Afrihost CAPPED ADSL Feedback (MTN)

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Hey all,

How's everyone's performance today?
Mine has been super stable today as it was through June. Everything across the board shows improvement. Tests to SAIX in Rosebank and Durban, which were maxing out some way below 3mbps are rock solid today at > 3.4mbps. My International test location has also been rock solid at >3.4mbps. I've fed back to the guys at AfriHost and did ask for feedback on the improvement.

@AfriMan: Would be great if you could look into my ticket and share insights.

Rgds,
SD.

Update 19h00: Odd behavior last night. Streaming speeds were erratic through the night. Not awful but between 1.5mbps and 2.5mbps... varied quite a lot. I kicked off a multi-threaded download late last night to check whether a multi-threaded download (p2p) maxed out the line... and it did. I did however note from the logs that just after midnight... 00h05... speeds dropped off completely (<20kbps) and didn't pickup again till around 1am and not to the full line speed. It maxed around 180 to 200KBps, whereas was maxing at 400KBps (multi-threaded) prior to 00h00. Any ideas what could have been happening?

Update 23:20: Sadly... the stable performance is gone. From about 7pm this evening to now I've had fluctuating speeds... from 1.8mbps to 2.5mbps. :( Seriously don't know what to make of this. Wondering whether I need to get a Plugg account... I need a stable line :cry: and this has taken time every day from last week :(
 
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I also recommend getting another account. That's something I've learned from all this: even though I want to be loyal to my ISP (they're really good to me), it all boils down to the raw internet service we're paying for. If that is not there then we have to look elsewhere, and there's nothing wrong with that.

The competition in the ADSL market is good enough that I can change to a better service for a while if I choose.
 
steel_dog said:
Hey all,

How's everyone's performance today?
Mine has been super stable today as it was through June. Everything across the board shows improvement. Tests to SAIX in Rosebank and Durban, which were maxing out some way below 3mbps are rock solid today at > 3.4mbps. My International test location has also been rock solid at >3.4mbps. I've fed back to the guys at AfriHost and did ask for feedback on the improvement.

@AfriMan: Would be great if you could look into my ticket and share insights.

Rgds,
SD.

Update 19h00: Odd behavior last night. Streaming speeds were erratic through the night. Not awful but between 1.5mbps and 2.5mbps... varied quite a lot. I kicked off a multi-threaded download late last night to check whether a multi-threaded download (p2p) maxed out the line... and it did. I did however note from the logs that just after midnight... 00h05... speeds dropped off completely (<20kbps) and didn't pickup again till around 1am and not to the full line speed. It maxed around 180 to 200KBps, whereas was maxing at 400KBps (multi-threaded) prior to 00h00. Any ideas what could have been happening?

Update 23:20: Sadly... the stable performance is gone. From about 7pm this evening to now I've had fluctuating speeds... from 1.8mbps to 2.5mbps. :( Seriously don't know what to make of this. Wondering whether I need to get a Plugg account... I need a stable line :cry: and this has taken time every day from last week :(
Click to expand...

Definitely odd, though we were running some network maintenance yesterday that threw up a few anomalies. I'll check with our specialists who have been looking into your query and see if they have come up with any answers on their side :(
 
kingd53 said:
I also recommend getting another account. That's something I've learned from all this: even though I want to be loyal to my ISP (they're really good to me), it all boils down to the raw internet service we're paying for. If that is not there then we have to look elsewhere, and there's nothing wrong with that.

The competition in the ADSL market is good enough that I can change to a better service for a while if I choose.
Click to expand...

It's very difficult for us to pin down individual issues that affect ADSL performance. There are so many factors like the cabling, exchanges, etc that can make a noticeable difference.

Having a backup ISP account shouldn't be necessary, we can always provide some alternate testing accounts to ensure that our network performs at the level that your line is capable of.

I'm always a PM away, so please contact me if you're having issues - I'm always happy to help :)
 
AfriMan said:
Definitely odd, though we were running some network maintenance yesterday that threw up a few anomalies. I'll check with our specialists who have been looking into your query and see if they have come up with any answers on their side :(
Click to expand...
Thanks! That would be appreciated. As always I'm keeping the ticket updated. Haven't heard anything back from them since the last PM to you.
 
My international performance this evening is (still) erratic. Streaming performance has been extremely poor. Almost everything from the US has struggled. My FNBConnect Account on the other hand is streaming perfectly. Hulu, Vudu in particular were streaming poorly - low quality with lots of buffering.
Have PM'ed Afriman 'cause I've not received any meaningful feedback to date from the Support team. To be fair there's been lots of engagement, questions and requests for tracert, etc however it's been a one way street of input from me with no meaningful output coming from the Support team.
 
Fifth reboot just done and still no connection. Been a slow and crappy connection since last night. Sigh.

Just what I need on a day off......

Edited to add: 6th time rebooting worked. Have a connection again.
 
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Telkom techs have been in the area since Thursday (there is a Telkom manhole right by our fence and a pole where the line comes into the house) and it might explain the random disconnects we had.

But since this morning around 11am, the line is definately more stable and I can now stream Youtube vids again at a decent resolution even while downloading other stuff.

I hope it will work like this next week though. Will do some tests in the week and update.
 
Happiness was short lived.......

Youtube, Streetfire etc vid streaming gone to hell again. And after 9pm on a Sunday night? Makes absolutely no sense to me.

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Local:
Test conducted on 14 July 2013 09:32:06 PM
Download Speed: 5645 kbps (705.6 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 523 kbps (65.4 KB/sec transfer rate)
Latency: 30 ms

International:
Test conducted on 14 July 2013 09:33:22 PM
Download Speed: 697 kbps (87.1 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 332 kbps (41.5 KB/sec transfer rate)
Latency: 267 ms

Testmy:
:::.. Internet Speed Test Result Details ..:::
Download Connection Speed:: 671 Kbps or 0.7 Mbps
Download Speed Test Size:: 1.5 MB or 1568 kB or 1605632 bytes
Download Binary File Transfer Speed:: 84 kB/s
Upload Connection Speed:: 237 Kbps or 0.2 Mbps
Upload Speed Test Size:: 256 kB or 262144 bytes
Upload Binary File Transfer Speed:: 30 kB/s
Timed:: Download: 19.13 seconds | Upload: 8.839 seconds
Tested At:: http://TestMy.net Version 13
Test Time:: 2013-07-14 21:34:20 Local Time
Location:: Pretoria, ZA ZA >> Destination:: Dallas, TX US
Validation:: http://testmy.net/db/QehfVOG.TA81e6z
TiP Measurement Summary (Download):: Min 0.21 Mbps | Middle Avg 0.82 Mbps | Max 1.69 Mbps | 82% Variance
TiP Data Points:: 0.8 Mbps, 0.83 Mbps, 0.68 Mbps, 0.69 Mbps, 0.86 Mbps, 1.09 Mbps, 0.83 Mbps, 0.88 Mbps, 1.1 Mbps, 0.82 Mbps, 0.49 Mbps, 0.31 Mbps, 0.28 Mbps, 0.44 Mbps, 0.8 Mbps, 0.99 Mbps, 1.23 Mbps, 1.69 Mbps, 0.21 Mbps
More Stats:: http://testmy.net/compID/96506151427
User Agent:: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:22.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/22.0 [!]
 
And connection died 20 minutes ago..... rebooting the router now for the 5th time to see if there is a connection.
Anyone know who I can go smack upside the head to fix this constant issue? Reward of a bottle of Gentleman Jack offered.
 
And why would my Client Zone show "3 Connections Active", when there is 1 PC connected to the single Telkom line in our house?

20130715_164531.jpg
 
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Question time.

Possibly against my better judgment I'm considering an Afrihost capped account from the end of the month (left Afrihost uncapped during the whole MTN move over mess). Don't need an uncapped account at the moment, so I was wondering what the performance was like on a capped account with Afrihost these days.

We've been running perfectly on OpenWeb and Plugg for the last few months (plugg is surprisingly good), so i'm not that keen to change, but as we're only using around 40GB per month, savings can be made moving to a capped account. R899 for an OpenWeb Gold Unshaped, which is actually shaped, doesn't make sense any more.

Afrihost seems to be the best price / GB.

How is the quality of the bandwidth in general? Looking to fully utilize the 10Mb line when needed, with no shaping whatsoever (skype calling is important). No P2P traffic required (although i'd expect no shaping on the account in any case).

Is is a wise move to try out Afrihost again? There's a small part of me inside that's screaming "noooooooo!".
 
Bursty-dude said:
And why would my Client Zone show "3 Connections Active", when there is 1 PC connected to the single Telkom line in our house?
Click to expand...

If you have multiple disconnections over a short period of time, say 5-10 minutes, sometimes our system does not have enough time to close the old session and registers as concurrent sessions. It should not affect performance anyway, but it does mean that your line is disconnecting unexpectedly and requesting a new connection within a few seconds, pointing at an intermittent connectivity issue :(
 
Full ADSL performance has been restored, so everything should be back to normal now.
Thanks for everyones patience :)
 
Now Client Zone says 4 connections active.

PC is not even on and I am browsing via Wifi on my Galaxy SIII and the SO is browsing via her iPod.
And I switched my PC off due to almost non existant video streaming capabilities over Youtube. Again.....
 
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