Afrihost Business Uncapped Feedback - 2

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I am extremely happy again with my 6MB Business Uncapped account after having two months of hell with slooooooow speeds and general uselessness of the line.

But so far this month it has been pure bliss. I don't know who to thank, but thanks.
Usage stats so far for October 2014:
IMG_20141006_000135.jpg

Now THIS is what I am paying for, not the crap from the previous two months.
Thanks to whoever!

There was a slight "glitch" last night (Saturday night) where the connection dropped and went dead for about 10 minutes, but other than that, I am very happy so far.
I just hope this carries on and does not suffer from an iOS invasion again.

Edited to add: I can actually watch Youtube vids at 720p or 1080p again, albeit with minor buffering issues.
480p streams with no issues at all.
 
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Why does the supersport web site take so long too load, this is the only site that will sit for 5mins and then eventually open?
 
BLK said:
What do you mean by this - I know they both use MTN Business as a backbone -
Can you elaborate to this point =
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MTN owns Afrihost, Afrihost and Axxess are sister companies that merged about a year ago. They run their separate networks differently, but they're pretty much a single entity.
 
So i purchased a 20GB pre-paid bundle from Axxess (to try them out) luckily my ADSL is Line is still with Telkom so it makes it fairly easy for me to jump around at this time,

I have done a speedtest this morning with both Afrihost and Axxess dialups and surprise-surprise

Router Sync:
Upstream 635900
Downstream 8191900

Afrihost : 6.73Mbps
Axxess : 6.83Mbps
 
NAG - Wesley said:
MTN owns Afrihost, Afrihost and Axxess are sister companies that merged about a year ago. They run their separate networks differently, but they're pretty much a single entity.
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Aha, so this is probably why the support agent had no issues when i told them I am moving to Axxess, this is useful info to know,
thanks for that,

:)
 
Orihalcon said:
Funny you should mention that...have friends in both Durbs and JHB who say the same thing...sftp (different sources for each) are limited to about 250kB odd. One is on 10mb, the other 20mb.
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For Business we don't shape any services, whether it's FTP or SFTP. The fact that different clients can record different throughput levels means that there can't be a different policy acting on the traffic, as we have basically one bandwidth management policy of for Business.
 
Crusader said:
snip
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This looks a little more erratic that what we're seeing in general on the network at the moment, depending on the time and the period you tested over.

I think I'd like to run further tests and troubleshooting, so please PM me when you've got some time.
 
AfriMan said:
For Business we don't shape any services, whether it's FTP or SFTP. The fact that different clients can record different throughput levels means that there can't be a different policy acting on the traffic, as we have basically one bandwidth management policy of for Business.
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Again - what your policies are and what is actually happening are different. Heck, it's already been posted that you are indeed managing the demand by shaping p2p on business and capped. I'll ask them to register accounts post themselves on their experience. This was downloading via EU and US NNTP servers btw.
 
r1pp3r said:
Yip and this is def an Afrihost Problem .... Throttling/shapping of the Business account
I just changed account with webafrica and my line returns to full speed.

Again i really think afrihost should be transparent with there Clients.:sick:
once more if you feel you are charging to little, let the client know or increase price so that we can have the service we signed up for.
But suppose it like everything in life.. you got to give the some cheese to catch the mouse ...
AH promise uncapped/unshaped business Accounts are the real deal..
contrary these accounts have become a pain... :(
Click to expand...

We are definitely not being evasive or not transparent around this. We're not shaping Business accounts in any way, but times of contention may present in certain ways that may seem like shaping. We're optimising the network to deliver the best overall experience, so this may see torrents (for example) suffer a little when contention is high. But the aim is to give a reasonable experience even when demand is high.
 
Orihalcon said:
Again - what your policies are and what is actually happening are different. Heck, it's already been posted that you are indeed managing the demand by shaping p2p on business and capped. I'll ask them to register accounts post themselves on their experience. This was downloading via EU and US NNTP servers btw.
Click to expand...

Our policies haven't changed, the changes we're making is to ensure that where we are shaping (on Uncapped, not on Business) and that we take measures to ensure that even high demand on shaped services are managed more efficiently so that overall we see the best possible experience.

There may still be further changes coming, and I think we'll start to see better and better performance in the coming period.
 
AfriMan said:
We are definitely not being evasive or not transparent around this. We're not shaping Business accounts in any way, but times of contention may present in certain ways that may seem like shaping. We're optimising the network to deliver the best overall experience, so this may see torrents (for example) suffer a little when contention is high. But the aim is to give a reasonable experience even when demand is high.
Click to expand...

Personally, I have no problem with Afrihost shaping torrents on Business Accounts.
But I would still like to see at least half line speed for torrents....
 
Orihalcon said:
I believe that the network management changes they've rolled out - shaping p2p - includes the shaping of sftp or shttp data as well if required to curb contention on the network.

They can massage the network anyway they like...usage won't drop anytime soon and at present the priority is to keep browsing and streaming as fluid and fast as possible. To do that they will shape any and all other protocols as needed on any type of account - capped and business included. It only makes sense that this needs doing to keep the network running.
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I think we are already seeing positive results and this has mostly been from improving efficiency on the network and tightening up policies to ensure that traffic is not disguised or misdiagnosed.
 
MagicDude4Eva said:
I can also confirm that this week must have been the worst so far. I connect from home via FortiClient VPN to our local data-centre and Wednesday alone I must have had re-connects every 10-20 minutes. Today I counted about 7.

Playing PS4 after 6pm is impossible - Destiny disconnects frequently and Diablo3 has major lag. All symptoms which did not exist in previous weeks. To me it seems more a real-time/latency issue, as I do not experience throughput problems (i.e. downloading Yosemite beta updates flies). In the past I was able to perfectly connect to our transactional databases (via VPN tunnels), but this week it was a no-go.

Unfortunately there are hardly any logs I can provide. FortiClient reports a "FCTVpnConnection:1633 -104: Connection was terminated unexpectedly. Error -104" (and our data-centre guys confirmed that on the DC side there have been no issues). I guess it means sweating it out and see if it improves.
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We'll need to look into this. Business should not be affected by any kind of shaping, but we'll need to analyse the traffic and ensure that there are no policies acting on this. It is possible with so many changes implemented over a short period of time that there are unwanted artefacts.

You can drop me a PM so I can initiate an investigation in this :(
 
AfriMan said:
We are definitely not being evasive or not transparent around this. We're not shaping Business accounts in any way, but times of contention may present in certain ways that may seem like shaping. We're optimising the network to deliver the best overall experience, so this may see torrents (for example) suffer a little when contention is high. But the aim is to give a reasonable experience even when demand is high.
Click to expand...


Afriman I beg to differ mate, struggling with the account to no end.
I can send you the bandwidth stats
why when i use your capped 20 gig account line is full speed and there are no time outs on some sites etc.
change back to business and it is slow.

I am running a test on my other business account.
I have not used it this whole weekend to download, it is pulling full rate Via FTP but assure once it passes a certain threshold it will be throttled like my other account.

I will forward you the details Via PM!!
 
bullzeye.za said:
My 10Mb line seems to be hard-limited to 4MB tonight ( Exactly 400KB/s is all I can manage at the moment, usually easily hit 1MB/s )

Definitely not a line issue.
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Not sure how you are measuring this. If your line is only getting 4Mbps max on all services, the line sync profile may have been dropped either by running the Fix my Line tool or by Telkom if there is reported congestion.
 
AfriMan said:
Our policies haven't changed, the changes we're making is to ensure that where we are shaping (on Uncapped, not on Business) and that we take measures to ensure that even high demand on shaped services are managed more efficiently so that overall we see the best possible experience.

There may still be further changes coming, and I think we'll start to see better and better performance in the coming period.
Click to expand...

Well...where they both use to get full line speed, they are only getting 250kB odd from about a week ago - when they noticed it anyway. When they switch to Mweb Premium uncapped or WebAfrica Business uncapped they get line speed again from the same sources.

So...yeah. The servers did not change...so something on your side did as it used to run flat out. Make of that what you will.
 
r1pp3r said:
Afriman I beg to differ mate, struggling with the account to no end.
I can send you the bandwidth stats
why when i use your capped 20 gig account line is full speed and there are no time outs on some sites etc.
change back to business and it is slow.

I am running a test on my other business account.
I have not used it this whole weekend to download, it is pulling full rate Via FTP but assure once it passes a certain threshold it will be throttled like my other account.

I will forward you the details Via PM!!
Click to expand...

Business and Capped accounts are essentially cut from the same cloth. The policies dealing with traffic and unshaped bandwidth are exactly the same. The only difference is that Business account have a product rate limit and also are limited to one concurrent connection.

We can test further to see whether there is an issue with your specific account which is causing it to underperform :(

Will look out for your PM.
 
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