Web Squad ISP

[Seeyou]

Rondebosch

Our engineers will be performing pon port maintenance in the node which will result in certain customers in the area to lose connectivity for 5mins. No more than 30 customers will lose connectivity at a time.

The maintenance is to alleviate any potential areas of concern, to ensure all connections are in spec for all customers to experience a solid stable connection.

Please see dates and time of the maintenance schedule below:

Date: Friday , 27th August 2021
Start time: 01:00am - 05:00am
Duration: 5 hours
The maintenance is schedule to alleviate all out of spec connections in the following area: Harfield Village - core 2 fibre infrastructure

This has been an on-going issue for weeks though, but it's the worst it's ever been at the moment.

 

[CrypticZA]

This has been an on-going issue for weeks though, but it's the worst it's ever been at the moment.

Yea well its Octohell I got them at my work place I'd rather have LTE, pay 5k for business fibre and can't even get over 25/25 on a 50meg line. They are just cluess and prove it every time

 

[websquadza]

This has been an on-going issue for weeks though, but it's the worst it's ever been at the moment.

Feedback from L2 is that Teraco to OLT is fine, so now they're looking at your last mile... hoping we get a quick resolution on this.

 

[websquadza]

Yea well its Octohell I got them at my work place I'd rather have LTE, pay 5k for business fibre and can't even get over 25/25 on a 50meg line. They are just cluess and prove it every time

Don’t get me started on the Octotel rabbit hole . @DrJohnZoidberg knows all about weirdness at L2..

 

[Seeyou]

Feedback from L2 is that Teraco to OLT is fine, so now they're looking at your last mile... hoping we get a quick resolution on this.

Aah, another two week wait with disconnects and then I'm sure we'll be right back to "investigating" with Octotel. Thanks for the update though.

 

[Loppas]

Yea well its Octohell I got them at my work place I'd rather have LTE, pay 5k for business fibre and can't even get over 25/25 on a 50meg line. They are just cluess and prove it every time

 

[CrypticZA]

View attachment 1135900

RSAWEB and Octotel are connected so not Telkom, funny to see how much Telkom was hated to them having one of the top fibre networks... their isp part is still questionable but fibre network is top class

 

[Loppas]

RSAWEB and Octotel are connected so not Telkom, funny to see how much Telkom was hated to them having one of the top fibre networks... their isp part is still questionable but fibre network is top class

yeah was just a meme, friend who is on octotel made it. I really hope octotel can sort out their **** one day, you can't even get 100mbps, let alone the 1000mbps they are offering without using some tcp acceleration or vpn to overcome the packetloss. Well locally you could, but internationally not a chance.

 

[websquadza]

yeah was just a meme, friend who is on octotel made it. I really hope octotel can sort out their **** one day, you can't even get 100mbps, let alone the 1000mbps they are offering without using some tcp acceleration or vpn to overcome the packetloss. Well locally you could, but internationally not a chance.

This is (one of the reasons) why we installed an accelerator in Cape Town it’s taken care of the majority of their network issues. Unfortunately for @Seeyou there’s no way to accelerate your way out of a link that just drops.

That said, you can bring a horse to the water, but you can’t make it drink. Same thing here- we’ve told them what we see with our tests, and that we suspect the issue is related to a) packet fragmentation along their backhaul paths (possibly a bad MTU at some point resulting in packets being fragmented and rebuilt), b) L2 best practice issues including a lack of client isolation, DHCP snooping etc, c) packet order issues- usually because of link aggregation configuration. Other ISPs have pointed out the same issues. And a year+ later we’re still in the same place.

 

[websquadza]

Aah, another two week wait with disconnects and then I'm sure we'll be right back to "investigating" with Octotel. Thanks for the update though.

How’s this looking today?

 

[CrypticZA]

This is (one of the reasons) why we installed an accelerator in Cape Town it’s taken care of the majority of their network issues. Unfortunately for @Seeyou there’s no way to accelerate your way out of a link that just drops.

That said, you can bring a horse to the water, but you can’t make it drink. Same thing here- we’ve told them what we see with our tests, and that we suspect the issue is related to a) packet fragmentation along their backhaul paths (possibly a bad MTU at some point resulting in packets being fragmented and rebuilt), b) L2 best practice issues including a lack of client isolation, DHCP snooping etc, c) packet order issues- usually because of link aggregation configuration. Other ISPs have pointed out the same issues. And a year+ later we’re still in the same place.

So my work signed a 3 year deal with RSAWEB and Octotel for business fibre, for the first few months they came back saying "we are unable to cap your line speed, since when we cap it, it goes to erratic speeds" so they left us on like an uncapped line, during early hours of the morning the line use to run at 500+mbps, then they capped the line to what we pay for (50/50) and in almost 3 years we have never been able to achieve 50/50... Both companies are beyond useless.

Their response majority of the time when you show them packet loss or poor speeds is "everything looks fine and your internet is up so there is no problem"....

 

[Seeyou]

How’s this looking today?

No drops today, but as I've come to realise, that means nothing as it'll likely start dropping randomly again next week. It stopped shortly after 5pm on Friday, though I still see the occasional blip on PingPlotter, but not for long enough to completely disrupt traffic like last week.

 

[Seeyou]

Their response majority of the time when you show them packet loss or poor speeds is "everything looks fine and your internet is up so there is no problem"....

Pretty much exactly the case with me. Back when I was with CISP, I complained to them about the packet loss, they opened a ticket with Octotel, Octotel sent out an engineer to "fix my line that was down". When I explained to him the ticket with Octotel specifically said packet loss, not line down, he measured the signal strength, said it looked good, and left. Never heard from them again.

Our building was deciding between Openserve and Octotel back in the day, and I was part of the decision. Octotel was cheaper and had better line speeds, and could get us up and running sooner, so we went with them. What a giant freaking mistake.

 

[JustAnotherSouthAfrican]

I'm curious, @websquadza, who are the FNOs you should try to absolutely avoid and who are the ones that you will be rock solid with when - for example - moving house, or deciding on a new installation in your area

 

[Bionic]

I'm curious, @websquadza, who are the FNOs you should try to absolutely avoid and who are the ones that you will be rock solid with when - for example - moving house, or deciding on a new installation in your area

Openserve far more stable than metro for me

 

[Seeyou]

I'm curious, @websquadza, who are the FNOs you should try to absolutely avoid and who are the ones that you will be rock solid with when - for example - moving house, or deciding on a new installation in your area

From what I've gathered, Openserve is Nirvana, Vumatel would be accidentally driving into a less desirable neighbourhood and everything else is like driving into a raging forest fire

 

[PilgrimToHyperion]

I upped to the 500/250 package. The download fluctuates between 320 and 480, mostly on the lower end and the upload never goes above +-130. Is there something I should be tweaking? I'm mostly in this for the upload and the extra money for an extra 30Mpbs doesn't seem worth it.

WS to WS
WS to CI
WS to AK/TD

 

[Seeyou]

I upped to the 500/250 package. The download fluctuates between 320 and 480, mostly on the lower end and the upload never goes above +-130. Is there something I should be tweaking? I'm mostly in this for the upload and the extra money for an extra 30Mpbs doesn't seem worth it.

WS to WS
WS to CI
WS to AK/TD

Latency should be a bit lower - are you on Wifi?

 

[websquadza]

I upped to the 500/250 package. The download fluctuates between 320 and 480, mostly on the lower end and the upload never goes above +-130. Is there something I should be tweaking? I'm mostly in this for the upload and the extra money for an extra 30Mpbs doesn't seem worth it.

WS to WS
WS to CI
WS to AK/TD

Apologies for the late reply. Could you please log a ticket so the team can check this out for you?

 

[PilgrimToHyperion]

Latency should be a bit lower - are you on Wifi?

Nope, 1Gbit ethernet directly to the router.