iBurst USB Modem falls apart again

I got my first nasty surprise from iBurst in 2010 when I saw they were sharing my files on the Internet. Before the 2 year contract was up, the modem had fallen apart. It turns out they only offer a one-year warranty on the modem, even though they spread the payments for the modem out over 2 years. I'm sure this is illegal.
I managed to buy a second-hand replacement USB modem for cash, and now that too has fallen to pieces. The USB plug works itslef loose, and the cables inside break and/or wear out. Its a really bad design. Almost as bad as the speed of the iBurst wireless service, which is abysmal. I cannot recommend their service to anyone, and have warned people against it in the past.
When I phoned to terminate the contract they offered me a new modem with a new 2 year contract. I declined. Fool me once ...

iBurst taught me a lesson I won't forget

I'm not a conspiracy junkie, so I don't believe there are a bunch of malicious plotters at iBurst wondering how they can frustrate me next. If they were, they'd be using their champagne budget to good effect right now. No, this is a tale of a big company that has lost its way. And I doubt if their CEO will ever read this because he is part of the problem, and he should be fired.
iBurst is an ISP in South Africa. They are were owned by Vodacom, the largest cellphone operator in the country. They "compete" against Vodacom's own 3G offering, and appear to operate independently. One thing they share: their call centres are both worse than useless. But there are three parts to this story: support, accounts and publicity.
In spite of all assurances to the contrary, the turnaround/response time on support is one week, or longer. When I decided to get an iBurst account, I contacted them via their web site, and asked them to call me. After a few days I gave up waiting and went to their offices to speak to someone in person, because I don't see why I should pay their exorbitant phone rates: dialling their 0877 contact numbers are more expensive than calling another cell phone. Only phone sex and international dialling costs more. R3.37 per minute to wait on hold for 10 minutes is not much fun.
The people at their accounts reception were quite helpful, and even kept my ID book for me when I left it behind. Nonetheless someone managed to mis-type my name and to incorrectly put my postal address as my physical address as well. So now I have to tell the support engineers that my physical location is not Cresta, but Emmarentia. Not that this helps.
The initial installation was a miserable failure. I was stuck with an awful "control panel" that doesn't work, and the connection kept dropping because the PC we used was too slow. Of course there is nothing on their web site about correct installation, or things to check. So their helpline is overloaded with the same query over and over again. And management is either too lazy, out of touch or incompetent to fix this.
Eventually I took the machine in to their offices and then a competent technician attended to the problem, after I had already paid an extra R300 for an extra antenna that I don't need. I keep the antenna so they can't wriggle out of fixing the problems with some half-baked excuse about reception quality.
They showed me how to set up the software on my Windows Vista laptop, basically telling me to ignore the default setup instructions and just install the two drivers from the CD. At least that works. I guess no-one would think of putting that info on their web site either, or bother to advise users of Outlook, Outlook Express or Windows Live Mail to uncheck the "disconnect when done" button. I have already written about the iBurst security problems which they have still not addressed.
When I set up Cara's Windows 7 laptop I forgot to uncheck the "disconnect when done" button, because after all it's a permanent broadband connection, right? Wrong. It's a dial-up connection, with the sluggish response times of radio/WiFi to prove it. My experience with MyWireless had taught me the difference between copper and radio "broadband".
The next problem was an issue of bandwidth: I thought 1GB per month would be fine, and then added an iCall facility to allow her to make phone calls. But that turned out to be a lame duck because the call rates to and from an 0877 number are worse than cell phone rates, plus it uses up bandwidth, when it works. The SIP software isn't intuitive to set up either.
I found out about their "unlimited" bandwidth option on the web site, and the account department was super-efficient about billing me for it immediately. I guess they are empowered to add items to the account without any problem.
So now I was paying double to get a better bandwidth package, and since Cara was using Skype instead of iCall I gave up on the iCall system and asked them to cancel it in August. Not so fast. They would have to "request" a cancellation because they are not able to do it directly. And I would have to pay for the full month, and there was no talk about refunding the unused call money.
Several weeks later I realised that nothing had been done, because they were gearing up to bill me in advance for my October "use" of iCall. I phoned to complain, and followed it up with an email to point out that under no circumstances should they bill me R457 at the end of September, but only R407.
Of course they ignored all of this and billed me R457, so I lost my sense of humour and started shouting. I asked to speak to the Accounts department manager, who not only has not taken any of my calls, but refuses to even reply to my emails. She should be fired too.
This is where the lesson comes in: if you want them to do anything, then join their Facebook page and complain about it in public. Then make the same complaint on Twitter. The Twitter responder then asks you to email your request to twitter@iburstgroup.co.za. Not that this helps, but they then "escalate" the "request" without actually doing anything. Then they followed up to ask if I had been "helped", so which I explained that nothing had actually changed yet. I had done a little "escalating" of my own, demanding a refund for both September and October, plus the remaining iCall credits: R125 instead of the original R50.
I also received an email to say that my "escalated request" had in fact been processed, not that they could tell me what had been done. It took another round of escalations to find out what had been done.
I also emailed accounts@iburstgroup.co.za to inform them that I would no longer be paying by debit order, since they had taken the wrong amount out of my account, and an "accounts consultant" sent back the following impersonal pre-written template reply:

Good Day
Thank you for contacting the Iburst accounts department, we value your email to us. Please note that as an individual we cannot remove the debit order option from our system, that we only reserve for our business/company clients. However if you wish for the debit order not to go off then a payment needs to be made into the IBurst bank account +-5 working days before the debit order day
Thank you for using Iburst.
Should you have any further enquiries please free to contact us on 087 720 2020, your call is important to us.

I was so pleased with this response I immediately posted the first part on their Facebook page. I have now been assured by a "Marketing Assistant" that my banking details have, in fact, been removed from their system. Time will tell.
As a programmer I analyse systems: both functional ones and dysfunctional ones. This is definitely a dysfunctional system: the call centre people are only there to take a message: they can't actually help. The message gets passed on to someone else who is either too lazy, too overworked, or too incompetent to understand or act on the message in time. You have to bypass or override the system by complaining on their Facebook page, at which point Marketing tries to do some damage control.
That's why the CEO should be fired: because it's management's job to prevent systems from breaking down like this, and clearly management is not doing its job. Does he even know about the 1 week response time? Does he know that the tech support people weren't able to tell me which tower I'm connecting to (for "security reasons"), or how many times a day I was disconnecting? Doesn't he wonder why the towers aren't shown on the coverage map?
Does he know how useless the accounts department is? Does he realise how little tech support information is published on their web site? Does he read the litany of (unanswered) complaints on HelloPeter? I guess the answer to all of this is no, given his response to other complaints, some of which have made the pages of Noseweek.
I'm a fast learner; I now know how to get things done at iBurst: send them an email, from their web site. Wait for it to be ignored. Then send a follow up email asking for a reference number. Wait for that to be ignored. Complain about it on Twitter (that gets the ball rolling) and then finally get it fixed by complaining on Facebook. What a bunch of losers. One day they'll put the "S" back into "ISP".
Update: As of September Vodacom no longer has shares in iBurst. There has been some useful discussion on the MyBroadband forums about this.
Update 13 October: Someone in the MyBroadband forums insists that I apply for "permission" to use their logo. So I have changed the graphic accordingly. I wonder whether they want Google Image Search to apply for permission too? Their skills at customer relations just got even worse than I thought it could possibly get.

M-Web 2, Seacom 0

SEACOM is an undersea cable that links Africa with Europe and Asia, when it works. It's also the primary bandwidth provider for my ISP, M-Web. Right now it's broken. This is the second time this year, and it will probably remain broken for the semi-finals and finals of the FIFA World Cup. How embarrassing.
M-Web gets my thumbs up during this debacle. When the cable went down yesterday, it effectively cut all access to the rest of the web, including this blog, Google, news sites, etc. M-Web responded quickly, posting a network status notice explaining the problem, and within a few hours they had alternative connectivity in place.
Last time the cable went down, M-Web sent a letter of apology to its customers and promised to have more effective plans in place for any future issues. Clearly they have kept their promise. Viva M-Web, Viva! They were also the first ISP to offer uncapped broadband, and it works really well. Right now we're in "emergency mode" so some services are flaky, but the important ones are online, unlike other ISPs who have nothing.
Update, Wed 7th July: Telkom, that bastion of reliability and business ethics (NOT!) decided not to provide M-Web with bandwidth after all. They have an effective monopoly of the other undersea cable, SAT3, and decided to sell the bandwidth to someone else. So now ISDSL has bandwidth but M-Web doesn't. ISDSL's connectivity has been up and down like a yo-yo the whole day. And SEACOM is still broken. Eish!

iBurst boggles the mind

I just installed a new iBurst USB modem, and my first thought was from Dr Phil: "What were they thinking?" Do they really think it is a good idea to take up a third of the screen with a connection utility that doesn't have a Minimize option? Like I really want to stare at a large round bubble with a few buttons on it! it doesn't even look good, unless you like in-your-face orange circles with useless buttons around the edge. It's hideous after 5 minutes.
But my bewilderment turned to horror when I inspected the network connections on the Windows XP box. Both "File and Printer Sharing" and "Client for Microsoft Networks" protocols are enabled by default, even though it violates their own Acceptable Use Policy. Do they really not have any idea how insecure this is? Are they determined to allow worms and malware to spread among their users through insecure file sharing? The mind boggles.
Worms like Conficker use weak passwords in shared folders to spread. This usually happens in a LAN because file sharing to the internet is correctly disabled. But in the case of iBurst, internet file sharing is not disabled. If a user has allowed the firewall to permit file sharing, thinking this would only work on the LAN, he is in for a nasty surprise.
So my warning to all iBurst users is this: disable both "File and Printer Sharing" and "Client for Microsoft Networks" protocols on the iBurst PPoE network connection and the additional LAN connection used by the iBurst Terminal, whatever that is. You really do not need anyone on the internet to see your shared files or your Windows login information. Just remove the checkboxes for "File and Printer Sharing" and "Client for Microsoft Networks" and reboot to make sure. Then check your firewall settings very carefully if you have "File and Printer Sharing" excluded. Only enable it if you really need to share files or a printer on your LAN.
To make absolutely sure, go to http://grc.com and select "Shields Up!" from the "Services" menu. Make sure you are not giving out the wrong information to the rest of the world, including your iBurst neighbours. Then subscribe to the Security Now podcast.
Update Friday 26-02-2010: I spent 26 minutes on the phone to their "special" 087-720-1234 support number, at R3.80 per minute from my cell phone. From a land line it costs R1.07 per minute, nearly double the cost of a 0861 call at R0.65 from a land line. But if I had a land line I wouldn't be putting up with iBurst in the first place. I'd be using ADSL, which does actually work.
I'm getting 100% signal using an external aerial, but they can't tell me which direction the transmission is coming from, which is a great help. And I'm getting 7% packet loss from a ping to their DNS server. That's great. And my account shows 0MB usage, so that might explain everything. Except I couldn't do this from the iBurst modem, because the connection is so poor.
Update Friday 5-03-2010: Almost exactly a week later a I get an email from iBurst apologising for the delay, but still no callback. Funny, there is nothing on their web site about a lot of support calls or problems.
Update Monday 8-03-2010: Finally someone calls. They can't show their transmission tower locations on their coverage map "for security reasons". What a load of BS. I feel like they really have no idea what they are doing.
Update Tuesday 9-03-2010: Spent a very productive 2 hours at their head office. I took the PC, the antenna, and my laptop. The PC seems to be too slow, because the signal worked fine on my laptop. Time to buy a new PC. Richard is a very patient, thorough and professional technician. He explained to me that I don't need to install the iBurst front-end, just the iBurst Terminal software, and then use a PPoE connection. It all works fine on my laptop. I arrived ready to tell them to take their equipment and shove it. I left feeling that there may be light at the end of the tunnel after all. It's amazing what competence can do.

ISDSL "broadband" IS Darn SLow

It's high time that Internet Solutions put the "S" back into ISP. I can understand Telkom being completely useless, since they are a bumbling state monopoly, but Internet Solutions is part of a commercial organisation listed on the London and Johannesburg Stock Exchanges. So what's their excuse, apart from greed?
Take a look at the traffic graph above. I have a 384kbps ADSL line. In SA that's regarded as "broadband". It's Monday and I'm running 3 simultaneous downloads, two from Audible.com and a podcast from twit.tv. It's 4am in the morning in the USA, so these web sites are hardly likely to be overloaded. Yesterday I downloaded a similar audiobook from Audible, and the download went as fast as my line would allow, i.e the yellow line maxed out just above the green graph line.
Today, if I stop the podcast download, the graph pattern gets even slower, and the line runs at about 50% capacity.
I have queried worse performance than this once before, and ISDSL have been unable to explain why this is happening. They also can't or won't provide me with a proxy server that I can use. When I used the Telkom/SAIX ADSL offering, I could connect to dsl-cache.saix.net:8080 and podcast downloads would often go much faster, because the podcast was already cached locally. ISDSL have a bunch of "invisible" proxies, but they can't tell me which one I am connected to. This has caused other problems, for which they have been unable to provide a "solution".
Everyone said that when the Seacom cable was connected in SA that we would have more bandwidth and lower bandwidth costs. Clearly this is not happening, or the Seacom cable is already oversubscribed. My guess is that Internet Solutions wants to pay for as little international pipe as possible, and just screw their customers like Telkom does. In the past they blamed Telkom. Who are they blaming now? Their shareholders?

Update: I called the Telkom ADSL fault logging service, and they "recreated the port" and then during the next few minutes we logged 5 ping timeouts between the modem and its own gateway, 196.210.152.129. I stopped the pinging and ran the speedtest.net and pingtest.net tests, results shown here. 384kbps works out at 0.375Mb/s, and I'm measuring 0.32Mb/s locally. The technician reckons if I upgrade to a 512kbps the problem will get worse.
Update 24 Jan: Downloading books from Audible.com definitely works better on a Sunday
Update 26 Jan: Windows update at 10pm on a Tuesday evening is back to its usual nonsense.
Of course it's Microsoft's fault, and not the local caching server. That's why there is no "S" in ISP.
Update Wednesday 27: Still slow downloading 2 books simultaneously from Audible at 10pm:
I did notice that when I used Firefox to go to a gdgt.com page with plenty of pictures on it, then the download speed maxed out while the pictures were loading. So are they just sluggish with single or double download threads, but fine with, say, 4 or 8 download threads? The mind boggles.

Irony is lost on Telkom Direct

This is the Telkom Direct shop at our local Cresta shopping centre. If you walk inside the first notice you will see is the one that says "We are offline". How ironic. Telkom is the telecomms company that has exploited and ripped off the South African public for years, first as a monopoly, and now as the smug major player in the (declining) landline telephone market and the growing "broadband" internet market.
They tout the "success" of their Telkom Business product, and proudly proclaim how much fibre they are putting in to cope with the 2010 Soccer World Cup tournament. Now all they have to do is get the stuff to work. Reliably. All the time. I guess that includes their own outlets, like the one in Cresta. Of course there is no backup plan, or connection using a 3G mobile data card from one of the mobile carriers, or even their own WiMax service. That would require initiative and planning, something they don't seem to have.
They didn't have any forms I could fill in, and of course they just said "Come back on Monday" rather than offer to call me once they were back online. Telkom was never known for their customer service, or their data speed. The post office is faster.
Update 11 Jan: I called 10219 and ordered the line extension. Got a reference number 29340/43 and a scheduled date of 15th Jan. I said they must call before coming.
Update 15 Jan: They didn't arrive, and left a message to say they would be coming tomorrow. No contact number or name. Duh.
Update 16 Jan: Arrived without calling. I wasn't at home. Will have to reschedule.
Update 18 Jan: I called 10219 and they said that the job would be done on Thursday 21 January.
Update 21 Jan: Installation completed.