69mb

Three weeks ago, my butterfly connection started acting up more than usual so I decided to get the Safcom bambanet modem as a backup and the speeds just blew me away. I was getting 200KB/s while downloading Firefox and Opera and I could watch youtube videos in real time. In other words, I can download a 1mb file using safcom 3g in seconds or send/receive a whole bunch of mails in less than a minute, something that would take 10+ minutes using anything else available in the market, for the same price or anywhere near it.

So by the 24th of last month my mind was pretty much made up, I was ditching KDN’s Butterfly for Safcom’s 2GB bundle. I headed over to the Sarit care centre on Sunday at 10:00, with all the required docs(copies of PIN + ID) and was the first in line but spent 45 minutes at the desk filling in the order form and having it processed. Since it was a Sunday, the order could not be approved so I had to wait for a call from them to head back over, pay and pick up the sim card. I patiently waited for the rest of the week slowly eating up my ‘free’ 700MB. On Wednesday, they leave a message that I have to settle my post paid bill in full first then my order will be approved.

Thursday I headed over to the care centre at 4:30 and waited in line for 30 minutes. When I got the front, I explained to the rep that I had come for my data line and to settle my phone bill. She called some lady at head office(?) to get the order for the 2GB line approved and told me to wait five minutes. 10 minutes later the order was still not approved so she called back and was told to wait another five. 10 minutes later it was the same story so I told her I will wait till this week then come back. Meanwhile, people are waiting in the queue as we are playing the call back after 5 game. 45 minutes spent.

Today, I figured the line should be ready and got to the Sarit care centre at 3:30 to find 8 people in the queue ahead of me and only 3 reps serving us. I vumiliad in the queue for 1 hour before getting to the rep at 4:30. At first she could not find the order in the system but after speaking to the previous rep with whom I had made the order, she finds it. It still had not been approved and makes a call to the same lady that the previous rep was calling last Thursday and the wait five minutes for approval bs starts again. Me and the rep sat idle waiting for the approval while ~20 people are waiting in line. 20 minutes later she still could not find the approval and calls back and gets told that the 2GB bundle does not need approval and they can just process it at the care centre directly(!@#$@!). 5:15 the rep candidly informed me that even if I got the line today it will take forever, like in days or weeks, to get it activated. At this point I begun getting hints that she wanted me to leave and just come pick it up later. At first I could not quite understand why till I realized it was 5:30 i.e. end of the work day. I was determined to ignore any such ideas but 15 minutes later, after the rep really insisted that it could not be activated today and that I will not have to queue when I come pick it up, I gave in. I left 2hrs after I entered the place empty handed.

On the way home, stuck in traffic, I heard a safcom ad on Capital saying that Kenya is hot because its covered with the new Safaricom HotSpot product, 3G. I wish I could get some of that.

This is just completely unacceptable. I’ve spent 4hrs trying to get through what should be a very straight forward process. So I’m adding my safaricom stink on a new facebook group to publicize a problem that has gotten to a ridiculous level. So c’mon, show some pamojaness by joining the group and share your experiences, invite your friends to join, blog about the group, tweet the group whatever. In the end, if we make a big enough stink, Safcom might will act.

With that done, I’m also trying to figure out where in safcom to direct complaints. Any ideas?

06/06 EDITED TO ADD: So I finally got my data line today. A rep from the Sarit care centre called at 4:00pm and gave me some references numbers to use when paying(2,000/-). I got there at 5:40pm and there was no queue at all(phew) but I’d forgotten to carry the reference numbers with me. At the desk I just gave my names and she located the order, got the sim and I paid for it and left. 30 minutes total. Back home, at around 7:00pm, I tried the new line but it was not able to connect at all. Just when as I was about to tweet about the problem, I got a call from someone at safcom asking if the line was working and we spent 1:45hrs trying this and that before it finally worked.

Its taken 10 business days total to get the line and the whole experience was nasty. The people from safcom I’ve spoken with have been very apologetic about the whole thing and its cool but I hope safcom knows that this doesn’t seem to be an isolated occurence.

15/06 EDITED TO ADD: Ok safcom have really screwed me up. I found out that they put me in the 700MB bundle instead of the 2GB bundle! This might just be the last straw for me.

19/06 EDITED TO ADD: I’m tired of calling up customer care to follow up on the being put in the wrong bundle issue and I just don’t have the 2 hours to waste at their customer care centres. I’m completely stuck now. This is it, today I close the damned account, go back to Butterfly and wait for Wananchi to reach my area.

26/06 EDITED TO ADD: So on Monday, I got all my voicemail notifications for the past two weeks(!) and among them was one from Safcom on the 17th telling me that my line was ready and that all I had to do was pay for the 2GB. I did pay at lunch time Monday and till now the line is not active. Apparently they’ve somehow lost my payment and are trying to track it down. All I can say now is that something is terribly wrong at Safaricom. Terribly wrong.

27/06 EDITED TO ADD: For the past two weeks I have had to repeatedly call to have the wrong bundle issue sorted then Safcom lost the payment I made on Monday. I think my line is finally sorted but not before a blasting of the customer care reps + their supervisor to get this done *today*. I got a text saying “Your GPRS line 710608516 is now on the 2GB Bundle plan. Thank You”. Is this what it takes to get any service out of Safaricom? Either be jerked around for weeks or serve a tongue-lashing and get results within hours? Today marks exactly 4 weeks since I applied for the line and what I hope is the beginning of an event free relationship.

30/06 EDITED TO ADD: I spoke too soon, again. I had barely done 100MB on Friday only to get a text on Saturday telling me I was over my credit limit! All I could do at this point was burst into nervous laughter. I mean I have tried everything from patience to a fault, firmness in my requests, persistence and finally resorted to rant and rave but it seems nothing will get safaricom to act. So Saturday I didn’t even bother calling customer care and just headed to the Westgate ‘care’ centre and closed the account. So, for now its back to my Butterfly connection and as for broadband, I’m hoping Wananchi will be in my area soon. Irony is, I had initially intended for this post to be a howto use safariom 3g in Kenya.

See part one & two.

So far things things are running smoothly. I’ve been able to complete a system update of about 200 megs,  pull down my podcasts (~70megs every other day), I’m getting at least 256Kbps for local traffic and the general browsing experience, though not spectacular, is comfortable. This is what a relatively busy day on the link looks like: 

I also got the 30 day subscription for 2,900/- through  MyISP. Compared to what’s on offer in the market, 2,900/- is  a heck of bargain given the service quality.    

 On reliability. The thing has been down thrice in the past two weeks: both Sunday afternoons and Wednesday evening last week.  I didn’t try calling for support but next time it happens I’ll give it a try and see how that goes.

Security. I’ve noticed that someone has been port scanning me but its nothing a good shorewall config can’t handle. I just drop all traffic initiated from the Butterfly end.

See part one here.

Figured out what was causing downloads to timeout after 2-3 minutes and sorted it out. To understand what the problem was, it is important to understand one aspect of the login process.

When you fire up your browser, you get automatically redirected to their portal page where you can select your login method: isp account, scratch card… Until you login successfully, you get short dhcp leases of ~2-3 minutes. I’ve been using the 200/- scratch cards which give me 12hrs of access and when I login, I get a dhcp lease of 12hrs. They also use these leases to disconnect you when your time is up.

What was causing me to get disconnected ever 3 minutes or so was that the linux box was the one acquiring an ip address via dhcp and it had a different mac address from that of the wireless interface of the ap which is the mac address that was visible on the Butterfly network. So even after logging in successfully on their portal, I wasn’t getting the 12hr lease and thus the disconnects every 3 minutes. To sort out this issue, I just set the mac address of the wireless interface to match that of inteface on the linux box and that was that. Doing the revers i.e. changing the mac address on the linux box to match the one on the ap’s wireless interface would not work since the wireless and lan interface mac addresses on the ap were the same.

Changing the mac address on the AP happened by fluke. I’d figured out that the AP is an atheros based device which is supported by the OpenWrt project, and I was already compiling the firmware(figured I need to get linux to change the mac), when I accidentally stumbled onto the factory menu in its telnet interface and found a command for changing the mac addresses. 

I was just typing random commands hoping(rather half heartedly) I could get some engineering menu and when I typed “admin”, I was prompted for a password and after a couple of attempts(1234, password…), I got in with password “atheros”. The command for changing the mac address once in the factory menu is “netifMac”.

Now I’m able to sustain downloads. I’ve tested by downloading the 45mb linux kernel from kernel.org and that came without any hitches. Download came down at ~13KB/s which is 128KB/s net speed. Below is are speed test results form testmy.net:

 Something else I realized over the weekend is that I was getting really fast speeds for local traffic. I was able to apt-get packages onto my linux box @131KB/s (1 Megabit) from the skunkworks mirror!  

AOB: Looks like I’m not the only one who has found it difficult to get the scratch cards. Many of the dealers listed on their portal page(at least the ones I’ve called so far) are no longer selling them. I’ve had to go to the KDN offices on Mombasa road to get them.

EDITED TO ADD: I could have sworn I had published this post. Anyway, it has something to do with the wp-database-backup plugin because it was doing a dump when I published this last night.  

As part of my search for a new provider, I tried a wifi isp(lets call them WISP) but that turned out to be another nasty experience on its own since I happen to be 1 kilometre away from their base station. I had invested in an outdoor access point which is sitting on a pole on the roof and it had been mostly idle till now.

The access point is a level one wap-1001. For some time I couldn’t get onto the Butterfly network despite their mast being ~70m away and in direct line of site. Someone at WISP had tried an unclean firmware upgrade on the wap-1001 which brought with it all sorts of strange behaviour. Downgrading to version 1.70 sorted things out. I can only use Butterfly if I have the ap in wireless client mode. Wireless repeater doesn’t work at all.

I’m sharing the connection on my network through a debian linux box with two network cards. One card is connected directly to ap, and the other to my lan. I have shorewall on the box and just plain old nat.

 Firing up my browser takes me to the butterfly portal page where I’m logging in using scratch cards. 200/- gives me 12 hours of access. There are options for isp accounts and I’ve been told kdn are offering monthly subscription for 2,900/-.

Initial impressions are good. Speeds are in the 128Kb/s range, no page timeouts, ssh to servers in the uk is good and no choppy sounds on skype(actually the skype call quality is fantastic).

One problem I’ve identified so far is that I’m unable to sustain downloads for long. For instance, when pulling down a 3meg file,  I get a timeout after a couple of minutes. I’m not sure whether this is a retarded AFOL-like move or just an artefact of the wifi. 

I’ll like to evaluate it for a couple of weeks then post a more comprehensive review but so far, I can give it a thumbs up. 

I’ve been mostly offline since September last year. Ok, I have Internet access at work or I could just go to a cyber or a wifi hotspot but its just not the same. I want access from the comfort of my home. I don’t expect much knowing full well that international bandwidth costs are freakishingly expensive. In fact all I want is that the link be usable and always up when I need it. Africa Online’s iBurst service, Infinet, fulfilled both of my key metrics, for some time.

iBurst 

It was August last year that I noticed some strange things. I would be surfing ok(the normal stuff, mail, feeds, pdfs) for some time then things would get so slow that even gmail wouldn’t open. I was certain it wasn’t signal strength since I had invested in the external antenna (after being with afol for some time I assumed this was going to be a veeerrryyy long realtionship) a couple of months earlier and their webmail was opening ok. I was getting 384kb/s speeds easy on their webmail; they give 3x speed for this. No one in the house was torrenting or doing large downloads either.I had not been using the link much for a few months but the other people in the house had been complaining about speed and I’d just assumed they’re expecting real broadband. So when I sat down for the first time and saw it for myself, I was stumped. I didn’t have the customer care number since I hardly and probably never even called them in the whole of 2007 and since the net was incredulously slow, I had no way to pull down the number from their website. Next day I saved the number on my phone and when I got home and the problem showed up again I got customer support on the line pronto.

Customer support was a complete waste of farking time. I got all sort of answers from “I need to carry out some tests” to “you need to get an external antenna”. Basically I was being bounced around until finally in the last week of August, fed up with the games, I refused to take any more b.s. answers from the guys and demanded to know what was happening. What came out was the most retarded thing I’ve ever heard.

It turned out, AFOL had some new policy in place. Customers who have downloads lasting for 20 minutes or more get caught by some system that slows down the entire link and it would remain slow for somewhere between 30mins - 3hrs.  This explains why when I would try to update my debian box of the skunkworks mirror(this is on the kixp so it is free bandwidth people) it would start off by maxing out my connection at 16KB/s and then eventually slow down to 200B/s or even timeout.On learning this I quickly checked every single document I put my signature to and the only thing that came close was their Fair Use Policy but that only affects users who are doing P2P, spamming or have worm infected computers and I fell in none of those categories. 

Last Friday of August 2007, I get a call at work. They guys can’t get to the net. The modem shows there is a signal but nothing (BTW, this was also happening a lot and it was some how related to the new policy). I call up the customer support guys, make some noise and the link is up within minutes(wth). After this I call my account manager and basically tell her that I am fed up with the shit they are pulling and if AFOL can no longer give me the service I’m paying for I want the account closed immediately. I got assurances that the problem was solved and they would send some people on Monday to check stuff out.

Weekend came and the problem was still there. That was the last straw. I just opened my mail, told the AFOL guys to close the damned account since they were no longer providing the serviced I had *signed* up for and was *paying* for. That was that and AFOL got into my personal blacklist of companies I will never deal with personally and professionaly again.

RIP Africa Online iBurst August 06′ - August 07′ 

The Long Road 

Initially I had intended for this post to be about the search for a new provider, and I have been to most of them, what is out there and just a brief background on what happened with AFOL but I guess I just had to get that out first. 

That bit about the search I’ll fork out into the next post. Later People.