Afrihost Air Mobile network down — fixed-LTE also hit
Afrihost Air Mobile’s network was knocked offline by a problem with its MTN access point name (APN) on Thursday morning.
The ISP has sent Air Mobile and fixed-LTE subscribers an SMS stating that it was attending to a fault affecting its APN services, which run on MTN’s network.
Not all Afrihost’s fixed-LTE customers are affected — only those that run on MTN’s network. The ISP also resells Telkom fixed-LTE products.
It directed customers to its Network Status page for updates.
At the time of publication, a message on the status page describing the problem said Afrihost was having a “high impact” issue on mobile and LTE services.
“We are investigating reports of no connectivity affecting clients on the Afrihost APN Network. We are working on identifying and resolving this issue as quickly as possible,” Afrihost stated.
In its most recent update, Afrihost said it was “working closely” with MTN to resolve the issue.
In simple terms, the APN is the name of a gateway between a carrier network and computer network. It allows a mobile device to establish a connection with the Internet.
Below is the message on Afrihost’s status page describing the problem with mobile services.
MyBroadband asked Afrihost for comment on the outage, but it did not immediately respond to our query.
The ISP recently launched a new uncapped Air Mobile package at R497 per month.
The shaped offering comes with a fair usage policy that limits speeds upon reaching certain usage thresholds, which is implemented as follows:
- Up to 100GB — “Full speed”
- 100GB-150GB — Download speed capped at 8Mbps
- 150GB-200GB — Download speed capped at 4Mbps
- Over 200GB — Download speed capped at 2Mbps
Early testing by MyBroadband has shown that the package does not throttle users after reaching these thresholds.
However, it was unclear whether the outage was related to this issue.
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