OpenWeb and their craziest e-mail to customers yet

You have the word ASS in your nick, nobody can take your post seriously
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...lol

Look, I think the personal touch is great. I think it saves the customer money because a PR department isn't required, which is clever.
but still, who's e-mail software doesn't have spell check ? Even my phone has spell check for e-mails. Just take a little extra effort when writing e-mails to ALL your customers and you won't have people like me laughing at you publicly.

I appreciate you trying to discredit me using my post count; You'll note I've been a member since 2005 and in that time I've done some 15 posts... which just goes to show you how AMAZED I was when I saw your e-mail. It was so unbelievable to me that it pushed me past the "lazy" stage to the point of actually making the primary post... at 02:00.

I think the thing that got me the most in your e-mail was the bit about internet in ZA being worse off... that made me extremely angry... because as I said, I pay an eighth of what I used to pay and I get exactly the same service. I felt that this was yet another attempt to pass the buck.

In fact everything you say is either an attempt to butter people up or pass the buck. This is unnecessary, you are an ISP.

Perhaps your only mistake, apart from that e-mail has been to not adequately educate your customers about the failure rate of some of your products. I don't think you've done anything else wrong.

Your latest e-mail is hot :
We have made OpenBrowse available to ALL our current active account holders at no extra charge.
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The_Librarian said:
In hindsight the ISP's who used SEACOM should already have looked at redundancy measures after the first SEACOM failure... If they had, then they would not be in this sticky situation.

But they didn't, and opted to ignore the warning signs...
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Wrong.

Chances are good that in the SEACOM T&C of sale and use there are clauses highlighting redundancy measures in place with SEACOM so that should their main backbone go down, their subclients aren't affected.

Your argument is as good as saying that a Landlord of a block of apartments can rent out those apartments, and if the building collapses, the tenants themselves are responsible for finding and paying for temporary accommodation and that their belongings are simply lost. That's not how things work in the real world, not unless something illegal is happening in legislation and regulation.


Telkom *is* partially at fault here. Telkom are the ones with a monopoly on bandwidth over SAT3 - to my knowledge, more than they actually end up using, too. The less supply there is left for a bandwidth pipe, the higher the cost of the remaining bandwidth. So what does SAIX (Telkom) do? They keep prices on their resold SAT3 bandwidth high. They keep prices on IPConnect, which is their way around the ICASA ruling to 'unbundle the local loop', high, and choke other ISPs.


It's not our local ISPs' responsibility to ensure that there is a redundant layer that they cannot afford to run if their primary source of international connectivity did a half-assed job of their setup. For SEACOM, the majority of costs for the installation of the cable went into specialized labour and equipment for the installation, not material costs. They could likely well have afforded to install redundant layers, such as three-part relay stations and cross-linking cables, or at the very least dual-part relay stations with cross-linking cables. What do they have instead? Seemingly *one* cable with a *single* series of relay stations, with no apparent automatic failover(s) within those stations.

o--o
|\ /|
|/ \|
o--o
|\ /|
|/ \|
o--o

This^ is something along the lines of how their cabling SHOULD look. I'm fairly sure that right now it's simply

o
|
o
|
o

SEACOM are also responsible, again depending on their T&C of use and sale, for providing options with discounted agreements to its shareholders/resellers as far as redundancy is concerned. Right now, TENET seems to be their redundant layer, and based on the message posted by the SEACOM themselves here: http://mybroadband.co.za/news/telecoms/13587-SEACOM-international-bandwidth-savior.html

TENET 'offered' the capacity, SEACOM didn't approach them to ask for it.
 
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As for that nanonyous you don't know what type of repeater they have in place
They may well have a cross link repeater system in place with backups (I would find it funny if they did not)
I have heard that their line is doubled and has cross communication (this is just what I have heard)

But even with the repeaters able to alternate the physical units still makes up one line system
So if they were using a dual repeater it is probably housed in the same physical location and it may just be that the whole unit was damaged somehow
We can't say

As for that here is a nice graph showing current and predicted lines for Africa
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d4/Cable_map18.svg
 
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I'd have reviewed that page again if I had intl access ;p

But that's what I mean; I'm sure they have some degree of cross-linking within repeater units, the same way a normal redundant network has failovers should a switch die. What I was referring to was different pairs of external lines and different repeater 'stations'. Keep in mind again that depending on the construction involved per repeater and the amount of repeaters, they only cost so much, and that the cabling itself also only costs so much.

Imagine the amount of money SEACOM *loses* when an entire link goes down and they aren't receiving revenue for that period of time. They'd have been better served by spending the extra money to ensure issues like that didn't arise and that they didn't have to necessarily rely on (their seemingly non-existent) backups.
 
@ MR BEEP

You are an great ISP i am with you just over an year i think and using the Vodacom Business account that's value for money, i have only been offline for about 5-10 hours since i singed up...

My point is if you want cheap uncapped internet, then u must take the consequence to be offline if it fails, the ISP can't give you Top grade internet from an more stable line for cheap, if you can't be with out internet then you need to stick your hand deep in your pocket and Pay for it...

Regards
KillerB
 
nanonyous I would suspect that to put in that kind of redundancy would have doubled the cost of the project
That while there is quite a few lines coming in soon which will provide redundancy
Seacom is in bad position because they are the first of the major bandwidth lines that is up and running (for redundancy at least)

Seacom is 1.28Tb
EASSY is 1.4Tb (soon)
And then the really lovely one (until I learned telkom owns part of it)WACS is going to be 5.1Tb (predicted Q2 2011) (ag no damn Telkom owns a big part of this)
and ACE also 5.1Tb :) :)

Oh and sat3 is measly 360Gb
 
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We may not agree 100% with the way in which it was done but lets give them credit for doing it. My provider only sent an sms 2 days after the issue started, informing me there is an issue....

kudos mrbeep
 
Pass the pop-corn

Openweb are great!

I have two words to Mr Aqurat - the last of the two is off!

:)
 
good to see that openweb at least is not "put head ground" and wait; seriously those who keep themselves busy with analysing other people's english need to go outside mom's basement.
 
Veneficus, fair enough, SAT3 is only 360gbps, but it would take (if we had to assume that SAIX had ALL that bandwidth for their exclusive use) 92,160 people running at 4096kbps full-tilt to saturate that.

If they only have half that capacity, that's still 46,080 4mbit users - how many DSL users are there in total in SA now, and how many of those are on 4mbit/1mbit/512kbps/384kbps? (this isn't me arguing, this is me wondering, as I quite simply don't know).

Obviously, though, there'll be business clients that likely have very fat pipes for international usage so that they can have constant data transmission, things like VoIP or video-calling such as for video conferences; the crux of the issue comes in that these businesses shouldn't necessarily be consuming that much bandwidth 'after business hours', and yet those of us with 'consumer' accounts are still somehow left in the dark, so to speak, once businesses have closed for the day. Now, it could be argued that home users are immediately saturating that bandwidth pipe, but if ISPs are temporarily 'disabling' streaming and bulk download/p2p protocols during an outage like this, exactly how would they be inflicting such a hit on the network?


Things just don't feel like they add up, to me. At the end of the day, SEACOM operates a total 1.52tbps, or ~1,500gbps connection running up the coast. Again, if we only had 360gbps total capacity of that for SA, that's a LOT of DSL users that are being served their international connection via that pipe, and if that pipe springs a leak, that's a LOT of users that get knocked off the net with no backup being provided by SEACOM by default? Why is that? Why did they have to be approached by someone 'offering' them a temporary solution?


If it were just a local ISP who's datacenters lost power due to Eskom and their generators failed with no backup generators, that'd be another story. That's one our of dozens of ISPs and essentially isolated; unless they offer up their hosting for resale, there's no sub-client that gets hit. When a tier 0 network provider drops, there are dozens of tier 1 network providers reliant on that pipe that have thousands, when not tens or hundreds of thousands of sub-clients that are also reliant on that same connection.


Home user pays their ISP, ISP pays SEACOM, SEACOM doesn't deliver, people get pissed off.
 
Funny letter :D:p

Edit: I Must say, well done for not sitting down and taking it. It's good that people can still open their mouths about things

This seacom trouble is a pain in the butt for all the ISPs in this country with lots of angry people phoning the whole time blaming the ISPs. Getting a bit gatvol of that tbh.
 
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nanonyous I agree
At this time when seacom is up (which obviously it is not at this time :) ) they are only using 90Gb of their 1.2Tb pipe

And yes I would say a large percentage of the country uses them now so there is allot of pissed of people I also agree that they have a right to be pissed off
does it help anything? nope

But all I'm saying is that the have some redundancy in place which also failed and from what I can see they already had a connection to Tenet since tenet has 2 10Gb links that is monitored for them already
So they must have done that prior to this.
But they aren't paying tenet 10% of their monthly income to keep a 100% backup ready

As for the sat3 cable
I doubt that it did not have bandwidth available to supply to the ISP's (say they were to provide even half the needed bandwidth)

But Telkom did not do that and I think it has more to do to proving uncapped is unreliable than to the fact that they want to protect integrity for the world cup
 
You have to remember 3G, HSPA and Wimax customers are all using those cables aswell, Private agencies like Hospitals, Schools Etc also uses that.
 
When I was a customer with Openweb, I enjoyed the fact that I was able to phone Keoma on weekends on his personal number and rant at him cos my VPN product wasn't working. Sure it isn't ideal for him but it was just a bad situation that can happen to anyone (the strange speed decrease I was getting).

Whatever my woes were though, I will always commend Keoma (MrBEEP) for trying his hardest to sort it out for me. This sort of email is expected, glad to see he is trying to keep his user base informed about SEACOM (not everybody browses these forums, shock and horror I know). Only other useful ISP info I have seen is from MWEB (who have a big presence here) and their FreeTheWeb group on Facebook (not much use when we don't have international).
 
MrBEEP said:
Aquarat, with your productive 13 posts, thank you so much for taking the time to pick through every part of my email!
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Nice one MrBeep. Now if we can get the Admins to start us all on 100 posts, you can think about being professional again. We all have a right to post on this forum. Do a good job and everyone is nice and quiet. Mess it up and here we are (the email - Aquarat...and the negativity towards new members;)).

I'm with Openweb and it will remain that way. Just watch the negative vibes please (I don't mind grammar and spelling that much, but it's the tone and attacking-ishness of the email). Get on the boat - apparently everyone blame a chap called God and his acting.
 
CPU there will always be a certain amount of reserve with new members
because that member has not been here long enough to know if you can trust what they say or not
for instance if someone you barely knew came to you and told you something bad about one of your close buddies
Would you not be inclined to trust your buddy whom you have known for a while above this guy?

same here people have learned to like and trust certain people because they have been conversing with them for a while
 
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