Afrihost ADSL network problems explained
Afrihost CEO said in an e-mail to subscribers today (Thursday, 20 November 2014), that the top technicians and engineers from Afrihost, MTN, and a hardware supplier are working “around the clock” to resolve problems on its network.
This follows the recent announcement (and subsequent putting on ice) of Afrihost Plus, a new membership programme the Internet service provider (ISP) intended to launch today.
Visser said that the announcement elicited a very mixed response from subscribers, with negative comments about the ISP’s ADSL network flooding in after the details about Afrihost Plus were made public.
Responding to these complaints from subscribers about the poor performance of Afrihost’s digital subscriber line (DSL) services, Visser said that he wanted to explain what was wrong and what they are doing to fix it.
Accurate shaping equals good performance
“The traffic and bandwidth on our ADSL network is managed by devices made by a leading overseas tech company,” Visser said.
He explained that these appliances have unfortunately been behaving inconsistently over the last few months for an unknown reason.
“We have been working closely with MTN and the device hardware company over this time to try to get to the bottom of it, but the problem has proved way more challenging to solve than any of us expected,” Visser said.
After months of research & development by the unnamed company and weeks of testing locally, they deployed a software upgrade to the devices last week which was meant to improve Afrihost’s traffic management and — by extension — their ADSL subscribers’ experience.
“Unfortunately since the updates, for reasons we are not completely sure of at this time, these appliances have not been working as expected,” Visser said. “They are not classifying all types of traffic correctly.”
This means that Afrihost can’t shape certain traffic, such as certain types of peer-to-peer torrent downloads, Visser said.
Without being able to accurately classify and shape traffic on the network, Afrihost can’t manage the network usage as effectively as they need to, which Visser said leads to the network performing sub-optimally when it is filled to capacity.
“When our network is stretched to capacity our ADSL clients contend and fight with each other for bandwidth and thus sometimes get poor and inconsistent speeds,” Visser said. “It also means that there are times that their latency and pings are high.”
Gian Visser Afrihost
What is being done?
Visser said that Afrihost’s top people, network people from MTN, and the engineers from the unnamed device manufacturer are all working hard to sort out the problem as soon as possible.
“We have a whole team that is working from Afrihost,” Visser said. “An engineer from the overseas company flew in and is working with the top engineers from Afrihost and MTN.”
Afrihost has also tried other avenues to try and alleviate the congestion caused by contention on its network, Visser said.
“We have upgraded our overall ADSL IPC capacity by 3 Gbps over the past few weeks,” he said.
IPC, or IP Connect, is Telkom’s wholesale product that Internet service providers buy to offer ADSL services.
“To put this in perspective, when we moved our entire ADSL client base over to MTN two years ago, we initially had 4.5 Gbps in total for all our clients,” Visser said.
Spending millions more than needed per month
Because they can’t control the traffic on the network properly, Afrihost (together with MTN) is “literally spending millions extra” at the moment to try and give a decent service while they simultaneously try to solve the problem with the traffic controllers, Visser said.
“MTN have been putting in great effort to help,” Visser said. “They often get the short end of the stick and I’d like to use this opportunity to publicly thank them.”
Time to resolve
Bad news for subscribers is that Afrihost does not know at this stage how long it will take to resolve the problem.
“I am hopeful that we will all have sorted out the problem very, very soon,” Visser said.
Although they have top technicians and engineers from Afrihost, MTN, and the device manufacturer working on the problem, it is proving challenging to fix.
“I honestly cannot give you an exact time to resolution with certainty,” Visser told clients.
He went on to invite customers to come visit Afrihost’s offices to see for themselves “just how hard we are working to try and get this fixed.”
Visser said that their big boardroom has been used non-stop for at least 20 hours a day for the last few weeks.
“You will see a very haggard-looking, stressed-out team, surrounded by Red Bulls, empty Pizza boxes and other assorted snacks,” he said.
“We know this is causing pain and frustration so, if it is any consolation at all, please know that it is also causing all of us at Afrihost intense pain too,” Visser said.
More Afrihost news
Afrihost Plus details: how it works
Afrihost ADSL network upgrades – good news
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