[lugm.org] Adventures @ Orange ISP

[Nishal Goburdhan]

On May 18, 2011, at 10:56 AM, Jochen Kirstätter wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> absolutely not surprising!

oh, i don't know.  people fat-finger configs all the time. 
what would be more upsetting is if they didn't fix it.

> Although that there has been a new sea cable connected during Feb 2010, there are no real benefits for paying customers at all. Using MyT seems to be a very lame choice for internet except that you like the TV and movie package, too.

that's the LION cable, iirc, and it's for interconnections between the Mascarene islands only;  ie.  it doesn't really improve MT's cost per mb to the rest of the world.
as Mozammil says;  you don't really have CIR on home services.
complaining - at least singly - won't help...

what would help is if you collected a complete sample of 'complaints'.
one of the things that helped force the incumbent Telco back home into improving its service was consumer pressure.
http://www.mybroadband.co.za collected user data and experiences and, with the press, lobbied hard to improve services.
and although they whine a lot still :-)  the home users in ZA generally have a much better connection experience than a few years ago.

can you find -- or build -- something that'll grow to a (semi-)respected consumer front?
1,000 voices are greater than 1...

there are a bunch of ways to do this. 
 first, you need to explain to your (potential) user-base that your interest is in experience, and information gathering.
which it should be! 
so start a location, service purchased, speed, timestamp,.... questionnaire. or better yet, test.  
for transparency, don't get them to download something from your home - try something indisputable.
i'd say MT's ftp site, but i can't see one in DNS;  perhaps something from their website like:
http://www.mauritiustelecom.com/myt/pdf/guideMyTWatch.pdf   (a 22mb pdf)
map the local exchanges, and position the answers you've got from your survey to their respective exchanges relative to their distance.
(since one of the things that you'll have to deal with is MT saying that the distance and quality of the copper matters)
repeat for different times.   draw some analysis.
...that'll make a pretty picture - if you make it to the newspapers, they'd love to print that!
work out the expected transfer time for the file above.  check how that mean compares to the times that people report.
(don't forget to count in serialisation delays for the different sized links)
....
(of course, there's a lot more that you need to do - and tune, but you get the idea...)

the more i think about this, the more i see how this could be a really cool project for a bored CS student ;-)


there are several things that could benefit from having a respected, neutral, consumer-body present to the media.
for example, from my MT connection, a traceroute to www.emtel-ltd.com - what's supposed to be local - goes through Belgium.  
if someone could explain, in real money terms, what this costs the Mauritian economy i'm sure you'd find MT and Emtel under pressure to peer directly, making life sweeter for all of us...
if that same respected consumer group could politely ask why other Mauritian entities like SBM and Air Mauritius (i am sure there are more) don't host their content in Mauritius, i'm quite certain that public pressure will make the change, again, making things better for you.
and..well, lots more ideas, than i can type now...

i guess my question is - can the LUGM be (or grow) that respected neutral consumer group for IT related matters?
i think you could;  of course it's a lot of work, but then the rewards would be worth it, right?


> Emtel WiMAX and 3G data services are pretty stable compared to Orange (whatsoever named) DSL.
> You might use http://speedtest.net/ for sporadic tests of your access point. It's the standard test suite that AfriNIC uses to check Emtel WiMAX installations.

i'm pretty certain that AfriNIC doesn't check Emtel WiMAX installs, or anything like that.
but speedtest is still a good link.

--n.