webafrica/metro fiber

[avanche]

Ive had this fiber for a few years now, everything was perfect untill last year in May, there was an area outage for 2 days.

Since then, fiber line drops constantly, sometimes 3-4x a day. It wont reconnect unless you restart ONT and router. Its taking up to 15-20mins just to connect half the time. Ive been reporting this to both metro and web africa since.

Metro support is non existent. Its just an endless loop of asking your ID, then you provide the info, they don't reply for 3 days. Then reply with "are you still experiencing the same problem?" Then dont reply again for 3 days. Then back to asking your ID for 200th time. In an endless bloody loop of wasting your time.

Web africa support is nothing but some fool sitting there reading you the same script on whatsapp, doing a re-profile and closing the ticket.

But it gets worse. As of the 3rd of January. Not only is the connection dropping constantly. Now during evening times from 6pm till after 11, My down speed to anywhere outside of SA, is less than 1mb. You cant stream from anywhere outside SA, you cant game as latency is 1k. So finally they had a "Senior technician" call me. Weeks of asking tracerts and pings tests, they proceeded to do another re profile, and ticket closed.

Same problems persist. However now im not even getting 250/250 during off-peak times. Now im only getting a 100/100 off-peak speeds along with the rest of the problems they didn't resolve any of.

Word of advice, if you are in the market for fiber, stay clear of Metro / Web Africa.

 

[saor]

Cancel asap. Absolutely pathetic company.

 

[Rickster]

Web africa support is nothing but some fool sitting there reading you the same script on whatsapp.

Sounds about right.

 

[PBCool]

Why not just move then?

 

[avanche]

Why not just move then?

Move where, different ISP, same exchange? There is no other line providers in this area.

Its not a priority to fix when its not affecting the majority of people doing email. wifi or phones, YT or netflix on local traffic. But we will see if its a priority for them to fix when taking this to their social media turning away potential customers.

 

[PBCool]

Move where, different ISP, same exchange? There is no other line providers in this area.

Its not a priority to fix when its not affecting the majority of people doing email. wifi or phones, YT or netflix on local traffic. But we will see if its a priority for them to fix when taking this to their social media turning away potential customers.

Are you making the assumption its the fibre provider that's congested? That sort of congestion would typically affect all traffic profiles.

 

[Brenvh]

Are you making the assumption its the fibre provider that's congested? That sort of congestion would typically affect all traffic profiles.

Nope it's definitely still webafrica's transit, right now it's fine surprisingly but every other night it's dead, I think it was dead last night. Getting around 1mbps internationally (openserve) I know a bunch of people on webafrica with different FNO's (mostly openserve and metrofibre) and they've all sent me tests and it pretty much affects everyone no matter where you are or who the FNO is, it's definitely webafrica/NTT and the only thing one can do is to switch ISP's, I don't see this issue going away, I remember having a friend on MWEB who would complain about this exact issue (this was a long time ago way before webafrica switched back to NTT) So it's been years and yeah...

 

[PBCool]

Nope it's definitely still webafrica's transit, right now it's fine surprisingly but every other night it's dead, I think it was dead last night. Getting around 1mbps internationally (openserve) I know a bunch of people on webafrica with different FNO's (mostly openserve and metrofibre) and they've all sent me tests and it pretty much affects everyone no matter where you are or who the FNO is, it's definitely webafrica/NTT and the only thing one can do is to switch ISP's, I don't see this issue going away, I remember having a friend on MWEB who would complain about this exact issue (this was a long time ago way before webafrica switched back to NTT) So it's been years and yeah...

We attempted to use NTT a few years back, but it seems to be a lot of sales that happens first.

Then post that they would attempt to manage the required upgrades, which with NTT ends up taking forever. So you sit for months with congested traffic.

IS back in the day used to be amazing for transit.

 

[cavedog]

We attempted to use NTT a few years back, but it seems to be a lot of sales that happens first.

Then post that they would attempt to manage the required upgrades, which with NTT ends up taking forever. So you sit for months with congested traffic.

IS back in the day used to be amazing for transit.

Same with NLD. They oversell so badly and then upgrades takes months or they just attempt to move traffic around to mitigate which doesn't last and makes things worse.

 

[PBCool]

Same with NLD. They oversell so badly and then upgrades takes months or they just attempt to move traffic around to mitigate which doesn't last and makes things worse.

Yeap, well with their NLDs they have some dark routes on some of the paths. But their backup routes are typically lit and so congestion occurs during failures.

 

[Brenvh]

I wonder what caused them to go down hill like that, it's unfortunate but not much one can do but avoid them I guess, I remember last year I think it was when some submarine cables died and webafrica or I guess NTT switched to seacom transit for that period, so for a few months we we're on seacom and it was amazing, which is interesting as people don't seem to like seacom here, but from my experience it was always 160ms to london from pretoria, max speeds, very stable, twitch never struggled. But I guess locally they still used NTT.

 

[PBCool]

I wonder what caused them to go down hill like that, it's unfortunate but not much one can do but avoid them I guess, I remember last year I think it was when some submarine cables died and webafrica or I guess NTT switched to seacom transit for that period, so for a few months we we're on seacom and it was amazing, which is interesting as people don't seem to like seacom here, but from my experience it was always 160ms to london from pretoria, max speeds, very stable, twitch never struggled. But I guess locally they still used NTT.

There is Seacom transit and the Seacom cable, typically the lower latency to London (even via Seacom, uses a West Coast cable)

 

[Brenvh]

There is Seacom transit and the Seacom cable, typically the lower latency to London (even via Seacom, uses a West Coast cable)

Yeah I remember traffic going to seacom in JHB <=> CPT <=> UK, so was definitely not the seacom cable which is east coast I think? With NTT sometimes I get 160ms but most of the time it's around 180.

 

[PBCool]

Yeah I remember traffic going to seacom in JHB CPT UK, so was definitely not the seacom cable which is east coast I think? With NTT sometimes I get 160ms but most of the time it's around 180.

Yeap exactly.