Afrihoax: Just Keeping Promises

Any updates on this? Im on the 6Mb business account bundled with my line and am also having trouble with twitch. Every minute or even less the stream will freeze up for a couple of seconds and then resume, whereas my mweb account is fine. Starting to get really annoying.
 
Update:

After AfriGuy PMed me, a guy named Kyle from Afrihost called on Friday. He gave me a special test account which bypasses the MTN backbone of Afrihost and seems to use Telkom directly. After these tests I submitted trace routes on the various accounts. Kyle was very friendly, efficient and had a level of authority (ability to do things) you seldom encounter using ISP support.

However in the end we were unable to come to a meaningful resolution to the issue. The verdict, from my side, is as follows:

  • Although Afrihost state in their AUP that real-time services are never shaped, even for their standard uncapped products (ie: not business), the watching of twitch.tv is limited in that the port and protocol are shaped. This means if shaping is active in the form of (a) network shaping during peak hours or (b) your account being managed due to high usage, then you will potentially not be able to watch twitch.tv channels at near your line capacity
  • Even on an uncapped Afrihost product or one which has no shaping applied (turbo charge active or no shaping or managing active), there seems to be problems when streaming from twitch.tv, at least in my case. I cannot claim this is network wide (although users like theLastDodo and others on this thread seem to have had the same issues, even without shaping applied). Whereas the two test accounts I was given (one a special diagnostic account and the other an @fnbconnect account) had zero stuttering or lag streaming 720p for extended periods of time (maintaining down speeds of up to 240KB/s on 720p and 340KB/s on 1080p), even the unshaped Afrihost accounts experienced no-audio-loss stuttering and/or full stuttering when trying to stream 720p, although the stuttering was definitely not as bad as when the accounts were shaped.

That's the basic summary. Afrihost really came to the party with their support after the whole support saga and the MBB thread and have sorted out the issue for me, of their standard uncapped failings, so it is here that I bow out and say thanks to AfriGuy.

You can draw your own conclusions from the thread. Whether Afrihost decides it is only right to change their AUP to avoid this issue in the future, remove the shaping of twitch.tv or look deeper into the issue of problems streaming from twitch on unshaped accounts, is up to them and anyone else who has similar issues pushing them. Although I realise this isn't a satisfactory end in terms of finding a ISP wide solution for all users, I have expended enough time and energy on this issue and my problem has been dealt with.

I would however warn all potential new Afrihost standard uncapped users who like to watch twitch.tv that as of the current time, up until Afrihost amend their AUP or service management, this will probably not work out for you and best to look elsewhere.

And there you have it! At last we can finally say that this insidious mystery has been ... solved?
 
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It makes me super-sad to read this thread. I know I've been away for a few days, so I haven't been up to date on all the goings on, and I'm truly sorry about that.

Firstly, we don't do dishonesty. We 100% believe and guarantee that we do not shape real time traffic in any way or form on Uncapped accounts. If there is a genuine oversight in terms of this particular service, then it's something we must and will address urgently with our shaping policies and our Uncapped clients can rest assured that we are absolutely committed to keeping our 100% real time promises. There is no question of changing our AUP or making "amendments" to allow for this. Our AUP is our promise to our clients in terms of what they should be able to expect, and we need to honour that at all times.

Secondly, and more importantly, an Afrihost client should always know what to expect. If we create an expectation of a service to work in a certain way, that is what should be delivered and we take that very seriously. It's the cornerstone of our brand - no catches. This includes the expectation of service and personal attention, which also seems to have been lacking somewhere along the way.

I'll be looking into this, along with AfriGuy and our Dev Team, and we'll definitely get to the bottom of this and find a solution for the OP, as well as anyone else experiencing issues in this regard.

Please PM if you have any updates since the last post here, otherwise I will also be chatting to all the guys mentioned in the thread and getting some background on what has been happening.
 
Hi AfriMan. I'm sorry too for the trouble but I can assure you something is definitely up with Afrihost and twitch.tv and although I regret that this issue had to go this far, I do not regret that some attention has been drawn to the issue from you guys.

We 100% believe and guarantee that we do not shape real time traffic in any way or form on Uncapped accounts.

AfriMan, if this is the case, does this mean the support person who said the following was incorrect, or when you say "we do not shape real time traffic" do you not include twitch.tv in that definition?

I have confirmed with our network and dev team, this service is not considered real-time, and as such is subject to our management policy.

Because you requested follow up I will report the following. You guys very generously offered me a Business Uncapped account in an effort to sort the issue. I am currently trying to stream the WCS OSL on twitch.tv on this account and unfortunately 720p is unwatchable due to stuttering. I've just tested my line and the downspeed is 3.4 Mbps so I think we can rule that out.

I think it is worth your while, if you really want to get to the bottom of this, checking out the twitch support forums and maybe chatting to some of their personnel as there are numerous reports about problems with specific ISPs such as ComCast. I can't pretend to understand the dynamics in the traffic flow from their servers (which are obviously international) but what I do know is that you have given me two non-afrihost test accounts which work perfectly on my line on 720p, and that even the new business uncapped cannot maintain a 720p stream. Perhaps it is something with the MTN network and the connection to their severs, or something external to Afrihost, interfering.

I would also like to request that you guys do some testing on Afrihost accounts from your side as the onus shouldn't always be on the customer to prove there is a problem. I know there is a problem, and other users have corroborated this, but you will always have doubt about the integrity of my setup or whether I have p2p going in the background or what have you. Just connect on a pc with a 4Mbps Afrihost account and go find a 720p channel on twitch.tv, then try it on your other test accounts and perhaps in this manner you can verify if the problem extends beyond my situation. Wouldn't this be the simplest way forward, even if it means just testing on some random pc outside of your offices?

If you do follow up on this and have new findings I will be very eager to alter the original post with a more positive update as I do believe you guys are doing all the right things in turns of mission and ethos (as I mentioned numerous times, I've been very happy with everything else from Afrihost) and your MBB representation has been fantastic, so keep us updated.
 
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Hi AfriMan. I'm sorry too for the trouble but I can assure you something is definitely up with Afrihost and twitch.tv and although I regret that this issue had to go this far, I do not regret that some attention has been drawn to the issue from you guys.



AfriMan, if this is the case, does this mean the support person who said the following was incorrect, or when you say "we do not shape real time traffic" do you not include twitch.tv in that definition?



Because you requested follow up I will report the following. You guys very generously offered me a Business Uncapped account in an effort to sort the issue. I am currently trying to stream the WCS OSL on twitch.tv on this account and unfortunately 720p is unwatchable due to stuttering. I've just tested my line and the downspeed is 3.4 Mbps so I think we can rule that out.

I think it is worth your while, if you really want to get to the bottom of this, checking out the twitch support forums and maybe chatting to some of their personnel as there are numerous reports about problems with specific ISPs such as ComCast. I can't pretend to understand the dynamics in the traffic flow from their servers (which are obviously international) but what I do know is that you have given me two non-afrihost test accounts which work perfectly on my line on 720p, and that even the new business uncapped cannot maintain a 720p stream. Perhaps it is something with the MTN network and the connection to their severs, or something external to Afrihost, interfering.

I would also like to request that you guys do some testing on Afrihost accounts from your side as the onus shouldn't always be on the customer to prove there is a problem. I know there is a problem, and other users have corroborated this, but you will always have doubt about the integrity of my setup or whether I have p2p going in the background or what have you. Just connect on a pc with a 4Mbps Afrihost account and go find a 720p channel on twitch.tv, then try it on your other test accounts and perhaps in this manner you can verify if the problem extends beyond my situation. Wouldn't this be the simplest way forward, even if it means just testing on some random pc outside of your offices?

If you do follow up on this and have new findings I will be very eager to alter the original post with a more positive update as I do believe you guys are doing all the right things in turns of mission and ethos (as I mentioned numerous times, I've been very happy with everything else from Afrihost) and your MBB representation has been fantastic, so keep us updated.

Thanks so much for chatting to me about this, it's really in everyone's interest for us to get to the bottom of this and improve our service all round. We'll need to look at all possibilities, how we shape our Uncapped (i.e. policies), routing paths to the servers for Twitch.tv and any other factors that could play a role in this. We'll be testing from our side for sure, to get some idea of what you might be experience. Bottom line is, if we can recreate the issue, we can fix it.

With regard to clients doing testing, unfortunately that is a necessary part of the process. There are so many unique factors in the process that it is literally impossible to recreate the conditions that you, as the client, will experience. Many times, geographic location, the condition of your line and exchange, how your traffic is specifically routed, plays a massive role. Testing from our side can be an indicator, but if we can monitor from the client's side, it's much faster to analyse and then re-create in order to isolate and fix.

The more info you can provide us with, the faster we can turn this issue around. Please feel free to drop me a PM or email on [email protected] so that I can also make sure that our guys are running as much testing as we can and then escalating accordingly.
 
Afriman, I've cancelled my account already, but if you do manage to sort this out, I will definitely consider reactivating. I really like that you're addressing the issue (I had given up after the most part of a week with nothing positive coming out).

I don't know if it's your shaping policy or your network, but I can stream from youtube at 720p almost all the time without trouble, but I cannot even load 480p streams from Twitch most of the time, let alone watch them without stutter. Turbocharge doesn't seem to do anything either, but in my limited experience it never seems to do anything (torrents and other downloads stay slow and videos continue to stutter along).

I like the apparent transparency in your AUP and showing what is being shaped when, and I really like your prices, but so far my experience with Afrihost has been pretty disappointing. One of the reasons I got a 4Mbps line was to stream at high quality, so I was quite excited to try it out, but I've never been able to with Afrihost. Add onto that the fact that my torrents never get above 50kbps and there's nothing left to keep me with Afrihost.

Hopefully you can sort out the Twitch streaming issue and perhaps I will be convinced to stay if you do. The effort alone is encouraging.
 
Afriman, I've cancelled my account already, but if you do manage to sort this out, I will definitely consider reactivating. I really like that you're addressing the issue (I had given up after the most part of a week with nothing positive coming out).

I don't know if it's your shaping policy or your network, but I can stream from youtube at 720p almost all the time without trouble, but I cannot even load 480p streams from Twitch most of the time, let alone watch them without stutter. Turbocharge doesn't seem to do anything either, but in my limited experience it never seems to do anything (torrents and other downloads stay slow and videos continue to stutter along).

I like the apparent transparency in your AUP and showing what is being shaped when, and I really like your prices, but so far my experience with Afrihost has been pretty disappointing. One of the reasons I got a 4Mbps line was to stream at high quality, so I was quite excited to try it out, but I've never been able to with Afrihost. Add onto that the fact that my torrents never get above 50kbps and there's nothing left to keep me with Afrihost.

Hopefully you can sort out the Twitch streaming issue and perhaps I will be convinced to stay if you do. The effort alone is encouraging.

Agreed. Cancelled my business account this month already but will definitely move back once twitch is working properly, everything else works 100%.
 
From the testing that I've done on Business, Capped, and Uncapped, I'm not seeing any difference in performance on my side. So I think we can eliminate shaping as an issue. However, the performance was intermittently poor, so there is still some work to be done. It might be that this US service doesn't cache like other services.
 
Yeah I am on your 4 MB business account and cant properly stream 480p on twitch.tv
 
I've done some extensive testing and investigation on this to satisfy myself about what might be happening here.

Firstly, and most importantly, we DO NOT shape any real time service, and this was not a shaping issue at any time. We've checked our classification of Twitch TV traffic, and we are 100% confident that our classification is spot on and this is definitely being treated as a real time service. Secondly, some questions were asked about whether there is shaping on Business, and there is absolutely none. Not just saying this from a product point of view, we've tested this thoroughly to ensure that there isn't even a shadow of doubt. Business is drawn from the same bandwidth pool as capped accounts. They are essentially exactly the same, except that Business has a "rate-limit" according to the speed you pay for, which capped will go up to 40Mbps (or whatever your line can handle)

What I've found on my testing is that Twitch is very bandwidth hungry. Some of the videos I tested on were peaking at around 900kBps (I think this may have been on 1080p). I've also found that 360p & 480p were sometimes looking for peaks around 350kbps. I would guess that if you're not running a 10Mbps line, there can be intermittent issues, especially if there is intermittent or sporadic congestion on your local exchange. Even at 240p, bandwidth was peaking at about 150kbps, so 1Mbps is pretty much a no-go and even 2Mbps would have issues, if there are other services running the background.

I'm going to continue testing and I'm happy to post my results here so everyone can see what I'm talking about. Having said that, I would also be grateful to get your experience. We want to deliver the service you expect, and if it's not working the way that it should, we want to do everything in our power to get it there. If you are testing with other ISP accounts, do so over a significant period. Testing for 5 mins doesn't give a true reflection to compare with. When you reset your ISP connection, it resyncs your line and you will usually get max throughput at first. This can degrade over time as congestion settles at the exchange, or latency on your line starts to act. We need tests to be run over a period of hours or days to have realistic data to compare with.

OTherwise, please drop me a PM and let's get this ball rolling :)
 
Afriman, I've cancelled my account already, but if you do manage to sort this out, I will definitely consider reactivating. I really like that you're addressing the issue (I had given up after the most part of a week with nothing positive coming out).

I don't know if it's your shaping policy or your network, but I can stream from youtube at 720p almost all the time without trouble, but I cannot even load 480p streams from Twitch most of the time, let alone watch them without stutter. Turbocharge doesn't seem to do anything either, but in my limited experience it never seems to do anything (torrents and other downloads stay slow and videos continue to stutter along).

I like the apparent transparency in your AUP and showing what is being shaped when, and I really like your prices, but so far my experience with Afrihost has been pretty disappointing. One of the reasons I got a 4Mbps line was to stream at high quality, so I was quite excited to try it out, but I've never been able to with Afrihost. Add onto that the fact that my torrents never get above 50kbps and there's nothing left to keep me with Afrihost.

Hopefully you can sort out the Twitch streaming issue and perhaps I will be convinced to stay if you do. The effort alone is encouraging.

It's definitely not a shaping issue, please check my most recent post. We can still run some further testing to find the issue before your cancellation goes through at the end of the month. Hopefully we can sort it out before then and you can reactivate your account.

Drop me a PM so we can chat about this :)
 
Afrihost has been very committed to sorting this out and have been in frequent contact. I am definitely convinced that they do want to ensure their customers understand fully what they are getting, and that they want to ensure that their service is of the quality they promise.

It seems that the support thread debacle led us in the wrong direction when, on at least three separate occasions, support agents said that the problem relates to the service being shaped and that business uncapped/capped/turbo-charge should solve it. A claim that the service was shaped was the final word in the original support thread, with a promise to amend the AUP to reflect that twitch is not a real time service. I have since been confronting this issue with shaping as a major culprit in my mind, but I was mostly testing on shaped accounts.

Having tested now on a business uncapped accounts, I can confirm that the problems still exist which backs up the claim that shaping is not involved. Also, Afrihost have got their technical guys onto testing thoroughly, as Afriman mentions above, and have asserted that the problems are not related to shaping, that the twitch.tv real-time services are definitely not shaped in any form. So I think it is fair to rule out the shaping. If this is the case then, while there is certainly a problem, there was no intention of deceit in the AUP from their end, just disturbingly incorrect information from the support personnel.

So we are closer to the root of the problem, which I am still is convinced is not localised to my line/location etc, as other Afrihost users have reported problems with twitch.tv while on Afrihost, which is not present on others:

7h3Ch3353:
I'm on the 6Mb business account bundled with my line and am also having trouble with twitch.

TheLastDodo:
I cannot even load 480p streams from Twitch most of the time, let alone watch them without stutter.

Emile613:
Yeah I am on your 4 MB business account and cant properly stream 480p on twitch.tv

Potential problem roots

http://help.twitch.tv/customer/port...ering-despite-high-speedtest-have-called-isp-

1) This thread on twitch might be similar to the problems we have having. One suggestion is that it might not be with Afrihost's network but with another provider they route through. Unfortunately traceroutes do not seem to help troubleshoot viewer issues because twitch block ICMP so the traceroutes just timeout.

2) Twitch tv is too bandwidth intensive for a 4Mbps completely unshaped account to stream 720p without stutter due to bandwidth peaking. This is compounded by potential exchange congestion on a 'broken-in' account (ie: not one just applied)

In any case I will update the original post (if only I could update the title) to reflect the move away from the shaping.
 
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Thanks AfriMan for the feedback on your testing. I think we can lay the shaping to rest (though I don't know when anyone said business was being shaped).

What I've found on my testing is that Twitch is very bandwidth hungry. Some of the videos I tested on were peaking at around 900kBps (I think this may have been on 1080p). I've also found that 360p & 480p were sometimes looking for peaks around 350kbps. I would guess that if you're not running a 10Mbps line, there can be intermittent issues, especially if there is intermittent or sporadic congestion on your local exchange. Even at 240p, bandwidth was peaking at about 150kbps, so 1Mbps is pretty much a no-go and even 2Mbps would have issues, if there are other services running the background.)

That 900KBps sounds like 1080p+ (the + means the exact resolution the broadcaster is broadcasting at) which is the absolute maximum of any stream.

I have spent a lot of time monitoring bandwidth usage while trying to watch twitch, and on the accounts from other ISPs which worked flawlessly on 720p, the bandwidth usage averaged at ~220KBps. Currently monitoring bandwidth on 720p on a 4MB uncapped, the average is 196KB/s - the stream is stuttering badly.

If the problem is the bandwidth intensity of twitch, I don't understand why a) the stream is flawless on other ISP accounts and b) the stream is stuttering badly yet the downstream is using half the line capacity?

To be honest I have never heard of bandwidth 'peaks' being an issue, but don't know much about the technicalities.

Is the theory you are suggesting that the other test accounts which worked did not 'rate-limit' the speeds and thus accommodated the peaks and/or that potential exchange congestion prevents the allowance for peaking?

In other words, sufficient bandwidth to allow for the peaks is necessary for stutter free streaming? So if a 720p stream stutters every 20 seconds, it means every 20 seconds the required downspeed peaks above the line capacity (or limited rate), say 420KB/s and thus the stutter, yet on average the stream only requires 200KB/s?

This however wouldn't explain why the same problems are present on Afrihost capped accounts (see 7hCH3353's post below)

while capped will go up to 40Mbps (or whatever your line can handle)
 
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Just tried testing a 1080p livestream on a afrihost capped account, speed tests to local and international servers are all max speed of my line (which is 6mbs). The stream wouldnt load at first but if i switched over to google dns it loaded right up and was fine for about 30 seconds after however it was constantly buffering and laggy. Switched to another isp's account, same 1080p stream and have been watching it for the last 30+ minutes with no lag whatsoever.
 
Just tried testing a 1080p livestream on a afrihost capped account, speed tests to local and international servers are all max speed of my line (which is 6mbs). The stream wouldnt load at first but if i switched over to google dns it loaded right up and was fine for about 30 seconds after however it was constantly buffering and laggy. Switched to another isp's account, same 1080p stream and have been watching it for the last 30+ minutes with no lag whatsoever.

Thanks 7h3Ch3353 for the feedback. Sounds like the identical issue. And good to know switching to open dns sorted the loading issue.

Would you be able to do the following on the other account to verify that "it doesn't degrade over time as congestion settles at the exchange, or latency on your line starts to act":

We need tests to be run over a period of hours or days to have realistic data to compare with.
 
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What I've found on my testing is that Twitch is very bandwidth hungry. Some of the videos I tested on were peaking at around 900kBps (I think this may have been on 1080p). I've also found that 360p & 480p were sometimes looking for peaks around 350kbps. I would guess that if you're not running a 10Mbps line, there can be intermittent issues, especially if there is intermittent or sporadic congestion on your local exchange. Even at 240p, bandwidth was peaking at about 150kbps, so 1Mbps is pretty much a no-go and even 2Mbps would have issues, if there are other services running the background.

I've watched 720p streams from Twitch on a 2Mbps line (this only works when the stars align: Twitch running flawlessly and the line running at maximum capacity), so it is definitely posssible. As 21stcn says, 720p streams typically average about 200kBps, so 4Mbps is plenty.

On the issue of the peak speeds you're seeing, I would imagine that is easily explained by the fact that these streams need to buffer a few seconds of video to smooth over the inherent variability of the connection speed between you and Twitch. After an interuption in that connection, the download rate will peak whilst buffering the stream again. Twitch is having some issues handling the demand at the moment, so, along with the sporadic congestion you mention, some level of connection interruption is to be expected and those peaks will be seen.

The issue I've had using an Afrihost account at the moment is that I'm not even maintaining 100kBps connection, so not even 480p is smooth and often the client doesn't even establish a proper connection and loading the video outright fails.

I'm testing an account (4Mbps) from another ISP at the moment and while 720p isn't flawless, it is mostly watchable, and 480p is smooth. Not ideal, but it's a vast improvement and I can probably put the 720p problems down to the demand issues Twitch is experiencing. When I switch back to Afrihost it's back to a slide-show, when the stream loads.

Again, I will re-iterate that I am able to watch 720p videos from youtube on my Afrihost account and, in my experience, youtube generally requires greater bandwidth than twitch does.

All in all, it looks even more likely that I'll be switching, but hopefully you can sort this out for the future.
 
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