Potion
Active Member
Note that I am using Mweb here because they are my service provider and my experience is with them. Given comparative rating of service and performance of ISPs in SA, Mweb usually rates highly, if not best overall. By extension, therefore, this message is directed at all ISPs, IAP's and the infrastructure providers who operate in the South African Internet Market Space, in the hope that they regain a sense of pride in delivering quality and value. (They seem to have forgotten.)
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I totally get it that I cannot expect sparkling performance from my shaped, uncapped, 384Kbps service, but I believe that Mweb's performance levels for this product have fallen below an acceptable level.
Skype, my family's cyber staple, is no longer reliable (although I am heartened that an international landline call is cheaper than a local cell to landline call - but that's another matter!)
But even ordinary browsing can be likened to a speech impediment, as Firefox stutters and stammers and sometimes just gives up trying. My email client fails to connect to mweb's smtp server. Understand that these are the high-priority services on a shaped profile.
Trying to FTP upload a 1MB website is an exercise in futility. It appears that network is so oversubscribed that FTP has fallen completely off the shaping policy's priority list. A few (usually 5) logins after FTP timeouts, and you have to wait out a reset period (usually minutes) – more coffee, anyone? Slow is OK, but latency that is worse than a timeout threshold of a commonly used protocol is simply unacceptable.
I have tried to establish from Mweb what exactly their minimum performance levels are, and what measurement criteria are used to determine them. Their technical support call centre certainly have absolutely no idea what a reasonable latency might be, or what tools one might to use to measure it. I've considered using another ISP, but I doubt the others are any better, and I've grown attached to the 15-year-old email address. How much for just an email address? No mailbox, just a forwarder? FIFTY FIVE BUCKS A MONTH! I came away less than satisfied.
Three years ago, SAAS and Cloud Computing were all the buzz. With Mweb shaped SAAS is dead! The Cloud is dead!
Chewing spiders, I called their switchboard and was put through to someone (who has a name, but didn't offer her job title), who was refreshingly interested in what I had to say, and for Mweb's reputation, and undertook to set up a temporary unshaped account for me to test.
Kudos to her! The verdict...
The unshaped experience is certainly much better - not sparkling, but much better. Almost as good as my shaped service was a few months ago. Skype works. So does FTP.
Should I be delighted? Delight is getting something that exceeds expectation; the answer's no, this is a minimum expectation
True professionalism is not avoiding problems, it's acknowledging that they exist and then dealing with them effectively. When I sum my experience with Mweb, not once did anyone acknowledge that there is a problem. My experience, and the experiences of others I have discussed this with, tell me otherwise.
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I totally get it that I cannot expect sparkling performance from my shaped, uncapped, 384Kbps service, but I believe that Mweb's performance levels for this product have fallen below an acceptable level.
Skype, my family's cyber staple, is no longer reliable (although I am heartened that an international landline call is cheaper than a local cell to landline call - but that's another matter!)
But even ordinary browsing can be likened to a speech impediment, as Firefox stutters and stammers and sometimes just gives up trying. My email client fails to connect to mweb's smtp server. Understand that these are the high-priority services on a shaped profile.
Trying to FTP upload a 1MB website is an exercise in futility. It appears that network is so oversubscribed that FTP has fallen completely off the shaping policy's priority list. A few (usually 5) logins after FTP timeouts, and you have to wait out a reset period (usually minutes) – more coffee, anyone? Slow is OK, but latency that is worse than a timeout threshold of a commonly used protocol is simply unacceptable.
I have tried to establish from Mweb what exactly their minimum performance levels are, and what measurement criteria are used to determine them. Their technical support call centre certainly have absolutely no idea what a reasonable latency might be, or what tools one might to use to measure it. I've considered using another ISP, but I doubt the others are any better, and I've grown attached to the 15-year-old email address. How much for just an email address? No mailbox, just a forwarder? FIFTY FIVE BUCKS A MONTH! I came away less than satisfied.
Three years ago, SAAS and Cloud Computing were all the buzz. With Mweb shaped SAAS is dead! The Cloud is dead!
Chewing spiders, I called their switchboard and was put through to someone (who has a name, but didn't offer her job title), who was refreshingly interested in what I had to say, and for Mweb's reputation, and undertook to set up a temporary unshaped account for me to test.
Kudos to her! The verdict...
The unshaped experience is certainly much better - not sparkling, but much better. Almost as good as my shaped service was a few months ago. Skype works. So does FTP.
Should I be delighted? Delight is getting something that exceeds expectation; the answer's no, this is a minimum expectation
True professionalism is not avoiding problems, it's acknowledging that they exist and then dealing with them effectively. When I sum my experience with Mweb, not once did anyone acknowledge that there is a problem. My experience, and the experiences of others I have discussed this with, tell me otherwise.
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