Frustrated consumers have lashed out at local Internet service provider (ISP) MWeb, after an unplanned network disruption left many without international connectivity for most of yesterday.
MWeb confirmed it had lost the connection to its international bandwidth due to road construction damaging a cable at Buccleuch interchange. Both links to Midrand were down at the time of the break.
Reports of the faults started at around noon yesterday; however, MWeb said the connection was back up and running at 16:00 yesterday.
Despite the speedy recovery, consumers have criticised the ISP's handling of the situation, as well as the frequency at which these breaks have been occurring.
Posts on customer service complain site HelloPeter.com indicate MWeb had not been taking calls from concerned customers during the outage. One client complained that these types of outages are happening at least twice a month.
“MWeb has put in place redundant links on our network and, despite our best efforts, our international capacity went down yesterday for a short period. This kind of failure is definitely not a regular occurrence and 'category one' network outages have been limited since we launched our uncapped product,” explains Carolyn Holgate, GM of MWeb Connect.
“Unfortunately, an outage like this affected our ADSL customers and no amount of staff or planning can prepare for these circumstances. We immediately notified our customers on all our social media platforms and call centre IVR messaging, providing an estimated time to repair the fault,” she continues.
“We take these outages very seriously and a full investigation has been done from a technical perspective, as well as operationally to ascertain how we could improve our service delivery in the future should this reoccur,” adds Holgate.
Latency issues
ITWeb's readers have also complained of much lower latency since MWeb's decision to cut its transit links to local operators.
The ISP recently announced it would no longer pay a cent for local transit links and that any local ISP wanting to connect with them would have to peer with them directly.
Subsequently, MWeb has had to re-route local traffic through international networks and the affect on latency has been felt by local customers.
One MWeb customer argued that he had a 4Mb ADSL account that is barely reaching 128Kbps.
Another pointed to the impact this decision would have on the online gaming community: “Now the online gaming community will suffer as high pings on some servers will cause frequent disconnects and a really bad online experience.”
However, Holgate says MWeb's peering decision is not directly linked to low latency issues.
“Latency issues are a function of performance across many networks at a specific point in time. If our customers are accessing services or content from a network that does not peer with us directly, it may impact performance of latency sensitive applications.
“These typically include international gaming servers. These delays are measured in fractions of a second and for general Internet use is not noticeable,” she concludes.
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