Afrihost subscribers, who have been experiencing connectivity problems in recent weeks, will take little comfort in the fact that the Internet service provider (ISP) admits it does not know when its technical issues will be resolved.
In a letter sent to customers, Afrihost CEO Gian Visser states "the honest truth is, I am not sure" when the problems will be sorted out. "I am hopeful that we will all have sorted out the problem very, very soon," he says, adding "top tech guys" from Afrihost, MTN and the device manufacturer are working on it, but the problem is proving to be challenging to fix.
Earlier this month, MTN received the go-ahead from the Competition Tribunal to acquire a 50% and one share stake in Afrihost, for an undisclosed amount. The mobile operator announced in June it was buying the majority stake to add scale to its local online ICT service offering, which is focused on the consumer and small and medium enterprise market.
In terms of the nature of the ISP's recent technical difficulties, Visser explains the traffic and bandwidth on Afrihost's ADSL network is managed by devices made by a "leading overseas tech company".
"These devices manage all the different type of traffic protocols (such as video streaming, online games and peer-to-peer torrents and downloads), at different times depending on how much capacity is available on our network.
"Unfortunately they have been behaving inconsistently over the last few months for some reason. It has been a tricky problem to deal with, because there were times everything seemed fine and we weren't sure exactly where the problem was."
He explains the devices' software was upgraded early last week to better improve traffic management and ADSL clients' experience, adding this was done after months of research and development by the unnamed overseas company and after weeks of testing locally.
Incorrect classification
"Unfortunately, since the updates, for reasons we are not completely sure of at this time, these appliances have not been working as expected. They are not classifying all types of traffic correctly. This means that we cannot properly shape some key traffic, such as certain types of peer-to-peer torrent downloads, because the devices are not always picking these protocols up accurately," Visser says.
"This, in turn, means we cannot manage the network usage as effectively as we need to, which 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. It also means there are times their latency and pings are high."
In terms of other remedies that Afrihost has attempted, Visser points out the company has upgraded its overall ADSL IP Connect capacity by 3Gbps over the past few weeks.
"To put this in perspective, when we moved our entire ADSL client base over to MTN two years ago, we initially had 4.5Gbps in total, for all our clients. Because of not being able to control the traffic properly we (together with MTN) are literally spending millions extra at the moment to try and give a decent service, while we're simultaneously trying to solve the problem with the traffic controllers."
Visser states he has tried to explain the problems "as best I can, but I am somewhat technically challenged".
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