Afrihost Business Uncapped Feedback - 2

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requiem said:
By definition - An unshaped service has no prioritization of any traffic and operates on a "first come, first served" basis regardless of which protocol is used.

Therefore, Afrihost are shaping.
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First off I am not condoning what they are doing, how they've chosen to communicate it and deal with it in any way, however you have to look at it from their perspective.

If they truly opened the data pools without any form of allocation the current usage would in all honestly bring their entire network to its knees. The whole damn thing. This should never have been allowed to reach this state to begin with, but what they've done they did out of necessity.

Cannot fault them for that...for a lot of other things in this mess, but not that.

This is of course, and nor should it be, of any concern to you the paying customer. We all know that much as well.

It just is what it is.
 
cortexenslaver said:
Can anyone from EAST (Durban/Pietermaritzburg/etc) share their current experiences???? Since the upgrade?
...anyone ????? :D
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If they did improvements in Durban, it is not working. If anything it is worse (10Meg line in Amanzimtoti):

Download Speed: 1101 kbps (137.6 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 778 kbps (97.3 KB/sec transfer rate)
Latency: 99 ms
20/10/2014 20:22:18

If this is anything to go by, the rest of the upgrades/improvements are not going to go well.
 
Whenever I do any tracert, the problem always shows as a MTN problem. Sadly, for AH to move to MTN was the worse decision for the customer ever. I don't like IS, but man, they were way better.
 
I accept that they're shaping to keep the whole network from melting down. They can call it "degrading downloads" or "constraining protocols" or whatever, but it all boils down to shaping.

Fair enough, there is a (hopefully temporary) capacity issue so this has to be done, but is it honest to continue spinning it as something it is not? Is it right to keep calling a spade an umbrella and then get huffy about how people will tend to point this out to you "ad nauseum"?

Right now, at this moment, they are still advertising Business Uncapped like this:

"- Business DSL accounts are Guaranteed to be completely unshaped at all times."
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Is that ethical?
 
zs6cey said:
If they did improvements in Durban, it is not working. If anything it is worse (10Meg line in Amanzimtoti):

Download Speed: 1101 kbps (137.6 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 778 kbps (97.3 KB/sec transfer rate)
Latency: 99 ms
20/10/2014 20:22:18

If this is anything to go by, the rest of the upgrades/improvements are not going to go well.
Click to expand...

Different experience here, NNTP and P2P is moving along nicely at almost full speed, I'm a happy camper for now provided things don't change.....Prospecton Area, Durban...
It may just be your line or an issue with your account, just a thought.......
 
Hello,

So let's see how we did today:

afrihost-business-perf-20141020.jpg

Not so good then. Although this (and the graphs I posted for Thursday/Friday) does show that IPC is not the only problem - there does seem to be a serious issue with the international component as well. Are the upgrades going to address only IPC or are there other things afoot?

--deckert
 
Tracing route to afrihost.com [197.242.144.102]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 3 ms 2 ms 1 ms 192.168.0.1
2 13 ms 12 ms 13 ms 105-236-1-1-esr-lo.mtnbusiness.co.za [105.236.1.
1]
3 21 ms 21 ms 21 ms 41.181.221.214
4 21 ms 21 ms 24 ms rb-dca-2.za--qux-b.za.mtnbusiness.net [41.181.16
5.118]
5 23 ms 23 ms 25 ms rb-dca-2.za--rb-cr-1.mtnns.net [196.44.31.122]
6 22 ms 23 ms 37 ms 196.44.31.97
7 49 ms 22 ms 24 ms 196.30.1.39
8 29 ms 24 ms 41 ms 196.31.220.21
9 23 ms 25 ms 23 ms 196.31.63.202
10 301 ms 302 ms 298 ms vl9-ah-ha-2.za.mtnbusiness.net [196.30.42.133]
11 38 ms 24 ms 22 ms cms-gm.afrihost.com [197.242.144.102]

Trace complete.

Local speedtest......
Last Result:
Download Speed: 1635 kbps (204.4 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 412 kbps (51.5 KB/sec transfer rate)
Latency: 61 ms
10/21/2014, 6:03:41 AM

International Speedtest ...............
Last Result:
Download Speed: 822 kbps (102.8 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 385 kbps (48.1 KB/sec transfer rate)
Latency: 220 ms
10/21/2014, 6:07:43 AM

East Region ....

Should be a 4 Mbps account ....

As you now have extra capacity, I have mailed support to sort this out.
 
Orihalcon said:
This is what I'm getting it. People keep harping on shaping...it isn't shaping. Bandwidth availability is merely constrained. Technically they aren't shaping as that would imply an active rule. I'm on Tapatalk so cannot find AfriGuy's post where he categorically said that bandwidth for downloads is what is being constrained...as unfortunate as it is.

Listen. This is a crappy mess no matter which way you slice it. All of us would have appreciated an up front straight to the point answer and post sure, but they are here to do damage as PR control until the problems are resolved.

This is merely the most effective solution - for most, not all - until they can light up more cap.

For legitimate businesses I feel the most with these issues :(
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I appreciate your POV here. I think we all know that this is not the best situation to be in, and we're making out as best we can. I think when many people are having a poor experience it's natural to look for a villain and in my experience this comes out in various forms. The truth is, we are doing the best we can and sharing as much info as possible. It's not damage control as much as communicating and trying assure clients as much as we can that we're not hiding under a rock until it all goes away. We're here every step of the way until we improve their experience (and beyond that as well of course)
 
dinkd said:
wow.. afrihost are "peaking" tonight! at 48kb/s on a 8meg uncapped account. and this is a business application... on a business account..................................
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Which application is this? I'm assuming this is a Business account and not a regular uncapped account :(
 
Cynicster said:
Refer to it as what you want shaping/throttling/constraining/bottlenecking/constipating/etc... it doesn't matter, fact of the matter is that Afrihost keeps saying they are not doing any of it even though a horde of their users keeps proving that they are. They are losing credibility faster than the local village bicycle claiming she isn't a sex worker. If they just owned up and admitted it to their clients then at least they'd know they aren't being taken for a ride.
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I think we've been very open and many of our clients (who probably don't want to get involved in a volatile forum debate) are happy that we're in communication with them and helping them understand the constraints we're under.

We did establish sometime ago that you are not a client of ours, so I don't think it's really fair to speak on behalf of clients. But I do take your opinion, as you have clearly expressed.
 
requiem said:
By definition - An unshaped service has no prioritization of any traffic and operates on a "first come, first served" basis regardless of which protocol is used.

Therefore, Afrihost are shaping.
Click to expand...

It is totally impossible to make an empirical argument when the subject itself is behaving intermittently. During high demand, the network could behave very differently, on different services, so it's really impossible to say which service could perform poorly, and then say with confidence that this is based on a ruleset. If we had plenty of capacity to spare and this was happening, you might have a more convincing argument, but the reality is quite different. While we are under strain, results are going to vary.
 
zs6cey said:
If they did improvements in Durban, it is not working. If anything it is worse (10Meg line in Amanzimtoti):

Download Speed: 1101 kbps (137.6 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 778 kbps (97.3 KB/sec transfer rate)
Latency: 99 ms
20/10/2014 20:22:18

If this is anything to go by, the rest of the upgrades/improvements are not going to go well.
Click to expand...

That shouldn't be the case. We're generally seeing pretty good performance but I know they have been experimenting with the right levels for shaping (for Uncapped, not Business accounts) etc, so they may have made changes or seen the level it set too high, etc. We should see the East performing as normal in the next day or so when they get this exactly right.
 
garp said:
I accept that they're shaping to keep the whole network from melting down. They can call it "degrading downloads" or "constraining protocols" or whatever, but it all boils down to shaping.

Fair enough, there is a (hopefully temporary) capacity issue so this has to be done, but is it honest to continue spinning it as something it is not? Is it right to keep calling a spade an umbrella and then get huffy about how people will tend to point this out to you "ad nauseum"?

Right now, at this moment, they are still advertising Business Uncapped like this:



Is that ethical?
Click to expand...

I think the issue here is that we are being accused of applying policies that we are not, and that is going around in circles. So all the talk of spinning and PR is really what is creating more confusion and become the focus of the thread rather than actual feedback and engagement. If we did implement a policy that contravened the product limits we would say so, communicate to affected clients and change our sales literature. However, this is simply not what is happening, so building new forms of rhetoric isn't really making any progress for anyone, in my opinion :(
 
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