Web sQuad ISP - Feedback Thread #2

PaulGherkin said:
Alrighty review time:

I believe I am getting a service as advertised.
I applied on Friday. Today is Thursday and it's done, connected!
It went very quick, and smoothly, there was no real hold up I think we just lost a day because of Octotel being, well, Octotel.
But even so I cannot complain. Do you know how nice it is to have a human to speak to?

Many thanks to Norah and Carl in particular for sorting things out and KNOWING STUFF. Wow, it's been a while since I last dealt with anyone at an internet service provider who knows a bit more than I do about PPPoE and when the username/password is incorrect (because silly old me made a typo).

But yes, Vox Telecom has issues, we see that now, because magically things are working like they used to in the past.
Confirmation just came from my gamer teenager who says his games are now working and not lagging out
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PaulGherkin said:
The only thing that doesn't work is the inbound VPN.
BUT
I have a feeling the problem is on my side because I struggled to add a user to that thing. The original user worked fine, and yet I could not copy those details to a tablet either. Saw an article online this afternoon where they say the Mikrotik implementation is very fiddly.

So I ain't going to call support, because I think I need to redo my router's config anyway.
EDIT: it's 19:46 and I HAVE DECENT INTERNET!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Thank you for the kind words! We're glad to hear the move went smoothly and the process was painless. That said, messages like these remind the team why they do what they do every day, and I've share it with them. Thank you.

Regrading the VPN, let us know if you need a hand. But if you're keen to tinker and learn your way around the box, they way I do, have a look at Wireguard and Zerotier (free for up to 10 devices), both native to ROSv7 and ARM based boxes.
 
BouncyNinja said:
Thats what i love about Websquad, the human touch , which is something missing from bigger ISP's :)

The whole team is amazing!

As soon as our vodacom fttb contract is done, im switching to Websqaud for our business
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Thank you and looking forward to getting that FTTB link sorted for you.
 
websquadza said:
Thank you for the kind words! We're glad to hear the move went smoothly and the process was painless. That said, messages like these remind the team why they do what they do every day, and I've share it with them. Thank you.

Regrading the VPN, let us know if you need a hand. But if you're keen to tinker and learn your way around the box, they way I do, have a look at Wireguard and Zerotier (free for up to 10 devices), both native to ROSv7 and ARM based boxes.
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Thanks for the advice... that just saved me a ton of work.
 
Working remotely today, first working day via WebSquad.
My call quality on Teams has improved, and also, my VPN connection to the HO is much better!
giphy.gif
 
Summary of what's going on:

* No real work needed doing, the one router providing the WiFi (Mikrotik) needed it's DNS cache flushed, we kept getting drops on it on both it's Ethernet ports and WAN ports. Upgraded firmware while I was at it. No problems since.

* My L2TP VPN is running once more on a fresh new configuration. It worked first time. I didn't wipe the router, just deleted the previous L2TP stuff and started again. Working.

* There was something funny going on when I was with Vox, it is hard to explain but when my Mikrotik router connects on PPPoE all the fields like Service, AC name, etc are filled in automatically with sensible values. With VOX I would see multiples of these and also the DNS values returned were often not functional. I see from my notes that VOX did something in 2019 and I was pretty pissed off that day (as I wrote four letter words in my notes) because they broke my VoIP phones. With WebSquad I had to UNDO that workaround/hack to make my phones work again- was easier to just reset and redo the whole phone.

* There was probably a DNS redirection loop or some funny shyte, because often times the network shares would come back with errors in Windows Explorer, and I had to run the troubleshooter and that somehow fixed it every time. Since Friday that shyte is gone, thank goodness. I didn't do anything I swear. All I did was flush DNS caching. The TTL on that stuff is 24 hours in the router it would appear (if I understand Mikrotik-ese correctly).

* As Octotel will always be Octotel, there are occasional hiccups, as I saw on Saturday afternoon there was a hell of a dip after 2PM, which was short-lived. But what I noticed this time is that when the Octotel go-slow is in effect, that the whole link becomes slow, not this difficult-to-prove BS that I have had with Vox. So when it was slow for those 15 minutes, the speeds on speedtest.net were still symmetrical up and down. Now the last time I saw that was at a company I worked at, who had a leased line from DFA.
Also note that when there's issues... AT LEAST THINGS STILL WORK, UNLIKE VOX WHEN THE WHOLE EFFING REMOTE SERVICE BECOMES UNRESPONSIVE!!!!
 
CPT Update: we are aware of a drop affecting one of our BNGs in CPT a little earlier, resulting in brief outages as sessions reconverged. iBGP sessions between this BNG and our core restarted without apparent cause. Teams are investigating this. Additional sessions have been set up to minimise future impacts of such events.

Update: our teams have been monitoring closely and the affected device and issue has been resolved.
 
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Can someone tell me if the service levels from Web Squad are real or am I on a bender of some kind?
I am wondering if it's the Advil or something because MY GOOD LORD!!!! When last did I get service from a company with smiles and red carpet on a Sunday when I had an issue (which turned out to be a problem with my teenage son hogging the bandwidth).

I can't believe this? Or maybe I am just so used to bad service.

Carl my man, how on earth do you do this? Please tell me sir, so I can pull up my own socks and become better at business.

Afrihost, Vox, etc.... LOOK AND LEARN!!!! This is how you treat customers!
 
PaulGherkin said:
Can someone tell me if the service levels from Web Squad are real or am I on a bender of some kind?
I am wondering if it's the Advil or something because MY GOOD LORD!!!! When last did I get service from a company with smiles and red carpet on a Sunday when I had an issue (which turned out to be a problem with my teenage son hogging the bandwidth).

I can't believe this? Or maybe I am just so used to bad service.

Carl my man, how on earth do you do this? Please tell me sir, so I can pull up my own socks and become better at business.

Afrihost, Vox, etc.... LOOK AND LEARN!!!! This is how you treat customers!
Click to expand...
It's just the awesome websquad service (:
 
PaulGherkin said:
Can someone tell me if the service levels from Web Squad are real or am I on a bender of some kind?
I am wondering if it's the Advil or something because MY GOOD LORD!!!! When last did I get service from a company with smiles and red carpet on a Sunday when I had an issue (which turned out to be a problem with my teenage son hogging the bandwidth).

I can't believe this? Or maybe I am just so used to bad service.

Carl my man, how on earth do you do this? Please tell me sir, so I can pull up my own socks and become better at business.

Afrihost, Vox, etc.... LOOK AND LEARN!!!! This is how you treat customers!
Click to expand...
The difference between treated as a money bag vs a actual customer.
 
Mzezman said:
It also doesn't hurt that they have deep technical knowledge and are often willing to go over and above tn ensure your complete experience is great
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Even the salespeople who helped me, knows more about the upstream routing and pointed out to me that when I got the static IP there would be no NATing. Vox Telecom's consultants, if you don't use their router they run out of steam and then blame your router and say it's faulty. ALWAYS. Also, trying to explain to Vox Telecom why there's a problem with DNS or when there is packet loss is like trying to tell my cat how to draw cartoons
 
My connection just died, no traffic through SFP1 (still connected, but no traffic..)

Running the IP scan tells me my router is screaming into the void, possible upstream issue @websquadza ?
 
Seems to be a Vuma issue, see on on CoolIdeas and Afrihost as well
 
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