Web Squad ISP

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Fcon_Vpro said:
My fibre line is less than a year old and has gone down 6 times. One downtime incident was in the region of 15 days. The others vary from a few hours to a few days.
This is vumatel trenched.

Now I'm in the fortunate position of having access to openserve fibre aswell but am really trying to avoid going Telkom related.

If you were me, would you stick it out with vumatel or make the switch to openserve?
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If you aren't in KZN, I'd say it's a no brainer - fibre on Openserve seem to be rock solid.
I've had a single outage in the last year and it lasted all of 2 minutes.
 
Fcon_Vpro said:
My fibre line is less than a year old and has gone down 6 times. One downtime incident was in the region of 15 days. The others vary from a few hours to a few days.
This is vumatel trenched.

Now I'm in the fortunate position of having access to openserve fibre aswell but am really trying to avoid going Telkom related.

If you were me, would you stick it out with vumatel or make the switch to openserve?
Click to expand...

In general, both are incredibly reliable and resilient networks. Don’t conflate Openserve with Telkom of the yesteryear, these are two very different companies…

I’d say it depends on the cause of these outages. Looking at breaks: If your fibre runs along a route that’s prone to being dug up (one example that comes to mind is Olivedale, where a tiny servitude caters for 3 separate services with both Vuma’s pop and a sub station sharing an identical servitude for some reason)- then outages will likely happen every time a new power/fibre cable needs to be installed. If the repeated breaks are a result of a temporary construction (eg, widening of a road and workers digging up fibres), then you’re pretty much sorted once that’s done.

Both Vumatel and Openserve (and others) also operate their pops with sufficient backup power (in general) as well as protected backhauls (mostly). This means PoP outages are less frequent than they used to be, and both operate great backhaul networks with sufficient capacity.

Fundamentally, a tree can fall on your aerial fibre from Openserve or a spade can hit your trenched fibre from Vumatel. We say this to FTTB clients and I’ll say the same to home clients, especially those who work from home, no SLA beats having a good backup plan; so if your budget allows, get both.
 
websquadza said:
In general, both are incredibly reliable and resilient networks. Don’t conflate Openserve with Telkom of the yesteryear, these are two very different companies…

I’d say it depends on the cause of these outages. Looking at breaks: If your fibre runs along a route that’s prone to being dug up (one example that comes to mind is Olivedale, where a tiny servitude caters for 3 separate services with both Vuma’s pop and a sub station sharing an identical servitude for some reason)- then outages will likely happen every time a new power/fibre cable needs to be installed. If the repeated breaks are a result of a temporary construction (eg, widening of a road and workers digging up fibres), then you’re pretty much sorted once that’s done.

Both Vumatel and Openserve (and others) also operate their pops with sufficient backup power (in general) as well as protected backhauls (mostly). This means PoP outages are less frequent than they used to be, and both operate great backhaul networks with sufficient capacity.

Fundamentally, a tree can fall on your aerial fibre from Openserve or a spade can hit your trenched fibre from Vumatel. We say this to FTTB clients and I’ll say the same to home clients, especially those who work from home, no SLA beats having a good backup plan; so if your budget allows, get both.
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How does a notice that starts on 10 August 2021 only get posted on 23 September 2021?
Also, according to your support I can only log a ticket after this maintenance window. I understand its a best effort service but potentially 7+ days of downtime is a little ridiculous and then still expect a customer to pay a full price.
In the past year on all of my tickets, I dont recall anyone mentioning the Olivedale servitude issue.

Screenshot from 2021-09-23 11-03-22.png
 
Fcon_Vpro said:
My fibre line is less than a year old and has gone down 6 times. One downtime incident was in the region of 15 days. The others vary from a few hours to a few days.
This is vumatel trenched.

Now I'm in the fortunate position of having access to openserve fibre aswell but am really trying to avoid going Telkom related.

If you were me, would you stick it out with vumatel or make the switch to openserve?
Click to expand...
Switch to Openserve, just don't use Telkom as your ISP. Openserve is cheaper, more reliable and probably has better support. I have had an open issue with my line with Vumatel for almost 2 months now, where they are dragging their feet, as they don't want to admit that they have capacity issues in my area. @websquadza can confirm and probably help you with the switch, and as far as I know, this is not rare for Vuma.
 
Fcon_Vpro said:
My fibre line is less than a year old and has gone down 6 times. One downtime incident was in the region of 15 days. The others vary from a few hours to a few days.
This is vumatel trenched.

Now I'm in the fortunate position of having access to openserve fibre aswell but am really trying to avoid going Telkom related.

If you were me, would you stick it out with vumatel or make the switch to openserve?
Click to expand...
If you're blessed with having more than one operator in your area and you're having issues with one of them then it's a no-brainer decision to use the other one in my book. They're probably cheaper too.
 
Fcon_Vpro said:
My fibre line is less than a year old and has gone down 6 times. One downtime incident was in the region of 15 days. The others vary from a few hours to a few days.
This is vumatel trenched.

Now I'm in the fortunate position of having access to openserve fibre aswell but am really trying to avoid going Telkom related.

If you were me, would you stick it out with vumatel or make the switch to openserve?
Click to expand...
Switched when the openserve-switch promos started
Discount and 0 FNO downtime to date? Hell yeah
 
My internet has been quite bad over the last few hours. Just WhatsApp and a few other things work.

DSTV Now, Facebook etc seem to be really slow and unusable.

Vumatel trenched, Durban

Do you think it's a vumatel issue or something else?
 
Fcon_Vpro said:
How does a notice that starts on 10 August 2021 only get posted on 23 September 2021?
Also, according to your support I can only log a ticket after this maintenance window. I understand its a best effort service but potentially 7+ days of downtime is a little ridiculous and then still expect a customer to pay a full price.
In the past year on all of my tickets, I dont recall anyone mentioning the Olivedale servitude issue.

View attachment 1153008
Click to expand...

Do you live in Olivedale - I didn't think to ask?

The Olivedale servitude is simply an example I've brought up and the first that came to mind, I lived in the area for many years (and saw the same issue wrt to Telkom's copper lines along Olive road) and until recently, is the area where our offices were based. Your issue isn’t related to this, rather cleaning up the pop.

We don't track all 1m+ homes, streets and areas on Vumatel's network and keep a list of problem areas. Your question was whether it was worth moving network providers and the example raised is purely based on knowledge of a specific area. Both networks have their pros and cons.

With regard to the maintenance notice, we did miss this one, apologies. We are looking at our internal processes with dealing with this to improve this.

This maintenance task won’t last the entire window. Individual lines will be down for short windows as cables are cleaned up. This maintenance will likely alleviate other pop related issues VUMA has had in the area.
 
JOEY_8 said:
My internet has been quite bad over the last few hours. Just WhatsApp and a few other things work.

DSTV Now, Facebook etc seem to be really slow and unusable.

Vumatel trenched, Durban

Do you think it's a vumatel issue or something else?
Click to expand...

Not aware of any issues in the region. Could you please submit a ticket?
 
websquadza said:
Do you live in Olivedale - I didn't think to ask?

The Olivedale servitude is simply an example I've brought up and the first that came to mind, I lived in the area for many years (and saw the same issue wrt to Telkom's copper lines along Olive road) and until recently, is the area where our offices were based. Your issue isn’t related to this, rather cleaning up the pop.

We don't track all 1m+ homes, streets and areas on Vumatel's network and keep a list of problem areas. Your question was whether it was worth moving network providers and the example raised is purely based on knowledge of a specific area. Both networks have their pros and cons.

With regard to the maintenance notice, we did miss this one, apologies. We are looking at our internal processes with dealing with this to improve this.

This maintenance task won’t last the entire window. Individual lines will be down for short windows as cables are cleaned up. This maintenance will likely alleviate other pop related issues VUMA has had in the area.
Click to expand...
I'm in Johannesburg North, so next door to Olivedale. So don't know if I'm served via Olivedale but based on support refering me to that notice, I'm making that assumption.

It's just frustrating that vumatel trenched always had the reputation of being the best fibre network, but in just under a year being with them I've had more downtime than in the previous 4 years that I had sadv and vuma aerial.
I really like the websquad network, but in order to get redundancy it means I have to sacrifice speed and probably half of my spend at websquad.
It means I have to consider something like MTN LTE uncapped so that I'm not affected by trees on openserve and apparently anything and everything on vuma trenched.
 
Questions being ignored - hope this additional transit isn't going the way of the fabled VPN :crying:
 
Seeyou said:
Wondering if there's progress on this @websquadza ? It bothers me on a spiritual level to throttle my downloads :)
Click to expand...
Seeyou said:
Questions being ignored - hope this additional transit isn't going the way of the fabled VPN :crying:
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Apologies, missed this. Still waiting on service handover, I was a little optimistic that they would do this this week.. Will update you once we start testing.
 
Anyone else in KZN on Vumatel trenched having issues? Internet is up and Speedtest looks fine but webpage aren't loading, steam friends list won't connect youtube infinite loading circle etc...
 
Savy561 said:
Anyone else in KZN on Vumatel trenched having issues? Internet is up and Speedtest looks fine but webpage aren't loading, steam friends list won't connect youtube infinite loading circle etc...
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Can you also please log a ticket. Seems similar to @JOEY_8’s issue. We’ll escalate to Vumatel NOC in the meanwhile
 
Singapore routes dead today @websquadza ?

Edit: I feel like there's a general degradation of service on international traffic today. Hard to quantify.
 
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