Allyoucaneat uncapped IS account

[steed]

Hi,

I would like to ask what the word is on the uncapped IS accounts that allyoucaneat.co.za has been offering.

Has anyone used this service ?
Whats the service level like if you have ?

I am aware that IS routes via satellite and therefore has much higher latency.
For me I can live with higher latency if I can get more bandwidth.
However I previously tried an IS based Uncapped 384kbps account from Cheetah-IS and had numerous problems with it. What I discovered is that I was being firewalled from any connections from outside the country, thereby preventing ssh, http, vpn, etc connections to my box from servers outside south africa.

Now the allyoucaneat guys wont tell me anything. Infact they went to far as to pursuade me to take a 26gb telkom package instead after I payed them for the uncapped account.

Something else thats also interesting about these accounts is that you do not have to use the router that they force on you. All other IS based accounts I have seen require a custom router supplied by the ISP and locked down so you can have no fun.

However this IS uncapped acc that allyoucaneat is offering they claim you can use it with your already existing router, which is quite different from other IS solutions I have seen. Can anyone comment on this ?

Thanks,

Steed.

[Metalspawn]

Well, this means u can open ports on ur own router which allow for better p2p and torrents etc. That is really cool, but they might have shaped the account like they shape the uunet uncapped accounts. They are shaped into hell :D(according to friend who has one, can any1 confirm???)

[PostmanPot]

well, there are ways around it.. i get full speed on my uncapped UUNET account.

[Tsimo]

i also get full speed but only on well known ports.

[.geek]

Yeah, I'm not sure what the big deal is about unshaped accounts with regards to bandwidth transfer speeds. Latency maybe, yes.

[bwana]

well, there are ways around it.. i get full speed on my uncapped UUNET account.Internationally? What's your secret? I've tried most methods of getting around the hideous shaping without success - thats why I use easynews exclusively now.

[PostmanPot]

Internationally? What's your secret? I've tried most methods of getting around the hideous shaping without success - thats why I use easynews exclusively now.

yup, international torrents. not sure about p2p, but i'm sure it'd work too.

[bwana]

yup, international torrents. not sure about p2p, but i'm sure it'd work too.More I think about it the more I'm convinced different resellers have their offering shaped in different ways. Hows your voip?

Still - not going to give up my uncapped just yet even though content is a bit scarce these days - damn US summer vacation. :o

EDIT - there I go derailing again - sorry guys.

[PostmanPot]

never used VOIP in my life.

didn't i tell you how to get full speed with torrents..? and you reported that it worked?

[.geek]

1. Plug in router
2. Enter ADSL account details
3. Download torrent
4. Enjoy!

I forward the port my bittorrent client uses to my PC and that's so that I can upload (seed) properly. As for speed, there's nothing else you need to do. If there are enough seeders for a torrent, you'll get fullspeed. This works for me regardless of SAIX/IS, TelkomInternet/Web Africa accounts.

There's nothing to it.

[bwana]

didn't i tell you how to get full speed with torrents..? and you reported that it worked?lol - Had to go back and check (it turned out to be v7) - as it turned out it didnt really make much difference. Perhaps the different resellers shape differently?

[steed]

Hi,

Let me expand on what I experienced with the Cheetah IS 384k account.
They say its IS based .. so this is why I am worried about other IS packages.

1. Latency was bad .. like over 1500ms most of the time. The net would come and go continuously. Complaints got me the bad weather excuse.

2. They claimed that no p2p was allowed, and let me tell you, it was impossible. Torrents would just not work, even with all the ports forwared and open correctly.

3. I do work on remote servers (London, Texas) via SSH. I was finding that I could connect to the remote servers, and I could type, albeit slowly, but the moment the data rate increased past a few kb/s, I would have the connection dropped. This provented me tunnelling vnc and mysql connections. It also totally trashed SCP file transfers.

4. I then discovered that the reason why was because they were actually routing all traffic via a transparent proxy. Cheetah-IS actually resells imagine-ips packages for interest. The Clipse dude at Cheetah could not tell me anything.

5. So, what they would do is any tcp connections from me would actually go out via this transparent proxy, be it http, ftp, ssh, pop, smtp, you name it .. if it went out the country, it went via this server (an imagine-ips server) and it would purposely drop my ssh connections if the traffic flow was faster than typing.

6. However, if I made connections to local servers or a friend on ADSL in jhb, then I would get a direct connection.

7. I then thought, well if I cant scp my files to the server, maybe I can get the server to scp the file from the other direction .. eg, the server connect to me. Now I had my port 22 open, and I could get files and ssh connections from local servers and people. Yet, when I connected back, from the foreign server to here, I continually would get connection refused. I then tried other ports too .. like http, port 80 .. and found that blocked as well. Cheetah was selling the thing with a dynamic dns solution included and telling people they could host servers, yet at the end of the day .. nothing. The Cheetah IS dude Clipse then reckoned that the dyndns is really for remote management of the router. How does one trust them controlling ur router ? Its like having a Trojan on ur pc.

8. I also could not ping anything. Local would somtimes reply, international, never. Cheetah-IS excuse ... ICMP is not regarded as important and therefore may not work.

9. After much fighting with the connection and not being able to use it for my work, I managed to get a refund for the router and a portion of the month I was still on.

10. Conclusion. Problem was unresolved. No explanation was given. In all cases, Internet Solutions was blamed when it was probally actually Imagine-IPS.


So, now since then I have been very very untrusting of IS accounts, especially ones where they force a locked router down ur throat.
So, can anyone tell me ? Is this just this bad ISP or is this IS in general. Can any of you other guys using IS based accounts tell me if you are being firewalled from outside ? If I cannot use SSH/SCP/HTTP incomming, I cant do my job.

Thanks and Regards,

Steed.

[proff]

PostmanPot, how much are you paying for your UUNET uncapped account?

Thanks
Proff

[steed]

Even more to the point, How does one obtain one ? I heard they are no longer offered.

[steed]

Hi,

So can anyone who has an IS based account tell me if they can host a webserver on it and/or receive incomming tcp connections from foreign(international) servers ?

Thanks,

Steed.

[pip]

Well I host a mail server just fine.

[steed]

aah, thanks for the info

[TonTo]

pip,

Do you host an exchange server? What IS connection are you use?

[Tinuva]

Steed, I dont know about the uncapped accounts, but my 3g internation 27g local IS account work just perfect. Sure the international traffic goes via satellite, but downloading on this account work like a dream.

I mostly use gnutella for my p2p downloading needs. I have used this program on both SAIX and IS accounts, and my experience is with the IS based account my downloads are actually faster. I also know that people can connect to me download since I have seen it happen. I have my netgear router in "modem only" mode which mean I make a PPPoE connection on my windows/linux/freebsd box (depend on which flavour I want to use today) and by just disabling windows firewall p2p download just fine, and people connect to me just fine.

I remember when I had freebsd running on the 1 box, I used to SSH into it from work, however that is local...

Like I say, I dont know about the uncapped accounts as I have only used accounts with a cap. My account is from www.intdev.co.za if that count for anything.