice, buy the right account for your projected usage and you should not have issues - don't buy the granny account and expect to download the internet.
 
I don't want to start a thread war, but here's my gripe at present and clearly related to the IPC issues in the Cape.

I'm trying to stream Netflix in HD, then tried some offsidestreams on Kodi, then some genesis SD streaming and some good old http downloads, a mac update on OSX, and a windows update on my Surface Pro 3.

Monitoring the traffic, I can see it spikes to around 4mbps, then all traffic above is throttled down to a max of 2.6mbps or around 240KB/s.

On a 20meg VDSL line.

That is simply crazy.

And it wasn't like this last month or the month before. Things were peachy.

I pray you guys sort this out. Because in a nutshell, it's a rate limited 20mbps capped account.

I could easily achieve 12-15mbps to overseas servers on the protocols mentioned before this trouble started.
 
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Is there an app to check the usage on an account? I am on home premium uncapped but just curious to see what my usage is
 
Hazelbag said:
Is there an app to check the usage on an account? I am on home premium uncapped but just curious to see what my usage is
Click to expand...

They send you a daily email with your usage at the moment.

I am sure that this will be a feature of the web portal when fully up and running :)
 
Our account is being shaped like mad, can't even load 144p YouTube vids.. The internet becomes unusable from about 4PM-10PM. This has been happening for about a week and a half now.

CW has been amazing for 2 months now, but just like Afrihost and the others, the third month comes around and all the rubbish starts happening.
 
Dipro said:
They send you a daily email with your usage at the moment.

I am sure that this will be a feature of the web portal when fully up and running :)
Click to expand...
Yeah I get the stats daily via email, even use to get them with the test account, but was just wondering if the have something similar to the AH app which is pretty good to check usage on.
Surv0 said:
Umm.. the WA portal works with any IS login it seems

https://dsl.webafrica.co.za/usage.html
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Dropping internet connection now during Battlefield 4 as well.

And you as CW can confirm that this is a Telkom issue? Because this is ****ing ridiculous.
 
thewusman said:
I don't want to start a thread war, but here's my gripe at present and clearly related to the IPC issues in the Cape.

I'm trying to stream Netflix in HD, then tried some offsidestreams on Kodi, then some genesis SD streaming and some good old http downloads, a mac update on OSX, and a windows update on my Surface Pro 3.

Monitoring the traffic, I can see it spikes to around 4mbps, then all traffic above is throttled down to a max of 2.6mbps or around 240KB/s.

On a 20meg VDSL line.

That is simply crazy.

And it wasn't like this last month or the month before. Things were peachy.

I pray you guys sort this out. Because in a nutshell, it's a rate limited 20mbps capped account.

I could easily achieve 12-15mbps to overseas servers on the protocols mentioned before this trouble started.
Click to expand...

I agree with this. 360p buffering for me on a 20Mbps VDSL line. Pretty pathetic
 
I have reached the end of my relationship with WebAfrica and will be moving to a CW Home Capped account. Mostly because of streaming being unable to saturate the link. (e.g. Youtube video cannot stream smoothly at 720p on 10mbps account) I've been read in one of the other threads that the profile used for CW Home Capped is identical to WebAfrica Home Capped accounts. Does this mean I will be having the same kind of problems with CW as with WebAfrica?
 
recre8 said:
I have reached the end of my relationship with WebAfrica and will be moving to a CW Home Capped account. Mostly because of streaming being unable to saturate the link. (e.g. Youtube video cannot stream smoothly at 720p on 10mbps account) I've been read in one of the other threads that the profile used for CW Home Capped is identical to WebAfrica Home Capped accounts. Does this mean I will be having the same kind of problems with CW as with WebAfrica?
Click to expand...

Chances are your experience will be more or less the same as CW uses the same profiles that WA does for their Home Capped.
 
Probably just an IS standard profile or CW is bulk reselling WA. Either way the experience will be the same. Although when I was using it capped was decent for streaming.
 
slvr said:
CW Home Capped = WA Home capped... Literally.
Click to expand...

I think the CW profile is actually more restrictive when it comes to torrents and downloads. When I was with WA I could actually do a decent download or run an occasional torrent during business hours as long as their network wasn't under heavy load. With CW it's more like nil by mouth during (extended) business hours.
 
recre8 said:
I have reached the end of my relationship with WebAfrica and will be moving to a CW Home Capped account. Mostly because of streaming being unable to saturate the link. (e.g. Youtube video cannot stream smoothly at 720p on 10mbps account) I've been read in one of the other threads that the profile used for CW Home Capped is identical to WebAfrica Home Capped accounts. Does this mean I will be having the same kind of problems with CW as with WebAfrica?
Click to expand...

in terms of the current constraints on the network the same performance applies
most weeks (not this week) the benefits of our support systems do apply.

The real issue for most providers on these sorts of accounts is IPC constraints in Cape Town and I think there will be a lot of happier ISP management people when the upgrade goes live
 
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