Open letter to iBurst asking for a standard monthly subscription fee
Posted on March 2nd, 2010 by Richard Catto 189 views
I object to your wirelesss pricing structure as published here.
Specifically I object to your varying monthly subscription fee which starts at R35 pm for a wireless Start 80MB package and increases to R369 per month for a Wireless 15 15GB package.
If you compare this with ADSL pricing, Telkom charges a varying line fee based solely on one criteria: speed of connection. However, in your case, connection to your network is at the same speed regardless of data package chosen.
It therefore makes logical sense to charge the same monthly subscription fee irrespective of which data package is chosen.
I would appreciate you amending your wireless pricing structure at your earliest convenience to reflect the same monthly subscription fee across all your data package options, whatever you deem it to be.
A 15G account holder, such as myself, should not pay a higher subscription fee because I’m already paying more for the higher volume of data I transmit across your network. I should not be penalised twice.
Tags: iBurst
Filed under Internet Access, iBurst | 1 Comment »
Suspended three times by iBurst
Posted on November 14th, 2009 by Richard Catto 733 views
Since January 2008, I have been a subscriber of iBurst. The package I am on is called Xtreme and allows for 5GB of broadband traffic, when that limit has been reached, the speed is throttled to 64Kbps. The monthly charge for this package (including a desktop USB modem) on a 24 month contract is R639. I also subscribe to their iCall VoIP service which is R50 per month, for a total bill of R689 per month. My contract with iBurst expires on February 04 2010.
On Friday, October 24 2008 17h00 until Monday, October 27 2008 14h05, iBurst first suspended my account without contacting me first. When contacted on Friday evening, the support people at iBurst would not reinstate my account. I was told that I was in arrears and that the problem could only be attended to on Monday at the earliest. On Monday, it transpired after asking iBurst accounts department why the account was suspended, that in fact they had screwed up. We had to fax bank statements to them to prove that the subscription had been paid. Eventually they worked out that the error was wholly on their side and my account was reinstated.
Up until this day, I have never received an apology from iBurst for this suspension of my service over an entire weekend. Emails to them asking for compensation have been ignored. It is clear that iBurst doesn’t care about me, nor do they care about any of their subscribers. They do not care how much they inconvenience their customers. The lesson here is that YOU should not do business with iBurst.
On Friday July 17 until Monday July 20 2009 iBurst again suspended my account for being in arrears. The pattern repeated itself. iBurst failed to contact me to rectify the problem before it summarily suspended me. Support staff over the weekend at iBurst were wholly unable or unwilling to attend to my problem and restore my Internet access. Only on Monday once we were able to speak to the “right person” could the problem be remedied. Again my account was not in arrears. iBurst had erred again and suspended my account again without cause.
This time I didn’t bother emailing them to ask for compensation. I knew that they would ignore me again.
This past week, on Wednesday November 11 2009 after 17h00, iBurst suspended my account for the third time without contacting me first. Apparently my account was in arrears again. This time it turned out that their billing system had failed to debit September’s subscription, due wholly to an error on their part. They had put through the debit order for October and November (and received payment). It took them until November 11 to discover that September’s debit had not occurred and instead of contacting me to ask me to provide funds and authorise them to debit my account, they simply suspended my account. Because iBurst does not care if they inconvenience their customers. Contacting iBurst’s support staff after hours proved fruitless – none of them would reinstate my account.
The pattern should be clear to you by now: iBurst suspends accounts after hours, without having staff on hand who can deal with suspension queries, because iBurst doesn’t care how much they inconvenience their paying customers.
On Thursday, I was told that my account would only be reinstated once September’s subscription had been paid. Never mind that they caused this problem in the first place – that did not enter into the equation. Funds were duly provided, the debit went off, and my account was reinstated, for about an hour, then iBurst’s network went down. Support staff told me that my account was active, but their network was down. So after paying the subscription, iBurst couldn’t even deliver me service. The next day, Friday November 13 2009, I found my service active, but again for only about an hour, and then it went down again.
I was then told that my service was offline because I had exhausted my bandwidth for the month! While this was true (I have indeed used up my 5GB quota), my Xtreme account, which is the second highest account, is still entitled to remain connected at the throttled rate of 64Kbps.
If you are on a Giga package or higher, your service will be slowed down (throttled) to a maximum of 64 kbps once your cap is reached. – iBurst’s web site
I was told that an iBurst representative would call me back, but that never happened. Eventually, my account was reactivated without anyone calling me to apologise or notify me.
All these calls to iBurst’s support come at a price – iBurst does not have a toll free customer support line. You have to call 087 720 7200 and wait in a queue, while your telephone air time is eaten away. All because they screwed up.
iBurst is just as bad as Telkom, if not worse. At least with Telkom, you can call their support for free.
As I said above, my contract with iBurst expires on February 04 2010. At that time, I intend taking my business to Neotel. I hope that they turn out to be winners.
UPDATE:
Nov 14 2009 19h30: After writing this blog post, my iBurst Internet connection failed again in the early hours of Saturday morning. When I called iBurst support I was again informed that I had no access because my bandwidth was exhausted. The support personnel could not be made to understand that despite this, I was still entitled to remain connected at the throttled rate. They simply refused to help me. So in desperation to get their help, I added 3000MB to my account at a cost of R499. This I did via the iBurst.co.za web site which is the only site my iBurst connection could access. I again called Support and they were just simply unable to help me. This is because iBurst deploys support personnel who don’t know how to do their jobs.
At around 17h00 today I tried again to access the Internet and saw that I was still offline. Eventually, after numerous calls to iBurst support, someone called Jacky called me back and told me that she had reset my account by suspending it and then reactivating it. She asked me to switch my computer and iBurst modem off, bring it back up and then try logging in again. This worked and I am now reconnected. However, I do not consider this to be acceptable service. iBurst completely screwed up my connection this past week and I have been offline for most of this week as a result, which means that I have been completely unable to do my work, which is all conducted online. Furthermore iBurst does not provide a toll free support line so getting their mistakes corrected costs me a lot of wasted phone time. Finally iBurst does not train their technicians to know how to do their jobs. I was incorrectly told that I needed to purchase more bandwidth. If only one person at iBurst knows how to fix things, then they are doing it wrong.
My conclusion remains the same – I refuse to put myself through the wringer with iBurst for another month longer than the contract I have with them says I must.
UPDATE:
Email to both Sandra Smit and Shaun Green of iBurst asking for compensation have been ignored.
Lest you think I am the only person afflicted with an iBurst connection, here’s another South African blogger who received similar treatment. It seems to me that South Africans cannot run a First World quality Internet or telecommunications company. Maybe we’re just too pathetic to do anything right?
Tags: iBurst, Neotel
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DeathWatch – notable web sites that have died
Posted on October 27th, 2009 by Richard Catto 394 views
Like me, there exist many people who have a morbid fascination with the demise of web sites they once regularly used, read or visited. I recently discovered Archive Team which keeps track of online mortalities. Their Death Watch page, which lists web casualties, makes for fascinating reading. Yahoo features frequently on the page due to the large numbers of Yahoo sites recently shutdown.
What brought this topic on? After a long hiatus, I decided to go back and revisit my old Yahoo 360 blogs that I had created back in 2006, only to discover that the whole of 360 had been wiped out by Yahoo! They didn’t bother to migrate them to my profile, because that was supposed to be done by me. Yahoo did send me an email to this effect on June 30 2009 notifying about this, but they neglected to copy the message to my gmail address, even though I had indicated in my yahoo profile that my gmail address was my primary email address! I have never used my yahoo email address for anything. So all my 360 data is gone for good. Oh well.
Yahoo has recently gone on a crazy shutdown spree, wiping out huge portions of the Internet that they used to control, like GeoCities, for instance. There’s a fascinating article about the origins of GeoCities here. The real story in the article was how badly Yahoo mismanaged that valuable online real estate, and now they’ve just shut it all down, obliterating huge amounts of legacy web sites. The Archive Team tried their best to back it up and mirror GeoCities before Yahoo pulled the plug yesterday, October 26 2009, but guess what? Yahoo refused to assist them in any way to archive the data! Now that’s just mean!
Another site on Death Watch that caught my attention was ma.gnolia.com. Magnolia was a popular social bookmarking site like Delicious or Reddit. It was launched in 2006 and died in a single day on January 30 2009 when all data was lost due to disk failure. The crazy thing was that the owner self-hosted the 500GBs of user created data and had no useable backup. The service is being relaunched now at gnolia.com and is by invitation only. The owner has apparently learnt his lesson and will be using all the data redundancy hosting services that money can buy this time around. This post sums up what went wrong at Magnolia.
One local web site that I used to enjoy reading on and off was tashitagg.co.za. (also tashitagg.com). If you do a search on Wikipedia for tashitagg, you’ll find 6 different articles have a reference link to a tashitagg article, none of which are still accessible, which is a great shame. Tashi Tagg, and her husband, Luke, created tashitagg from their home in Kenilworth, Cape Town. It was originally centred around the first South African Big Brother reality TV show. It gathered a large readership from being ranked high for that show and went on to discuss a whole slew of other reality TV programs, such as The Amazing Race.
Luke wrote a no-holds barred column called The Daily Smoke (link goes to archived site) which was often entertaining reading. As TashiTagg grew, they decided to add blogs to their original site, which also had very active forums. However, I believe the blogs feature proved its undoing as they allowed it to completely takeover the site and ultimately led to a large falling out with their audience over an argument over who owned the copyright to material posted. Tashi and Luke Tagg clarified the issue by telling their contributors that all the content they had added in the blogs didn’t belong to the authors, but to Tashi Tagg, at which point, many blogs were promptly erased and many members departed in anger. That crucial misstep by the owners ultimately led to the disbandment of tashitagg, both of whom now edit tvsa.co.za.
What dead sites do you miss?
Tags: Dead web sites
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rpxnow, openid and this blog
Posted on September 5th, 2009 by Richard Catto 1,845 views
One of web 2.0’s great annoyances is the growing multitude of accounts one accrues whenever one signs up for yet another new online service / web site. In fact it is sheer madness.
What would be so much easier is to have one Internet account that logs you into every darn thing you use. This is an idea that first occurred to me nearly a decade ago, but only in recent years has that problem been addressed via OpenID and something called OAuth, which I will explain in layman’s terms in a second.
Each WordPress blog has a user database and a registration facility that can be turned on or off depending on the blog owner’s preferences. So if you are an avid follower of many blogs and you registered with them all (which has certain benefits, including the ability to edit your own comments) you could very swiftly amass a lot of new accounts which you would need to keep track of somehow. If you throw in all the other sites that you register accounts for it’s not inconceivable to have literally hundreds of accounts all over the web, some of which you have probably completely forgotten about. I am definitely in that category. I’ve signed up for so many services and sites over the years that I can’t even remember some of their domains, let alone what username, password combination and email address I used to sign up with.
However, in the ocean of accounts that I’ve accrued over the years, there are some that I use on a daily basis. One such account is my main google account at which I receive all my email. That is the one account I use on a daily basis. So if that one google account could be used to give me access to all those other web sites and services that ordinarily I’d have to register for, then that would solve the whole multiple account problem.
A few years ago, such a protocol was created and we know it as OpenID, and you can go get an OpenID account which will allow you to access a lot of sites, however, for most people, OpenID does not offer anything except a login. If you create an OpenID account with claimid.com, for instance, you just get an OpenID login and a profile page. Big deal. It’s not immediately obvious to many people how that helps them further in life, and I agree with them. It’s much more useful to register a yahoo account or a google account which offers you a whole range of services including an email address. Thing is, both google and yahoo have now converted those accounts you have with them into OpenIDs. Ditto for FaceBook, Twitter, myspace and a whole lot of other service providers.
Each one of those service providers offers the facility to a third party web site, such as this blog, to allow their accounts to verify the identity of the person logging in. The third party site can then give them access to a profile it creates for that associated google or yahoo or etc. account. Of course, it’s not quite as straightforward as that. Each third party site owner needs to install or write software which handles the OpenID protocol and all the individual nuances that each different service provider adds to their account offerings. Into this breech steps RPXNOW with a service that unifies these disparate third party implementations of OpenID into a single user configurable service that makes the process of accepting OpenID logins from all the popular services much easier. In the case of this WordPress blog, all I had to do was install the RPX WordPress plugin and do some easy configuration to get this blog accepting OpenID logins.
The above image is what you will roughly see if you click the link to login. I’ve customised my login screen to show the six third party account providers that I think most of my readers use on a daily basis. When you use OpenID to login to this blog via OpenID via RPXNOW, you don’t transmit your account credentials (i.e. your password) to either RPXNOW or this blog. You only tell your provider, what your password is so that it can log you in, then it tells RPXNOW that the login was successful and because we trust them to give us the correct answer, we log you into this blog and allow you to modify your profile on this blog.
The important thing to remember is that your password is never given to anyone except the service provider that holds your account, which brings us back to the other topic of OAuth.
The alternative to OAuth is Basic Authentication which is the familiar username / password combo. With Basic Authentication, all access to a service requires that you hand over your password, even to a third party app, if you wish to give that third party app the ability to modify things on your account. But that is a big security hole and requires you to trust someone other than yourself with your password. So this is a problem and most users refuse to hand over their password, which is the best practise. So the problem remains – how does one allow a third party app to access your twitter account , for example, without having to hand over your password to them? OAuth was designed to address this problem.
When a third party app uses OAuth to access your twitter account, for example, what happens is that you are sent over to twitter to sign in. Again the only party receiving your password is twitter. Once twitter has logged you in, it then presents to you the request from the third party app to allow it either Read only access or Read-Write access. The latter is more common because then you would be allowing the third party app to send a tweet to your twitter account. This all happens in a context of you wanting a third party app to have access to your twitter account so that information from that app is published on your twitter account. If you didn’t want to accomplish that, you wouldn’t grant access to the third party app. When you tell twitter to grant the third party app access, you again are not giving it your password, instead it is given a unique token which is only valid for that app for your twitter account. So the effect is that it strictly limits the app to doing only what you want it to do. If you gave the app your password, as Basic Authentication does, you would be giving it unlimited power to your account and not only it, but potentially anyone else that got hold of the password. The OAuth token is good for only one app to access it, and that is tied to a domain. The token does not expire, but can be revoked at any time, giving you complete granular control.
Some people prefer to look at pictures to understand something, I prefer words, but just so everyone is catered to, here is a pictorial guide on what I just explained in words.
The point of this discussion was to introduce my readers to OpenID and OAuth as two important new web technologies that you can expect to encounter more often now and to help you to understand them and to know how they benefit your online experience. Do not be afraid or wary of them – they are useful tools! Feel free to test OpenID out on this blog by logging in with your favourite third party online account. You will discover how easy it will make registering and logging on to new services and sites.
If you have any further questions you need answering, post them below and I will endeavour to clarify further.
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Domain Name System (DNS) tweaks
Posted on December 24th, 2008 by Richard Catto 856 views
The Domain Name System has been the way we use the Internet since 1983. The underlying protocol of the Internet, TCP/IP, identifies each device attached to the Internet by one or more IP addresses which are difficult for people to remember and do not describe the nature of the device.
DNS assigns a hierarchical name to each device. Prior to DNS, a central HOSTS.TXT file was used which listed all the devices attached to the Internet. Whilst the Internet comprised a small set of devices, this system sufficed but it does not scale beyond a few thousand devices. After that the database simply becomes too massive.
The DNS system allows a name to be attached to IP addresses, so that one can type in a domain name instead of a dotted quad IP address (IPv4).
An ISP or web hoster usually supplies their subscribers with at least two IP addresses which represent the nameservers you use to do DNS lookups. However, not all nameservers are created equal. Some are faster than others, some are more accurate (because they update their caches more frequently).
Since July 2006, a totally free DNS service has been available for anyone connected to the Internet to use in lieu of the ones their ISP or web hoster gives to them. It’s called OpenDNS and it offers much more than simply domain name resolution (the process of translating a hostname into an IP address).
OpenDNS also allows subscribers to filter out harmful sites and sites not suitable for minors. To use OpenDNS, simply substitute the IP addresses of their publicly accessible name servers for those supplied to you by your ISP. Instructions for setting up PCs and routers are available on their site. You may also create an account with them which allows you access to more advanced features and stats.
For people with dynamic IPs, which includes most people connecting to the Internet via an ISP, OpenDNS has a utility, OpenDNS updater, which will automatically update your OpenDNS account with your new IP address whenever you are assigned a new one. This allows you to track your stats and keep your settings across multiple IP addresses.
OpenDNS is fast, accurate and reliable. It definitely enhances one’s Internet experience. However, there is another issue to look at too.
Since Windows 2000, Windows also runs a local DNS cache on your PC which by default takes too long to refresh itself, because it’s TTL (Time To Live) value is set to 24 hours, which means that if a site gets a new IP address, you will not be able to resolve it’s new value until your local Windows DNS cache has expired.
Windows provides a way of shortening the TTL by setting new values in registry parameters. You can add these parameters in yourself using the built in Windows tool, regedit.
Instructions on what parameters to change and how are provided in this Windows Help and Support page:
How to Disable Client-Side DNS Caching in Windows XP and Windows Server 2003
I set my TTL value to 4 hours for postive responses and to 0 hours for negative responses and I can tell you it made a difference. If you are registering new domains or transferring them between servers, you definitely want to change your default TTL values or you will be frustrated to discover that while the IP address changes have propagated to most people, your local Windows DNS cache still retains the old values.
Tags: DNS, OpenDNS, TTL
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