Afrihost Business Uncapped Feedback

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wingnut771 said:
Hey hey ;)

Thanks for repsonding at this late hour :)

What I'm trying to establish is:

Are the folks that are happy with nf etc "settling" for SD (as long as it doesn't buffer kinda strategy) or are they getting HQ/HD/Super HD according to linespeed?
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I have never actually checked. Don't know how. We use Roku's for Netflix and don't even know how to check resolution of the current stream.
What I can tell you is we watch on a 42", 47" and 120" screen (all 1080p) and the quality is great. I don't have complaints. On a 120" bad quality shows up very easily.
I have monitored the incoming bandwidth on my firewall a few times and a stream averages around 120Kb/s with peaks at around 350Kb/s.
When a stream starts, the quality is normally a bit dodgy while it buffers in the background. Within a minute or 2 the picture is hundreds.

efitol said:
Are your streams HD though? Try watching some streams on twitch.tv with the quality set to "High".
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Can you watch twitch.tv on a Roku? Never watched twitch except for CoD tourneys in which case I use my laptop. Quality not great though.
 
Mike Smit said:
I have never actually checked. Don't know how. We use Roku's for Netflix and don't even know how to check resolution of the current stream.
What I can tell you is we watch on a 42", 47" and 120" screen (all 1080p) and the quality is great. I don't have complaints. On a 120" bad quality shows up very easily.
I have monitored the incoming bandwidth on my firewall a few times and a stream averages around 120Kb/s with peaks at around 350Kb/s.
When a stream starts, the quality is normally a bit dodgy while it buffers in the background. Within a minute or 2 the picture is hundreds.



Can you watch twitch.tv on a Roku? Never watched twitch except for CoD tourneys in which case I use my laptop. Quality not great though.
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Yes you can watch Twitch on the Roku through the Unsupported AppStore app on Plex. See this linky to set it up. Quite a few nice (and unofficial) channels on there actually.

It's the "not great" quality on the Twitch streaming that's giving me problems. Just doesn't make sense to me.

Also, I doubt you're getting HD quality streams from Netflix if your average throughput is 120KBps. From what I gathered 720p Netflix bitrate is about 2.5mbps, or 320KBps.
 
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efitol said:
Yes you can watch Twitch on the Roku through the Unsupported AppStore app on Plex. See this linky to set it up. Quite a few nice (and unofficial) channels on there actually.

It's the "not great" quality on the Twitch streaming that's giving me problems. Just doesn't make sense to me.
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OMG :eek: How did I not know about this. I am probably the biggest Roku junky and gadget tinkerer (is this a word?), yet I did it know about this at all. Fantastic.
A thousand thanks efitol! The channel list is great.

Off to see what other unofficial channels are available for my toys.
 
Mike Smit said:
OMG :eek: How did I not know about this. I am probably the biggest Roku junky and gadget tinkerer (is this a word?), yet I did it know about this at all. Fantastic.
A thousand thanks efitol! The channel list is great.

Off to see what other unofficial channels are available for my toys.
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You're welcome :p.

See my edit above about your Netflix bitrate.
 
Does anyone know if there is any reason that all connections over port 119 would timeout. I've just signed up for Afrihost Business Uncapped today and everything was going really well... until SAB started moaning.

I'm trying to connect to:


us.news.atraweb.com:119
eu.news.astraweb.com:119
news.afrihost.co.za:119

none are SSL based. and all are timing out. It worked until I was being throttled to death by mweb so I switched to AH.

Any ideas?
 
MyLowBandwidth said:
Does anyone know if there is any reason that all connections over port 119 would timeout. I've just signed up for Afrihost Business Uncapped today and everything was going really well... until SAB started moaning.

I'm trying to connect to:


us.news.atraweb.com:119
eu.news.astraweb.com:119
news.afrihost.co.za:119

none are SSL based. and all are timing out. It worked until I was being throttled to death by mweb so I switched to AH.

Any ideas?
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Go into clientzone, then to your business account, then to Protocol Prioritisation, and switch it off :)

Z
 
Hi, I am on Telkom, and recently it's been particularly bad due to what looks like some serious IPC problems in the South-West. I am considering moving to Afrihost (I posted in the Uncapped thread for user feedback, but it seems like a 50/50 chance of getting a bad service at the moment...)

I am considering the 4mbps business uncapped (maybe 6 or even 8 if I can afford it), and would like to know how it stands against a capped AH account's performance and 10mbps AH uncapped. I mostly game (so looking for 0% packet loss and low latency) and watch streams online at 720p (XBMC 1Channel or IceFilms/YouTube/Twitch.tv).Also, are there data limits at which the account will be throttled?

Thanks
 
Mike Smit said:
I ended up with AH because Mweb kicked me off their network and banned me. Best thing they could have ever done. They suck compared.
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Careful, AH will raise you and close ALL your accounts if you badmouth them or claim the refund.
 
giggity said:
Hi, I am on Telkom, and recently it's been particularly bad due to what looks like some serious IPC problems in the South-West. I am considering moving to Afrihost (I posted in the Uncapped thread for user feedback, but it seems like a 50/50 chance of getting a bad service at the moment...)

I am considering the 4mbps business uncapped (maybe 6 or even 8 if I can afford it), and would like to know how it stands against a capped AH account's performance and 10mbps AH uncapped. I mostly game (so looking for 0% packet loss and low latency) and watch streams online at 720p (XBMC 1Channel or IceFilms/YouTube/Twitch.tv).Also, are there data limits at which the account will be throttled?

Thanks
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Twitch HD (High quality setting) streaming is quite bad on the business uncapped accounts and it buffers every few seconds. YouTube works fine for cached streams. Haven't tried 1Channel or IceFilms.
 
efitol said:
Twitch HD (High quality setting) streaming is quite bad on the business uncapped accounts and it buffers every few seconds. YouTube works fine for cached streams. Haven't tried 1Channel or IceFilms.
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4meg?
 
Taranis said:
I don't think he's helping by issuing overly impressive reports about accounts he doesn't own. I'm happy for him to assist if he's honest.
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I don't know whether he has an Uncapped or a Business account, but since you are also posting in both threads, doesn't that kind of imply a double standard here.

I think he's very helpful to a lot of people wanting info, and I don't have an issue - unless you're saying that no-one should post in a thread that is not specific to them - in which case there are several repeat posters in this and the Uncapped thread that need to be sanctioned :(
 
Phinix said:
Well I'm stuck with OW until the end of June, so i guess I'll check back about twitch streaming then.
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Twitch streaming has bee reported several times, mostly in this forum. I've run several tests that seem pretty normal and I've also logged queries with Twitch, will pretty dismal response. :(
 
klipdrifter said:
Hey Afrihost members

I would like to get some feedback regarding the Afrihost Business Uncapped.

Is it really unshaped, unmetered as their website advertise?

Will be jumping the gun on Telkom soon and looking for a new uncapped ISP.

Hope you guys can help a stranger out!

Kind regards
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Our Business is guaranteed unshaped - and it will never be shaped under any conditions, unless you specifically apply the Protocol Prioritisation feature that shaped P2P traffic (designed for business owners who want to protect their office networks)
 
wingnut771 said:
and this is the crux :(

It seems these accounts are cool if you're a downloader, but don't expect top quality with hulu/nf/twitch, as they say it's not supported, even tho "other" ISP's seem to manage fine :(.

Then there's the fact that capped works normal, but business not so much and yet they supposed to be from the same pool :wtf:
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The only aspects we can't support are the use of external DNS. For two reasons. firstly, using different DNS to bypass a service provider's restrictions is essentially a violation of their terms of service, so we can't officially sanction that - although we are aware that clients have the ability to do this on their private networks.

Secondly, using an external DNS means that you are introducing a variable that we are not in control of, and using another DNS provider can have a big effect on your overall experience. From that point we cannot guarantee speeds or performance, as we have no insight or control over what factors may be present on the DNS servers/clusters you are using, whether it's public or free DNS services or paid DNS services.
 
giggity said:
Hi, I am on Telkom, and recently it's been particularly bad due to what looks like some serious IPC problems in the South-West. I am considering moving to Afrihost (I posted in the Uncapped thread for user feedback, but it seems like a 50/50 chance of getting a bad service at the moment...)

I am considering the 4mbps business uncapped (maybe 6 or even 8 if I can afford it), and would like to know how it stands against a capped AH account's performance and 10mbps AH uncapped. I mostly game (so looking for 0% packet loss and low latency) and watch streams online at 720p (XBMC 1Channel or IceFilms/YouTube/Twitch.tv).Also, are there data limits at which the account will be throttled?

Thanks
Click to expand...

We don't shape or throttle Business traffic ever, so that answers part of your question.

We prioritise real time performance on all our accounts, so whether Capped, Business or Uncapped, your realtime streaming should performance relatively similarly. However, if you are running other services like torrents or NNTP, this may have more of an effect on Uncapped, due to to QoS acting on your line. Similarly, running multiple services on unshaped services like Capped or Business will cause local contention on your line, so some services will not perform at peak, depending on whether you have QoS setup on your router and the specific services and sequence of events.

The best way to test the unshaped experience would be to sign up a Free GB account and then try out a few services. Essentially all unshaped products should perform similarly, so it will be a good indicator.

https://www.afrihost.com/microsites/freegb/?src=socmed
 
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