Mandla Ngcobo, MD of Accelerit, talks to an industry journalist about fibre:
There's a lot of exciting activity in the FTTH space. What's been keeping you guys busy at Accelerit?
Our primary focus in 2018 was to scale our network adequately to cater for the explosive growth we experienced. The growth caught us somewhat off guard, as we were relatively new in the fibre space with very limited marketing. Through word of mouth, however, we quickly realised that people had been waiting for a product crafted around their needs, and our prepaid fibre product delivered exactly that.
What were major challenges experienced by Accelerit?
Among some of the challenges we experienced were availability of IPv4 public IP addresses, as we do not do any natting on our FTTH network. Anyone who has dealt with AfriNIC (the custodian on IP addresses in Africa) of late will know that it's a bit of a lengthy process to get IPv4 blocks lately, but eventually, in December, we were assigned additional ranges.
There are still issues that we come across from time to time due to the fibre network operators (FNOs) being down. Reasons ranging from power cuts, fibre cable damages, road accidents affecting aerial fibre deployments and others, however, obviously affect all the ISPs when experienced. We try and push for quick restoration of services for our affected clients when these happen.
What have been the latest improvements made on your network?
We have now deployed multi-core network kit and servers at all the Teraco data centres (Johannesburg, KwaZulu-Natal and Cape Town) specifically to cater for the service demand in the regions, and to ensure not a single region is reliant on our national long-distance routes to the Johannesburg Teraco data centre for uptime.
Deploying servers and network kit per region reduced our NAP pings from 20ms to 1ms in Durban and Cape Town, making it easier and faster for our users to consume Google, Netflix and Showmax, etc, content. We also more than doubled our capacity on international transit, ensuring we run at a maximum of 60% at peak.
Overall, we've received positive feedback from our users on their experience; however, we work every day to ensure we remain providing excellent service always, and where there are slip-ups, we course-correct rapidly.
What can users look forward to going forward from Accelerit?
There's myriad value-added services we will be launching this year, all of them centred on customer needs. Accelerit already offers VOIP, Web site hosting and on-demand virtual private servers services on its platform. Our users access these services easily via their client portal and can activate them within a matter of minutes, any time of day. We will therefore continue with the automation of our services while introducing other services
What would be the advice you wish to give to FTTH users?
Make sure you keep those routers away from other microwave emitting devices to eliminate signal interference.
When testing for line speed, make sure you have full signal on your device if it isn't possible to test with a LAN cable.
Always check if your line speed is enough for your needs, as we find that with the advancements in technology, devices are consuming more and more data. Line speeds of 4mbps and slower just do not cut it anymore, especially for activities such as online gaming and streaming. Your experience won't be great.
Make sure there is enough coverage in your apartment/house, especially if you live in a multi-storey or big space. WiFi has inherent challenges as a technology, and these aren't ISP-specific. Also, if you can get a better router than the one you're provided with, then go for it; remember, our network does not restrict you to using our router only.
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