Vumatel Cape Town & Telkom ISP, website timeouts

A

AndiJ0hn

Member
Joined
Nov 21, 2016
Messages
19
Reaction score
0
Location
Cape Town
I have Vumatel fibre installed and Telkom as my ISP. For a week now my internet access has been intermittent. Some websites are inaccessible, says connecting but eventually just times out.

Examples of websites that are either intermittent or not accessible at all:

www.usatoday.com - not accessible
www.onedayonly.co.za - not accessible
news24 - now accessible
youtube - occasionally accessible
iol.co.za - not accessible
www.cnet.com - occasionally accessible

Changing DNS settings to openDNS and to Google has not helped. I can only think this must be "routing" issue.

Vumatel support tells me everything is fine. Telkom does not see the issue... or is not able to help.

Any advice would be welcome.
 
AndiJ0hn said:
I have Vumatel fibre installed and Telkom as my ISP. For a week now my internet access has been intermittent. Some websites are inaccessible, says connecting but eventually just times out.

Examples of websites that are either intermittent or not accessible at all:

www.usatoday.com - not accessible
www.onedayonly.co.za - not accessible
news24 - now accessible
youtube - occasionally accessible
iol.co.za - not accessible
www.cnet.com - occasionally accessible

Changing DNS settings to openDNS and to Google has not helped. I can only think this must be "routing" issue.

Vumatel support tells me everything is fine. Telkom does not see the issue... or is not able to help.

Any advice would be welcome.
Click to expand...

Change ISP's
 
then sadly you will be stuck with the problem till you can change. Telkom is useless, and it is more than likely their fault the sites time out.

If it was VUMA, you would either always have access, or never. Some sites timing out points to your ISP, so telkom issue
 
It does indeed point to a telkom issue. Finding someone at telkom who understands the fibre / optic side has proven to be a challenge.
Even the www.cisp.co.za website timesout for me.
 
AndiJ0hn said:
I have Vumatel fibre installed and Telkom as my ISP.
Click to expand...

When was it installed.

(I was involved with launching Telkom Internet on Vumatel in Johannesburg, but I wasn't aware it had launched in Cape Town).

For a week now my internet access has been intermittent. Some websites are inaccessible, says connecting but eventually just times out.

Examples of websites that are either intermittent or not accessible at all:

www.usatoday.com - not accessible
www.onedayonly.co.za - not accessible
news24 - now accessible
youtube - occasionally accessible
iol.co.za - not accessible
www.cnet.com - occasionally accessible
Click to expand...

Can you give some examples of sites thay work?

Changing DNS settings to openDNS and to Google has not helped. I can only think this must be "routing" issue.

Vumatel support tells me everything is fine. Telkom does not see the issue... or is not able to help.

Any advice would be welcome.
Click to expand...

Please PM me your Vumatel object ID and any detail you have in your Telkom Internet account (e.g. username), and I will try and have a look.
 
Here's the trace Cool Ideas:

C:\>tracert www.cisp.co.za

Tracing route to www.cisp.co.za [154.0.13.95]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms homerouter.cpe [x.x.x.x]
2 1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 105-186-16-1.telkomsa.net [105.186.16.1]
3 130 ms 132 ms 110 ms 105-187-252-225.ti-sen.telkomsa.net [105.187.252.225]
4 120 ms 116 ms 42 ms ipc-aggr-1.south.dsl.telkomsa.net [105.226.0.14]
5 116 ms 119 ms 120 ms ipc-aggr-1.south.dsl.telkomsa.net [105.226.0.13]
6 90 ms 122 ms 124 ms blv-pr-02-be200-vl1.net.telkomsa.net [105.226.0.54]
7 101 ms 133 ms 94 ms ct1-pr-01-te0-0-0.net.telkomsa.net [105.187.249.138]
8 78 ms 79 ms 83 ms 196-10-140-171.ixp.capetown [196.10.140.171]
9 130 ms 111 ms 112 ms coolideas.ixp.joburg [196.46.25.171]
10 163 ms 138 ms 126 ms 154.0.1.65
11 133 ms 133 ms 93 ms 154.0.2.162
12 128 ms 132 ms 117 ms 154.0.13.95

Trace complete.
 
I've had a very similar issue on Telkom as a whole.

I've got multiple VDSL / LTE products with them and it was across the board.
Some sites load, some take forever, some not at all.
Then a few minutes later it works. I found this extremely odd and frustrating.

I changed the DNS that I was using, and set the Primary DNS to OpenDNS (208.67.222.222) and the Secondary to Google (8.8.4.4).
And bobs your uncle.
Issues disappeared and everything has been working fine since.
Be sure to set the above DNS's on the DHCP of your Router so it does not select the ISP one by default. Some routers will assign the Router IP as the DNS if it cannot open a connection to the ISP DNS as a failsafe, even if you set it on the PPPoE connection.

I have long since suspected there to be an issue with Telkom DNS servers, and it seems this is in fact the case.

Hope you're sorted soon.

PS: Also, having OpenDNS and Google as your DNS servers, removes the need to wait for Telkom's DNS Cache to update every 8 hours. Yup. 8 hours.
If there is a stale record and you use the default DNS, sorry from Telkom. You're stuffed...
 
snowwolf said:
I've had a very similar issue on Telkom as a whole.

I've got multiple VDSL / LTE products with them and it was across the board.
Some sites load, some take forever, some not at all.
Then a few minutes later it works. I found this extremely odd and frustrating.

I changed the DNS that I was using, and set the Primary DNS to OpenDNS (208.67.222.222) and the Secondary to Google (8.8.4.4).
And bobs your uncle.
Issues disappeared and everything has been working fine since.
Be sure to set the above DNS's on the DHCP of your Router so it does not select the ISP one by default. Some routers will assign the Router IP as the DNS if it cannot open a connection to the ISP DNS as a failsafe, even if you set it on the PPPoE connection.

I have long since suspected there to be an issue with Telkom DNS servers, and it seems this is in fact the case.
Click to expand...

But, where is the proof?

These would be Telkom Wholesale's/SAIX's DNS servers, which we are still using for most customers, and which Telkom Mobile also uses.

We have had new recursive DNS servers ready for some time that we wil migrate customers to soon (region by region, KZN will probably be last).

If you want, you can try them:
105.225.0.1
105.225.0.2

Hope you're sorted soon.

PS: Also, having OpenDNS and Google as your DNS servers, removes the need to wait for Telkom's DNS Cache to update every 8 hours. Yup. 8 hours.
If there is a stale record and you use the default DNS, sorry from Telkom. You're stuffed...
Click to expand...

Uh, I think you don't understand DNS. DNS is cached by any caching DNS server for the TTL of the record. In some cases, people make mistakes and don't decrease the TTL in advance of a change, and then their stale record is stuck on all servers that had it.
 
Changing DNS, I have tried this on a number of occasions thinking that this MUST be DNS related. A few days ago I changed and set DNS server manually on the router provided by Telkom a Huawei B315s-936 to Googles and OpenDNS IPs. (/flushdns & reboots) Unfortunately, this has not helped.

I have since gone back to where the system obtains an DNS IP address automatically.

Primary DNS server: 105.225.0.1
Secondary DNS server: 105.225.0.1
 
Side note, when using a VPN service and a server hosted in the USA I am able to access these websites with no issue.
 
AndiJ0hn said:
Here's the trace Cool Ideas:

C:\>tracert www.cisp.co.za

Tracing route to www.cisp.co.za [154.0.13.95]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms homerouter.cpe [x.x.x.x]
2 1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 105-186-16-1.telkomsa.net [105.186.16.1]
3 130 ms 132 ms 110 ms 105-187-252-225.ti-sen.telkomsa.net [105.187.252.225]
4 120 ms 116 ms 42 ms ipc-aggr-1.south.dsl.telkomsa.net [105.226.0.14]
5 116 ms 119 ms 120 ms ipc-aggr-1.south.dsl.telkomsa.net [105.226.0.13]
6 90 ms 122 ms 124 ms blv-pr-02-be200-vl1.net.telkomsa.net [105.226.0.54]
7 101 ms 133 ms 94 ms ct1-pr-01-te0-0-0.net.telkomsa.net [105.187.249.138]
8 78 ms 79 ms 83 ms 196-10-140-171.ixp.capetown [196.10.140.171]
9 130 ms 111 ms 112 ms coolideas.ixp.joburg [196.46.25.171]
10 163 ms 138 ms 126 ms 154.0.1.65
11 133 ms 133 ms 93 ms 154.0.2.162
12 128 ms 132 ms 117 ms 154.0.13.95

Trace complete.
Click to expand...
Hop 2 to 3 latency goes up big time. 130ms for a local site is bad.
 
Vumatel did the install on 3 Nov 2016. It was only on the 11 Nov 2016 when I was able to access the internet. I noticed that some local websites were not accessible. After a few days the local websites were available.

So a shaky start...
 
Due to staff on leave (due to new "company shutdown" policy) and change freeze, we haven't made any progress on this issue.

Affected users should be able to use cache.saix.net:8080 as a proxy in their browser to reach sites they can't reach directly. (Yes, this won't help for other protocols).

I haven't been able to reproduce the latency between Vumatel (105.186.16.1) and our network (105.187.252.225) which runs over a third-party link (our circuit is running at low utilisation).

It's a pity this issue didn't come to our team's attention sooner.
 
Many thanks for the assist ranger, confirmed using the saix proxy now. I am able to access websites that were giving me timeouts.
Even got now.dstv.com up and playing. Shot!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X