Okay to throw in my 2c - well maybe a little more than 2c - on this. And I have no real inside information and treat this as speculation shaped by a little bit of knowledge and reasoning:
Afrihost are an ISP and I believe they are licensed by ICASA as an IECS licence holder (by virtue of the Altech decision) which means they can self-provision and provide services but they can't to my knowledge build their own network -> if they were in a position to lay fiber then a dog would really be indispensable (because they can dig)
<- and are in essence dependent on players in the market who build and operate networks: in reality Telkom, MTN, Vodacom, Neotel, IS, DFA and sort of CellC (CellC having sold off their towers ...). They make their money by providing consumer services and while many of their clients (and probably the bulk of their revenue) are from business their relationship with businesses is as a service provider and the business is very often as "consumery" with respect to the Internet as your average grandmother and with respect to hosting there are other service issues that jack up costs. Ultimately they are by the very nature of the business very much facilitating middlemen.
Now even if licensing doesn't come into play for Afrihost to "build their own network" (mostly using components from the network operators) carries massive costs and risks and I am inclined to the view (again its based on thumbsucks as to the size of the market and so on) that the market segment of consumer national backbone networks is saturated between MWEB, MTN, Telkom and IS. Originally Afrihost used the IS network but about 2 years ago (or so) they migrated to MTN Business (which as I understand it is not used as part of MTNs mobile servicing network at all and was acquired pretty much as a full going concern). Afrihost do not purchase IPConnect from Telkom - MTN do. The migration to MTN gave Afrihost a massive boost to network capacity and allows for a lot more flexibility, it does however put them into a partnership with MTN.
So to the issue: ADSL services in the Cape appear to be a little (I don't know for myself as I am not using ADSL at the moment but my brother-in-law is having problems in Grahamstown) strained again. The simplest explanation is that Afrihost do not have enough IPConnect capacity however this is not necessarily the case and there could be a dozen explanations that include a faulty piece of equipment on MTNs side of IPConnect that causes major problems (I don't think that this is the case, but if it were ask yourself how the problem plays out especially if the faultiness is due to a lack of skilled staff ...). There are promises of more IPConnect going live today and this raises questions about when the capacity was ordered especially as it has been suggested that more capacity would be coming on stream quite a bit earlier than mid-April.
Now my gut is telling me that Telkom (Wholesale) is having massive problems with Cape Town and that there is a bottleneck arising between legacy networking and metro ethernet. This suspicion is based on the fact that not everybody using CT IPConnect is having problems and Telkom Internet seemed to have similar problems. My guess is that what happens is that you have an escalating domino effect and while extra capacity on the IPC might solve the problem from a user experience point of view it is an expensive solution that isn't actually addressing the problem - hitting a fly with a sledgehammer - which is particularly problematic if the IPConnect capacity is not fully utilized at certain times of the day. My gut is also telling me that there isn't the best of relationships between the MTN and Telkom wholesale guys in this part of things (as opposed to mobile
) and that there is naturally a lag between Afrihost committing to the boosting of IPC and MTN making a procurement offer and Telkom: these things can involve very expensive equipment and there have been work freezes and the big bump up on DSL access.
Also don't forget that there is a little fight about Telkom not reducing the IPConnect tariffs.
So from a networking point of view Afrihost is entirely dependent on Telkom who are not exactly forthcoming in giving information. On top of this they are entirely dependent on MTN and I imagine that there are very sensitive dynamics in this relationship. The bottom line is that I don't think Afrihost can disclose to customers details of networking matters that could represent disparaging Telkom or MTN and even if they could there is probably a management resistance to bashing other players. A deep part of Afrihost culture is being nice and Gain hasn't taken out a full page advertisement in the Sunday Times.
When Afrihost have cocked up on certain things they seem quite forthcoming and so on - even look at the vulnerability on OpenSSL - but they have been very opposed to saying anything bad about their upstream providers and if you will remember the IS days the notice would be in the form of "our upstream provider informs us ...". The moment Afrihost posts a network notice they are effectively saying that there is a problem with MTN and this probably means that there are service level agreement implications between MTN and Afrihost (I imagine there are downtime refunds and that sort of thing).
I recall a similar sort of fight about issue concerning the use of the Afrihost APN on MTN postpaid contract and the impression I got quite clearly was that Afrihost try desperately to provide as decent a service to the consumer without pissing on their suppliers and that their senior support staff have the problem that if they were to go out to bat for the consumer they could create problems with the B2B relationship. There seems to be a situation where a certain amount of provision fold over is not well addressed, I've chatted with Afriman on this concern of mine and I certainly think his attitude is in the right place. There is a massively complex balancing act and when you consider the incredibly tight margins things run on and the amount of risk Afrihost have taken on more than one occasions to bet on the consumer it is clear that you've got a company that is innovating in the market.
There is a very clearly expressed fear on this forum that Afrihost might have grown to quickly and might have for this reason lost its essence, another view is that getting hitched to MTN is a disaster. I am disinclined to holding either view to their conclusions but suspect there is a little truth in both: (i) the growth cycle has lead to gaps in customer support (not securing the right staff to the right level of training quickly enough) and the diversification has probably complicated things a little more than is ideal and (ii) MTN is well MTN and naturally there is a reason MTN who do not practice functional separation as a rule across the group have entered into a relationship with a service provider which really creates a retail / wholesale division; put differently there is a reason MTN are not their own ADSL service provider with hundreds of thousands of customers.
I think there is a need on Afrihost's part to come to grips (and be seen to come to grips) with the changing dynamic of the market and there is a very real risk of the company loosing the ground it made over years of hard work by failing to adapt at the pace they have actually set. I am quite sure that the MTN relationship is the cause of many more headaches than they'd like but it almost certainly was the best available option at the time of it being entered into. - They should maybe borrow Telkom's management consultants (or call in Jeannie van der Hooven
) because Telkom clearly are getting far to much consulting and there is no chance that the consultants can give the easy answer of retrenching staff at Afrihost. Also they need to get a dog.
