Afrihost Business Uncapped Feedback - 2

[Type RSA]

This is pathetic really!! Almost an hour into the download and look at the mb downloaded.... But no shaping applied here..

 

[TomasW]

So I have an AH 20Mbps Business VDSL!!!!! Or do I???

20Mbps Busines VDSL (13-10-2014 23:09:00pm)

 

[whatwhat]

The scary bit is that they say it will take weeks for the IPC to get upgraded.

That means a couple of months of this.

Good luck to those staying and waiting it out.

 

[nerevar]

We've gone over this many, many times around.
As I said, some downloads are degraded. This means that P2P may be affected while HTTP is fine, visa versa or both. It depends on the demand and contention being seen at the time.

Upgrades are on the way which will have this fixed up.

Any kind of ETA on this? cant afford these speeds at the moment

 

[Napalm]

I was having the same issues, hectic slow p2p. Then I rebooted the router, (thinking maybe refresh DNS etc.etc.)


Now my router says PPP down. Lol. There must be something wrong @ AH. (Nothing wrong with the router, and the username/pass configs are there). I rebooted the router, waited 4min and switched on... <- I retryd that 2-3 times.

It says my adsl line is up. But PPP connection is down

 

[arni1954]

The scary bit is that they say it will take weeks for the IPC to get upgraded.

That means a couple of months of this.

Good luck to those staying and waiting it out.

+1
Life is too short to stay with unperforming ISP.

 

[AfriMan]

I'm very confused.

I signed up for a Business 8Mb/s ADSL account on the weekend. I've since spent days trying to work out why I was getting 1KB/s NNTP download speeds. I came across this and other threads, and disabled "Business Optimization", but nothing made a difference. In frustration, I closed the Business account, and reverted to my Capped account (which I had paused). As soon as my modem had reconnected, my NNTP speeds went back to > 100KB/s. Immediately.

The 1KB/s was obviously shaping. And I can understand it being due to the Business Optimization, but with that disabled I was seeing the same thing. Makes no sense.

Sometimes it does take some time for the Business Optimisation toggle to work, and in some cases we've turned it of and on and off again to make it work faster. Remember that you are making a change from a shaped to unshaped service (which is at the user's discretion) so it takes some time for the settings to be updated on our radius and for the shaping change to be rolled out.

Business and Capped accounts are essentially the same account, except that Business has two additional rulesets for a line rate limit (for 4Mbps line, 2Mbps line, etc) and limits to a single concurrent connection. Otherwise the shaping rules (or at least unshaped rules) are exactly the same.

 

[AfriMan]

P.S. I used the awesome Glasnost tests (at http://broadband.mpi-sws.org/transparency/bttest.php?) and got what certainly appears to be positive confirmation that Bittorrent and NNTP were being shaped on my Business account (to the magic 1kbps number).

(And yes, I know the difference between 1KBps and 1kbps... The Glasnost tests report bandwidth in bps: "In our tests, downloads using control flows achieved up to 8 Kbps while downloads using BitTorrent achieved up to 1 Kbps.")

It may well have been reporting that Business was still using the Business Optimize setting. I know that P2P limiting on that shaping is very harsh and consistent with what you've reported. I still don't really know how accurate this test is, I've asked our network engineers if they believe this is a reliable test to use.

 

[Gatecrasher]

What is the difference between degrading and shaping services?

In this case, some downloads are degraded - so traffic for that service is being contended.

Afrispeak at its very best.

 

[Samildanach]

Latencies to EU WOW servers seems to be quite high tonight. Wheres my pure internet joy AH?

After a great weekend of gaming on Smite and other online games, I was a very happy gamer... The new week rolls in, and gaming goes out the window.. Whatever policies you did not implement over the weekend and switch on back now is really not working for online gaming. Can you look further into this @Afriman? and give us an update on the state of gaming on your network. Other *unnamed* isp's gaming was quite fine...

 

[AfriMan]

I understand and apologize for getting upset on here and with you guys, I know this is out of your control. It is just blatantly obvious bro. We can all see it. I am sure you cannot admit to it here due to legal reasons.. So I will not pester you anymore. I am just really looking forward to getting my normal speeds back on p2p. Because this shaping is killing me.

I know there is a lot of speculation happening here, and when network performance hasn't been great this is often something that people assume that we're shaping or throttling. We have to be very careful that we don't diminish the product, even in the short term. We can allow a measure of contention as this is covered in our terms, but we can't actively rate limit services or protocols on an unshaped product. I think it would create something much worse that a poor experience today to go back on our client's trust and I don't think our management or engineers would ever do that

 

[AfriMan]

Shaping Business accounts is breach of contract by Afrihost because there website still says Unshaped Business and calling it degraded instead fixes it......kinda. You gotta love that African logic. My last month with these idiots before moving to the Netherlands.

Officer: Did you kill that man?
Suspect: No sir I stabbed him 200times
Officer: Ok in that case your free to go

Performance could be degraded by contention for bandwidth, not be rate limiting or fire walling of ports or services. Business is unshaped in terms of protocols, but due to high demand at peak times, some services may perform poorly or intermittently until we upgrade our IPC (which should be very shortly)

 

[Orihalcon]

P2P may be degraded, the available bandwidth for download specific protocols is being contended.
Upgrades are on the way though, so things will improve.

Finally! Some semblance of truth. So your data is divided into categories for which services it's allocated to. In this case the portion for P2P / NNTP is over saturated and contention has increased.

Now my question is this; why are business accounts' data also part of this allocation? Shouldn't it be completely free of any restriction or division? If I can watch 720p and pull 440kB/s flat for an hour I should then be able to run a p2p download at max speed without this restriction.

Actually...never mind. This was the worse time to try out a business account. I'll go somewhere till this is eventually resolved...thinking circa April 2015 based on past upgrade times.

 

[Gatecrasher]

Performance could be degraded by contention for bandwidth, not be rate limiting or fire walling of ports or services. Business is unshaped in terms of protocols, but due to high demand at peak times, some services may perform poorly or intermittently until we upgrade our IPC (which should be very shortly)

What is the difference between protocols and services?

 

[AfriMan]

Well could you at least stop "degrading" legitimate business protocols like MySQL/SQL and RDP? I have already cancelled but it would be nice if we could actually get something done during the remaining two weeks.

We definitely not intentionally degrading any services intentionally, especially priority terminal services. I believe our Critical Care team did contact you and we are trying to replicate this issue with you. If you haven't received an update, please PM me so I can follow up

 

[AfriMan]

How is this different from shaping?

Shaping or throttling would be a deliberate ruleset based on port or protocol which would intentionally rate limit specific services. We are definitely not doing that, we are seeing that when demand we do see some service perform poorly.

 

[AfriMan]

It's not shaping because it has nothing to do with how the package is shaped. This is throttling certain services according to a total network demand. Either way it means that you're going to get bad speeds, because MTN and Afrihost don't have the infrastructure to house this much data. Should basically be illegal to sell any more products until they fix it, since they are essentially promising lies in exchange for cash.

It's definitely not throttling, as that would rate limit services completely, either on the entire line or on a particular port or protocol. The fact that speeds are intermittent would show that it's overall demand causing some services to be slower depending on the specifics of the network at that point in time.

 

[AfriMan]

The scary bit is that they say it will take weeks for the IPC to get upgraded.

That means a couple of months of this.

Good luck to those staying and waiting it out.

Not sure how weeks became months in your post

For clients using our network, it should definitely not be a long wait. As soon as I have a rough date we can expect the capacity to be lit up, I'll update. Pretty sure it's not going to be months from what I've been assured.

 

[AfriMan]

Any kind of ETA on this? cant afford these speeds at the moment

We don't have a firm date but we have been told that the IPC could go live within the next few weeks at most. As soon as I have a more specific date confirmed, I will let everyone know.

 

[AfriMan]

I was having the same issues, hectic slow p2p. Then I rebooted the router, (thinking maybe refresh DNS etc.etc.)


Now my router says PPP down. Lol. There must be something wrong @ AH. (Nothing wrong with the router, and the username/pass configs are there). I rebooted the router, waited 4min and switched on... <- I retryd that 2-3 times.

It says my adsl line is up. But PPP connection is down

Pretty weird. We're definitely seeing normal authentication on the network in general.

Can you please drop me a PM?