Thoughts on Screamer

C

cda

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Sales
Along with pretty much all service I've experienced with Screamer, this was great. Open and honest about managing expectations.
2 days after placing an order, guys were at my house to signal test (and install if there was signal)
Unfortunately their signal test failed, and they wanted permission from the person above me to install on the roof. I couldn't get this since I'd only been in the complex for a few days.
On discovery a week later that several people happily had the service in my complex, Screamer were admirably apologetic and sent someone the very same day to install.

Accounting
Yes, that little thing iBurst and MTN suck at. Very good, very responsive, and willing to let me pay for my CPE on pay-day rather than immediately.

Support
I can't comment, I'm an IT system analyst so any form of support desk is a painful chore for me. Screamer's is no worse than IS GSC.

Interwebs experience
Local latency is absolutely perfect. 60ms to our head office, running Asterisk IAX trunks over it and it just works perfectly.
You might not want to play an FPS over it, but WoW is perfect.
Web browsing is perfect and fast, and no traffic shaping or PMTU filtering breaking my HTTPS all the time which I find with almost every other ISP in the country. But...

Some things that could be better (Screamer rep take note)
  1. Your transparent Squid cache is running out of DNS connections. You either need to round-robin more caches or more caching DNS servers. One per tower is a good benchmark. You have Vmware ESX, use it.
  2. I can't view my bandwidth usage, and the links to it on the website are broken. Fortunately I have my own Netflow monitoring, but I still like to know if you're seeing what I'm seeing, and you can't fairly charge people for overuse if they can't check on it.
  3. Buy some IPv4 address space while it's still cheap, can't stand seeing RFC1918 in my traceroutes ;)
  4. Give your customers some kind of starter pack, who they phone, who they email for technical problems and that sort of thing.
 
cda said:
Sales
Along with pretty much all service I've experienced with Screamer, this was great. Open and honest about managing expectations.
2 days after placing an order, guys were at my house to signal test (and install if there was signal)
Unfortunately their signal test failed, and they wanted permission from the person above me to install on the roof. I couldn't get this since I'd only been in the complex for a few days.
On discovery a week later that several people happily had the service in my complex, Screamer were admirably apologetic and sent someone the very same day to install.

Accounting
Yes, that little thing iBurst and MTN suck at. Very good, very responsive, and willing to let me pay for my CPE on pay-day rather than immediately.

Support
I can't comment, I'm an IT system analyst so any form of support desk is a painful chore for me. Screamer's is no worse than IS GSC.

Interwebs experience
Local latency is absolutely perfect. 60ms to our head office, running Asterisk IAX trunks over it and it just works perfectly.
You might not want to play an FPS over it, but WoW is perfect.
Web browsing is perfect and fast, and no traffic shaping or PMTU filtering breaking my HTTPS all the time which I find with almost every other ISP in the country. But...

Some things that could be better (Screamer rep take note)
  1. Your transparent Squid cache is running out of DNS connections. You either need to round-robin more caches or more caching DNS servers. One per tower is a good benchmark. You have Vmware ESX, use it.
  2. I can't view my bandwidth usage, and the links to it on the website are broken. Fortunately I have my own Netflow monitoring, but I still like to know if you're seeing what I'm seeing, and you can't fairly charge people for overuse if they can't check on it.
  3. Buy some IPv4 address space while it's still cheap, can't stand seeing RFC1918 in my traceroutes ;)
  4. Give your customers some kind of starter pack, who they phone, who they email for technical problems and that sort of thing.
Click to expand...

Hi cda

Thanks for your constructive comments and let me try and give you what feedback I can:

Sales
I take note that some of our technicians are not trying hard enough to get the required signal strength and will advise them.

Support
We really try and make sure that our support staff know everything but, as in every support dept, they are trained to handle queries from about 98% of our clients who have a basic understanding of broadband and voice services and are not equipped to handle advanced requests immediately from "super users" like yourself who obviously know a lot more that 98% of our clients would. They are however instructed to open a ticket when they cannot assist and this ticket MUST be resolved (not just answered) within 24 hrs by our engineers.
If all else fails PM me and I will make sure you get an answer.

Some things that could be better (Screamer rep take note)
  1. Your transparent Squid cache is running out of DNS connections.
    You are right. Our cache servers have not kept up to our client growth and additional servers are due to be added next week.
  2. I can't view my bandwidth usage, and the links to it on the website are broken.
    Please PM me your login details and I will get one of our support guys to contact you to make sure you can access our bandwidth monitors which are working really well.
  3. Buy some IPv4 address space while it's still cheap.
    We applied for our own Afrinic range months ago but it takes them some time. We will soon be allocating a permanent Screamer IP address to every one of our clients.
  4. Give your customers some kind of starter pack, who they phone, who they email for technical problems and that sort of thing.
    We had a DVD starter pack finalised but some of the content changed and will also be ready in about 2 weeks time
 
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Glad to hear some things are coming down the line the make thigns better for us :)

Just to add to the positive bit in this thread.
All i can say is that I have had nothing but joy since i subscribed to Screamer.
looking back this is somethig i should have done ages ago.
 
howzit said:
Some things that could be better (Screamer rep take note)
  1. Your transparent Squid cache is running out of DNS connections.
    You are right. Our cache servers have not kept up to our client growth and additional servers are due to be added next week.
  2. I can't view my bandwidth usage, and the links to it on the website are broken.
    Please PM me your login details and I will get one of our support guys to contact you to make sure you can access our bandwidth monitors which are working really well.
  3. Buy some IPv4 address space while it's still cheap.
    We applied for our own Afrinic range months ago but it takes them some time. We will soon be allocating a permanent Screamer IP address to every one of our clients.
  4. Give your customers some kind of starter pack, who they phone, who they email for technical problems and that sort of thing.
    We had a DVD starter pack finalised but some of the content changed and will also be ready in about 2 weeks time
Click to expand...

Fantastic response, I look forward to even better service.

That said, you're still beating your competition hands down.
 
howzit said:
Support
We really try and make sure that our support staff know everything but, as in every support dept, they are trained to handle queries from about 98% of our clients who have a basic understanding of broadband and voice services and are not equipped to handle advanced requests immediately from "super users" like yourself who obviously know a lot more that 98% of our clients would. They are however instructed to open a ticket when they cannot assist and this ticket MUST be resolved (not just answered) within 24 hrs by our engineers.
Click to expand...

This is such a tricky problem that facinates me. Having seen it from both ends, in our companies support department and dealing with other ones.

It's almost unsolvable without infinite resources and infinite skills. Engineers don't have the patience to be front-line support, and rightly so - it is too time consuming. But front-line support frequently don't have the skills to solve higher level problems (or often just lack the authority). Even if a company could afford to pay higher skilled people to man the call center, their frustration levels would be too high to retain them.

The other problem is if you leak high level peoples info to clients, they will bypass first level support every time. So Joe Blogs deals with Sam Jones to solve a routing issue, next time round they phone Sam Jones to plug their keyboard in. But then on the other hand you occasionaly get over zealous first-line people who will block your requests for quicker or more skilled assitance, or even take dangerous initiative. Losing battle.

Anyway, you're on the right track there IMHO. It's the only model that seems scale well with the least amount of frustration, at least from the point of view of dealing with the general public.
 
just out of curiosity on one of the above points.

permanent Screamer IP address to every one of our clients
any idea if this is somethign that cost us extra ? or could be opt for a dynamically assigned IP instead ?
 
cda said:
This is such a tricky problem that facinates me. Having seen it from both ends, in our companies support department and dealing with other ones.

It's almost unsolvable without infinite resources and infinite skills. Engineers don't have the patience to be front-line support, and rightly so - it is too time consuming. But front-line support frequently don't have the skills to solve higher level problems (or often just lack the authority). Even if a company could afford to pay higher skilled people to man the call center, their frustration levels would be too high to retain them.

The other problem is if you leak high level peoples info to clients, they will bypass first level support every time. So Joe Blogs deals with Sam Jones to solve a routing issue, next time round they phone Sam Jones to plug their keyboard in. But then on the other hand you occasionaly get over zealous first-line people who will block your requests for quicker or more skilled assitance, or even take dangerous initiative. Losing battle.

Anyway, you're on the right track there IMHO. It's the only model that seems scale well with the least amount of frustration, at least from the point of view of dealing with the general public.
Click to expand...

We actually don't mind our "super users" who get the attention of an engineer having direct access to those engineers because the questions or problems they usually have will go over the heads of our front line help desk personnell. They are normally able to plug a keyboard in:p

Darksun said:
just out of curiosity on one of the above points.

permanent Screamer IP address to every one of our clients
any idea if this is somethign that cost us extra ? or could be opt for a dynamically assigned IP instead ?
Click to expand...

Screamer will pick up the cost of these permanently assigned IP addresses. It looks like we will have them in the next 3 weeks.
 
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Oh what I'd give for you guys to get your Cape Town network online! I'm sick and tired of my slow Telkom Wimax connection....512kbps just doesn't cut it anymore. Hopefully I'll be in range of one of your high sites!
 
deweyzeph said:
Oh what I'd give for you guys to get your Cape Town network online! I'm sick and tired of my slow Telkom Wimax connection....512kbps just doesn't cut it anymore. Hopefully I'll be in range of one of your high sites!
Click to expand...

Come on Screamer, when are you going to take the Cape?
 
I have been with Screamer for almost a year now after being frustrated by Telkom's promises of installing adsl or WiMax in my area.

It has been a long road to walk from the earliest frustrations to a damn solid connection now. I applaud Screamer for what they have achieved and thank them - in particular two gents for all they have done.
 
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