Pass the Problem Packet with Telkom Fibre

<p>Last year in October after numerous Telkom sales solicitations I accepted their package and upgraded my trusty old Telkom ADSL package to a 20/2 Fibre package.</p> <p> </p> <p>During all the sales conversations I was assured that</p> <p>1 - Bandwidth was guaranteed</p> <p>2 - I would not have to deal with the actual fibre provider (in this case Vumatel)</p> <p> </p> <p>Point 2 was important for me as I come from an IT background and do NOT want to be caught between two vendor's service desks who both claim that their systems are fine.</p> <p> </p> <p>About a month ago I started experiencing bandwidth issues, with phone apps like Instagram failing to load images/movies and my work RDP sessions dropping.</p> <p> </p> <p>Over the last 2 weeks I have spent many hours on the telephone with both Telkom and Vumatel, resetting and reconfiguring routers, technicians checking backend systems to no avail. At the end of these conversations the technicians on either side usually recommend contacting the other company as "there are no issues we can see on our side" and "connectivity/data are Vumatel/Telkom's problem and we cant help you, you must contact them".</p> <p> </p> <p>I have established that the connectivity issues usually start around 4pm and persist until 11pm. During this time a ping eg www.cnn.com will resolve and return in a reasonable time, although I have had pings reporting up to 40% packet loss in a series of 10. However any attempt to actually browse either through a browser or using say wget http://www.cnn.com will not return data. Wget seems to have far higher timeouts and a better retry mechanism and will sometimes return a 5k page over a period of 20 minutes, where I suspect the browser times out.</p> <p> </p> <p>All this information and troubleshooting notwithstanding I now find myself in the position I tried really hard to avoid:</p> <p>1 - Broken connectivity</p> <p>2 - One vendor blaming the other</p> <p> </p> <p>At this point I am seriously unhappy with the Telkom service. Even though they bill me for the Vumatel portion, and stated explicitly in the sales interaction that they would manage the vendor, it seems like I am stuck in the middle, with no hope of resolution.</p> <p> </p>