Internet provider Yayzi Broadband has been causing a spot of bother for quite a few of their customers this week after their plan to roll-out an “incredible network upgrade” resulted in a protracted period of service disruption as users were migrated, which saw broadband speeds plummet to single digits (Mbps), as well as other connectivity problems.
The migration, which was announced a month ago (here), had been aiming to “deliver lower latency, improved peering, and a smoother overall experience” in order to better support their future growth. But in fairness, Yayzi had provided prior warning (here) that it would also cause some short but “random connection dropouts” and disruption to the availability of Static IPs.
In addition, the ISP also said that it would be applying some “temporary traffic shaping” during peak hours (between 5pm and 10pm), which would remain in place until 14th December 2024 to help “maintain stability“. The technical details of what Yayzi has actually changed remain a little unclear, but it appears as if many customers were not prepared for the level of disruption it caused.
The bulk migration process was due to commence on 5th December, and Yayzi told ISPreview that this involved moving to their own network infrastructure, including migrating “thousands of customers over 6 days“. But as any quick skim of their community forum will tell you, quite a few of their customers have seen their broadband speeds dive into sub-10Mbps territory during this transition (even some of those on their 2Gbps+ packages).
“Yayzi are currently going through a customer migration, which has gone about as bad as you could imagine. IP ranges located in Iran? Check! Customer speeds sub 10mb on 2.5gb lines? Check! Repeatedly missed dates and not sticking to agreed timelines? Triple check,” said one of the provider’s customers to ISPreview.
“My Internet has been pretty much unusable for the past 3 days, my current speed is 3mb/s,” added another disgruntled customer. But there is light at the end of the new fibre tunnel, says Yayzi.
A Spokesperson for Yayzi told ISPreview:
“The migration was successful and the customers were all moved to the new network.
Unfortunately we had a delay with a cable which meant that customers have suffered less than favourable speeds, this was not an intended consequence and we have communicated with customers via email, and our forums. We have been as open and transparent as we can with customers, and we expect full speeds to be back as normal tomorrow.
We will deal with any compensation claims on a case by case basis due to the complexities. There isn’t a one size fits all solution as some customers only moved to the new network yesterday.”
History shows that major migrations of key network platforms do have a nasty tendency to throw up the odd problem, although such disruption is usually only minor, when planned and executed properly. In this case, it appears as if Yayzi’s plan ran into some unexpected difficulties and the result has been.. rather bumpy. Some customers will inevitably be more forgiving of all this than others.
This is all in stark contrast to the network upgrade email that customers received on the 6th December, which only warned of a speed reduction to 250Mbps and occasional latency spikes. Yayzi has since acknowledged that they “got it wrong when we communicated the 250Mbps speeds. This expectation was based on past traffic trends, and we sincerely apologise for the confusion and frustration caused.”
In fact, we do have to credit the provider for being significantly better at communicating all this to their customers than we’ve seen other providers doing in the past, where it’s often more common – depressingly so – for providers to be almost totally silent during such events. The hope now is that Yayzi will stay true to their word and get speeds back to normal tomorrow. We’ll know soon enough.