UUnet dial-up infrastructure changes
How fun! The dial-up infrastructure provider my company uses decides to "improve" their service offering and they now start providing a degradation in service as their new improved service! And clients all assume that I'm stupid and stuff, seeing that dial-up product range has been sold by myself in certain cases to the majority of the clients. Also the world's largest global ISP who we outsource our dial-up infrastructure requirements to is UUnet who apparently carry over 40% of South Africa's local internet traffic and over 44% of the global internet traffic from what we've heard.
Well lets take a look at what happened today, which were all events outside of my control.
- The old 0860-883245 number vanishes off the face of the planet which so far has given me 3 phonecalls and having to explain how to change those settings on Apple's Mac OS 8, which I've now not played with in a couple of weeks. Luckly my unix dial-up box clients have been changed automatically by my perl script that checks for an updated list of phone numbers and makes changes to the ppp configuration file.
- Speed / latency issues caused by using the L2TP back onto their network from the SAIX NASes does not make life any better, seeing that there is way too much latency and slow download speeds.
- UUnet were providing the best dial-up platform in .za land since I have been using their infrastructure after my corporate account manager sold me on it. Yes I've been using various other providers at clients and their dial-up platforms have never really impressed me. It takes a lot to impress me. Yes back in the day where I could rock up at UCT and download at 2Mbit/s was like WOW! Yes that is over 6 years ago. UUnet's dial-ups were able to pull from local and international sites at an almost constant steady speed almost at full capacity. Users using 128Kbit/s ISDN have told me that they've been getting 15Kbyte/s download speeds. Now it's way down, and no one can tell me why!
- Recently my dial-up user doubled over a month and a half period, and now people who moved over because they heard about how sweet the dial-ups were are planning on leaving I'd presume, because of UUnet's service degradation, which I can do nothing about in real terms because I don't own the dial-up infrastructure.
Life sucks!