More bye than ‘Hai’ as Liquid Telecom internet service slows down
Hai Telecommunications, a retail outlet of internet service provider Liquid Telecom, has been depressing customers of late with the slow speeds being experienced on the network the past few weeks.
Last week a test using speedtest platform Ookla showed speeds of UL/DL at 8/1 mbps. Today they are at the figures below, with the result showing that it’s faster than 75% of Zambia. What?!
A complaint was logged in last week, a representative called back and said the issue is affecting more customers but a ticket has been raised on our complaint and they will ‘look into it’.
See the problem is, businesses are running on the need for internet. Having no (or slow) access hinders productivity. The main ISP raises the issue of a business having to find alternative providers, increasing the cost of business for many; data bundles may have to be bought so that employees may access their work.
There is no formal statement on the issue, which is a bit unprofessional especially for a firm that knows the complaints are coming from many customers. There is a need-to-know basis for every PAYING customer as to why they are not getting their money’s worth. There is a need for Hai, Liquid Telecoms, and other providers to adhere to their service level agreements, and not give vague responses to questions asked.
There needs to be a shift from playing the blame game on the consumers. ‘You’re downloading too much!’ ‘You’re too many!’
Are you kidding me?!
An insider familiar with the situation says there may be a bigger issue going on with Liquid Telecom but could not share details of exactly what it is because you know, secrets… *sigh*
Hi, this is very interesting to know, i have always wondered whether they give dedicated internet service or its shared.
one point of correction on the sentiments above, (speedtest platform Ookla)
when you are using Ookla, its uses or rather points your to the most nearer servers around your region.in zambia we have only three servers MTN server, Zamtel and Africonnect. these service providers has what we call Internet Exchange, so insteady of you getting test to a USA server when you are locally, it will by default direct you to the local server, unless you wish to chose another server,,,,,,so to clear the air it doesnt mean that when you use the server availabe then thats your break-out like mentioned above….
hope to sufficiently informed anyone.
HAI offers various services to suit different budgets. There are shared services and dedicated services and the pricing for these services will differ. On the shared service expect to slow down during peak hours when everyone else is online. If the customer is prepared to upgrade to dedicated service that can be arranged and you will test and experience your full allocated bandwidth.
If you require an upgrade to a dedicated service please visit our offices located at pangea park and a sales advisor will be on hand to take you through your options.
Ookla picks the closest speed test server on the basis of ping, geo-location of your IP address (which is often a bit of a black art on the internet and not always 100%) – as well as from its own historic metrics of which servers work best for which networks.
It doesn’t strictly mean that the traffic is officially “breaking out” in zimbabwe – it just means that for one reason or another the ZW speedtest server has been detected to give best results, either by ping times or from historical testing data.
It may also be due to internal routing in zambia making the other speedtest servers appear slower or with higher ping times etc. I know testing from ZW to Zambia some of the speedtest servers are really bad in terms of Ping RTT and some are what might be an expected RTT for the distance covered
The only way to check where your internet goes through really is traceroute to something like facebook or twitter and inspect the hops.