Vox / @lantic

[IdlePhaedrus]

Hi All,

Just thought I would post my experience with Vox.

About three months back I decided to get an additional capped ISP account with Vox. There were a couple of quite nice features like data carried over from month to month and when the account works, it works well, full ten megabits. However, there were a number of issues listed below:

• Vox resets the ADSL connection on a twenty four hour basis (or so it would appear) and my router would not always recover from the reset, so a cold reboot would often be required.
• If you download too much on a particular day, or had too many html connections in a particular session the account would simply fail and there would be a message: can't establish a connection to the server at portal.lantic.net. Sometimes a cold restart of the router would resolve the issue. Sometimes not. Sometimes it would take a day or so for this message to go away, so had to resort to other ISP accounts.
• Their help-desk cannot help in this scenario.
• Their bandwidth accounting is shocking. Last month I had 25 odd gigs available, but could not use it because I was 'capped'. Probably due to their download / connection limit mentioned above, or some other issue with their technical accounting. According to my current stats I have 10.73 Gigs available, but cannot connect to the net even though my account status is "Active". So am now using my Afrihost account which doesn't have any of these issues.
• They have no SMS or email alert system. If you go over your cap, or get arbitrarily cut off, the account simply stops working, and even if you don't go over your cap it also simply stops working. No warnings, no email notifications, nadda!
• Month notice period for cancellation. Cannot be done by email, has to be done telephonically.
• The numbers on their account usage page just don't add up. One fields say Available: 12207.25 MB and another says Data Available: 10.73 GB.
• In my Recent session history list, my IP Address is actually my telephone number.
• To date I have not been able to use any of my 'carried over' data.
• Getting top-ups is very difficult. They would prefer you to move you up to the next account level.

I have cancelled the account and it should become inactive at the end of the month. I will report back if they debit me for February. While the account offered modern day speeds, it had technical / billing / accounting issues that were reminiscent of ADSL ISP accounts eight years ago. Their systems and help desk are obviously not up to the task. Its a pity, because the account worked really well, when it worked.

Phaedrus

 

[wingnut771]

WOW!

Thanks for the heads-up.

It seems like nothing has changed with @lantic even since becoming/joining Vox.

Hi All,

Just thought I would post my experience with Vox.

About three months back I decided to get an additional capped ISP account with Vox. There were a couple of quite nice features like data carried over from month to month and when the account works, it works well, full ten megabits. However, there were a number of issues listed below:

• Vox resets the ADSL connection on a twenty four hour basis (or so it would appear) and my router would not always recover from the reset, so a cold reboot would often be required.
• If you download too much on a particular day, or had too many html connections in a particular session the account would simply fail and there would be a message: can't establish a connection to the server at portal.lantic.net. Sometimes a cold restart of the router would resolve the issue. Sometimes not. Sometimes it would take a day or so for this message to go away, so had to resort to other ISP accounts.
• Their help-desk cannot help in this scenario.
• Their bandwidth accounting is shocking. Last month I had 25 odd gigs available, but could not use it because I was 'capped'. Probably due to their download / connection limit mentioned above, or some other issue with their technical accounting. According to my current stats I have 10.73 Gigs available, but cannot connect to the net even though my account status is "Active". So am now using my Afrihost account which doesn't have any of these issues.
• They have no SMS or email alert system. If you go over your cap, or get arbitrarily cut off, the account simply stops working, and even if you don't go over your cap it also simply stops working. No warnings, no email notifications, nadda!
• Month notice period for cancellation. Cannot be done by email, has to be done telephonically.
• The numbers on their account usage page just don't add up. One fields say Available: 12207.25 MB and another says Data Available: 10.73 GB.
• In my Recent session history list, my IP Address is actually my telephone number.
• To date I have not been able to use any of my 'carried over' data.
• Getting top-ups is very difficult. They would prefer you to move you up to the next account level.

I have cancelled the account and it should become inactive at the end of the month. I will report back if they debit me for February. While the account offered modern day speeds, it had technical / billing / accounting issues that were reminiscent of ADSL ISP accounts eight years ago. Their systems and help desk are obviously not up to the task. Its a pity, because the account worked really well, when it worked.

Phaedrus

 

[snobee]

My experience with them has been negative as well. As a business customer, over the past year I have been cutting my ties as my contracts have ended. Moving from spending over R15k per month down to just under R2k now. Even my hosting was moved recently due to too much down time. I certainly would not recommend them anymore.

 

[aktor]

I don't know about the @lantic division, but our company moved from MWeb Business to Vox for our Internet connectivity last year. Had no issues at all, but then it's hard to compare it to a residential scenario, because we have close to a 100 users going through various internal gateways to various different ADSL routers. However, having said that, the connectivity's always been solid with low latencies and good speeds. As far as service goes, I heard @lantic (and Vox, by default) doesn't have great service on their helpdesk. Luckily we skip that problem since we use our telecoms account manager there for any queries.

So, to summarise: for business, I'd recommend Vox anyday. For residential.. not so sure.

 

[Totempole]

I remember contacting them after hours because I couldn't reactivate my Kaspersky License subscription with them. The guy told me it was possible that someone had hacked into my computer and stolen my Kaspersky License key. :erm:

Another issue is I can't receive emails larger than 10MB on my paid email with them and they don't give a rat's ass about it.

They seem to be great to the corporates, but they treat home users like crap.

 

[wingnut771]

 

[aktor]

They seem to be great to the corporates, but they treat home users like crap.

Unfortunately that does seem to be their primary target market, yeah.

 

[wingnut771]

I remember contacting them after hours because I couldn't reactivate my Kaspersky License subscription with them. The guy told me it was possible that someone had hacked into my computer and stolen my Kaspersky License key. :erm:

Another issue is I can't receive emails larger than 10MB on my paid email with them and they don't give a rat's ass about it.

They seem to be great to the corporates, but they treat home users like crap.

Vox or @lantic?

EDIT: I think I can answer my own question: Vox hey? @lantic don't do corporate? I remember when we first got internet in the late 90's, we had @lantic, and they were crap even then, I see nothing has changed. A leopard doesn't change it's spots!

 

[wingnut771]

What ISP need's to "bribe" their customers with an Apple TV?

 

[aktor]

Vox or @lantic?

EDIT: I think I can answer my own question: Vox hey? @lantic don't do corporate? I remember when we first got internet in the late 90's, we had @lantic, and they were crap even then, I see nothing has changed. A leopard doesn't change it's spots!

Yeah, Vox. Gets confusing though, since they have so many divisions; Vox Telecom, Vox Orion, Cristal, @lantic...

 

[Gtx Gaming]

must say my experience is good , and have been for quite a few years.

using the lantic afterhours uncapped , which is vox now.

 

[Wackyza]

I have had only superb residential service from them. I hardly use my telkom uncapped account anymore. I give them thumbs up

 

[cobusv]

I use the after hours uncapped as-well for about 2 years now, never had a problem and it just works! Thumbs up from me too

 

[cvanwie]

Hey there Phaedrus,

I just wanted to touch on a few things from your post, not to pursuade you to stay with us, but rather ensure that you and the community actually understand what's going on...

Vox resets the ADSL connection on a twenty four hour basis (or so it would appear) and my router would not always recover from the reset, so a cold reboot would often be required.

Yes, we do. The fact that your router doesn't recover, is a hardware problem. When you first connect to our network, we create an expiry time for your session which is handled by Telkom infrastructure and they disconnect you when that time limit is reached. This is fairly standard practice.

If you download too much on a particular day, or had too many html connections in a particular session the account would simply fail and there would be a message: can't establish a connection to the server at portal.lantic.net. Sometimes a cold restart of the router would resolve the issue. Sometimes not. Sometimes it would take a day or so for this message to go away, so had to resort to other ISP accounts.

What you are describing here sounds like you've reached your provisioned quota amounts. When you hit your cap, our subscriber management platform will re-direct you to a captive portal in order for you to top-up your account. The URL that you provided "portal.lantic.net" is just such a captive portal that is configured. The reason that you are getting the error that you posted "can't establish a connection..." is most likely due to the fact that you aren't using our DNS servers and therefore cannot resolve portal.lantic.net because upon time of reaching cap, we don't allow any further network traffic, except hosts that we permit such as our DNS and our portals to allow customers to increase their caps.

Their help-desk cannot help in this scenario.

They can ... they can increase your cap and without having to reconnect to the internet, or in your case, suffer a cold reboot of your router, you would be able to continue surfing until you reach the next cap (that you selected).

Their bandwidth accounting is shocking. Last month I had 25 odd gigs available, but could not use it because I was 'capped'. Probably due to their download / connection limit mentioned above, or some other issue with their technical accounting. According to my current stats I have 10.73 Gigs available, but cannot connect to the net even though my account status is "Active". So am now using my Afrihost account which doesn't have any of these issues.

This doesn't sound right to me at all. Please in-box me with your DSL username, I'd like to have a look at it. I know you've cancelled service, but if there's a problem/fault in our system, I need to know about it in order to fix it! Again, we don't have a download limit; you do have a cap though. Account status of "Active" means that you can connect to the internet. Cap and Status are very different.

They have no SMS or email alert system. If you go over your cap, or get arbitrarily cut off, the account simply stops working, and even if you don't go over your cap it also simply stops working. No warnings, no email notifications, nadda!

This is true for the Consumer (formerly @lantic) customers, I believe that they will be enabling such notification, but present time it's not available. The Enterprise (formerly Vox/Datapro) system sends SMS and Email notifications on specific thresholds which are reached.

Month notice period for cancellation. Cannot be done by email, has to be done telephonically.

Nothing I can say here, this is the Terms and Conditions that you and I (I'm also a customer of Vox - Consumer) agreed to.

The numbers on their account usage page just don't add up. One fields say Available: 12207.25 MB and another says Data Available: 10.73 GB.

Again, please provide me with your DSL username so that I can have a look at our subscriber management platform in conjunction with the Consumer portal system (Solid). This kind of information/bug reporting is extremely helpful.

In my Recent session history list, my IP Address is actually my telephone number.

That's a bug in the display, not a train smash, but not cool, I agree. I'll log this with the Consumer portal team.

To date I have not been able to use any of my 'carried over' data.

(I can't but to say it again..) DSL Username please so that I can have a look at this. =) Thanks!!

Getting top-ups is very difficult. They would prefer you to move you up to the next account level.

Top-ups are managed in the portal, you can actually do it yourself without having to deal with the service centre. It's their job to up-sell... Can't blame them can you?

I truly hope that you will in-box me with your DSL username so that I can have a look into the problems that you've pointed out here.

For those of you who aren't experiencing this issue, and loving the service/account, SURF ON!

Regards,
Chris
_____________________________

Chris Van Wie
Solution Architect
Vox Telecom Limited
Andes Building, Rutherford Estate
1 Scott Street
Waverley
Web: http://www.voxtelecom.co.za

 

[cvanwie]

must say my experience is good , and have been for quite a few years.

using the lantic afterhours uncapped , which is vox now.

Ah! Mr Heretic Angel, yes you have!!

You should know this service extremely well, if not the best!

 

[Totempole]

@lantic/Vox.

Customer Care: Nope.
Defend Themselves: Indeed.

 

[Voxy]

Yeah, Vox. Gets confusing though, since they have so many divisions; Vox Telecom, Vox Orion, Cristal, @lantic...

I would just like to clarify any confusion regarding the Vox Telecom consolidation.

As part of our long-term strategy, we are nearing completion of our brand consolidation plan. We’ve been transforming from a “house of brands” (Vox Datapro, Vox Orion, Vox Telepreneur, @lantic, etc.) to a “branded house” (Vox Telecom). The purpose of this change is to both offer customers a wider range of services (i.e. a full spectrum of enterprise and consumer telco products) and attempt to eliminate any confusion that currently exists. You’ll start noticing our retail stores, collateral and advertising are changing to Vox Telecom.

We hope you like it!

 

[aktor]

I would just like to clarify any confusion regarding the Vox Telecom consolidation.

As part of our long-term strategy, we are nearing completion of our brand consolidation plan. We’ve been transforming from a “house of brands” (Vox Datapro, Vox Orion, Vox Telepreneur, @lantic, etc.) to a “branded house” (Vox Telecom). The purpose of this change is to both offer customers a wider range of services (i.e. a full spectrum of enterprise and consumer telco products) and attempt to eliminate any confusion that currently exists. You’ll start noticing our retail stores, collateral and advertising are changing to Vox Telecom.

We hope you like it!

Definitely

 

[Totempole]

I would just like to clarify any confusion regarding the Vox Telecom consolidation.

As part of our long-term strategy, we are nearing completion of our brand consolidation plan. We’ve been transforming from a “house of brands” (Vox Datapro, Vox Orion, Vox Telepreneur, @lantic, etc.) to a “branded house” (Vox Telecom). The purpose of this change is to both offer customers a wider range of services (i.e. a full spectrum of enterprise and consumer telco products) and attempt to eliminate any confusion that currently exists. You’ll start noticing our retail stores, collateral and advertising are changing to Vox Telecom.

We hope you like it!

SSDB

 

[IdlePhaedrus]

Chris, I have PM'd you.

I will update this thread once I have received some sort of response.

Regards
Phaedrus

Hey there Phaedrus,

I just wanted to touch on a few things from your post, not to pursuade you to stay with us, but rather ensure that you and the community actually understand what's going on...



Yes, we do. The fact that your router doesn't recover, is a hardware problem. When you first connect to our network, we create an expiry time for your session which is handled by Telkom infrastructure and they disconnect you when that time limit is reached. This is fairly standard practice.



What you are describing here sounds like you've reached your provisioned quota amounts. When you hit your cap, our subscriber management platform will re-direct you to a captive portal in order for you to top-up your account. The URL that you provided "portal.lantic.net" is just such a captive portal that is configured. The reason that you are getting the error that you posted "can't establish a connection..." is most likely due to the fact that you aren't using our DNS servers and therefore cannot resolve portal.lantic.net because upon time of reaching cap, we don't allow any further network traffic, except hosts that we permit such as our DNS and our portals to allow customers to increase their caps.



They can ... they can increase your cap and without having to reconnect to the internet, or in your case, suffer a cold reboot of your router, you would be able to continue surfing until you reach the next cap (that you selected).



This doesn't sound right to me at all. Please in-box me with your DSL username, I'd like to have a look at it. I know you've cancelled service, but if there's a problem/fault in our system, I need to know about it in order to fix it! Again, we don't have a download limit; you do have a cap though. Account status of "Active" means that you can connect to the internet. Cap and Status are very different.



This is true for the Consumer (formerly @lantic) customers, I believe that they will be enabling such notification, but present time it's not available. The Enterprise (formerly Vox/Datapro) system sends SMS and Email notifications on specific thresholds which are reached.



Nothing I can say here, this is the Terms and Conditions that you and I (I'm also a customer of Vox - Consumer) agreed to.




Again, please provide me with your DSL username so that I can have a look at our subscriber management platform in conjunction with the Consumer portal system (Solid). This kind of information/bug reporting is extremely helpful.



That's a bug in the display, not a train smash, but not cool, I agree. I'll log this with the Consumer portal team.



(I can't but to say it again..) DSL Username please so that I can have a look at this. =) Thanks!!



Top-ups are managed in the portal, you can actually do it yourself without having to deal with the service centre. It's their job to up-sell... Can't blame them can you?

I truly hope that you will in-box me with your DSL username so that I can have a look into the problems that you've pointed out here.

For those of you who aren't experiencing this issue, and loving the service/account, SURF ON!

Regards,
Chris
_____________________________

Chris Van Wie
Solution Architect
Vox Telecom Limited
Andes Building, Rutherford Estate
1 Scott Street
Waverley
Web: http://www.voxtelecom.co.za