Numerous Afrihost ADSL clients have been complaining about slow speeds and high latency on their ADSL service, and the company’s CEO Gian Visser has explained that they are actively addressing these problems.
Afrihost recently moved their ADSL client base from Internet Solutions to MTN, which gives the ISP more control over their wholesale ADSL network. This move, said Visser, brought some teething problems.
“It was obviously a massive undertaking and there have been a few teething problems. Unfortunately there are still some issues that are affecting a small percentage of our users and I promise you that it is our top priority to resolve these,” said Visser.
“Afrihost, Axxess, and MTN’s tech teams are working (literally) night and day to get all the kinks sorted out 100%. “
The problems
The Afrihost CEO listed the following problems, with details about what is being done to resolve these problems.
The average latency in Cape Town has increased marginally (by about 50ms) as we don’t have a Cape Town IPC yet. However, we will be getting an IPC in Cape Town early in the new year which should remedy this.
The biggest challenge we’ve been having is with our Home Uncapped product. We are trying to ensure the best possible experience for each uncapped client – for this reason we do not want to throttle our users in any way. Instead we are focusing on prioritising protocols: This will give higher priority to real-time actions (such as surfing, e-mail, YouTube etc) and deprioritise non-real-time actions (such as torrenting) during peak hours when the network is at its busiest.
Visser explained that, at times, the protocol prioritisation has not always worked as planned which has led to intermittent congestion of the network and spikes in latency.
“However, I am confident that within the next day we will have solved this challenge and our user experience should be excellent again,” said Visser.
Gian Visser
Interesting stats
Visser also shared some interesting statistics with MyBroadband about their move from Internet Solutions (IS) to MTN.
The overall capacity of IPC we have available to us now as compared to when we were on the IS network is significantly higher.
While we didn’t know exactly how many Gbps of IPC our (Afrihost and Axxess) clients were using on the IS network (since they managed the network), we do know this: We are currently delivering 38.27% more GBs on average every day to our clients on the new network than we were a month ago.
Visser concluded saying that they are aiming to make their clients’ experience amazing: “I encourage any MyBroadband user who has not been happy with their ADSL connection’s performance to e-mail [email protected] with feedback and we’ll do our best to help”.
Article courtesy of MyBroadband – Afrihost ADSL problems explained
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Hey, Im a cape town based user – have a 4meg uncapped account. My line
is currently shocking. I know this has to do with the switch but if this
is only going to be sorted out in the next year I would either 1)
Appreciate a huge discount on my account because I dont get anywhere
near a 4meg line 2) Move me onto a different backbone or sort out my
connection personally – if those two option cant be met I will have to
leave Afrihost which I really dont want to do, but I cant work with the
service im currently getting – its affecting my work at home and
research I need to get done, and not to mention my gaming.
Also the PR that runs your fb page should be fired – she/he disabled me
from commenting on the page, deleted all my posts, wasn’t a help at all,
kept on giving false information to clients – that is one thing that
has really pissed me off, feel like my freedom of speech was revoked by a
company’s PR who thinks she/he can play CEO or GOD. Not cool at all