Afrihost CAPPED ADSL Feedback (MTN)

[AfriMan]

What's the point of bundling your line with AH?

I've had to contact Telkom myself to get the maximum sync speed database updated for my area (so much for dealing with them on my behalf). Now I've been waiting 5 days for a line speed change. Could of done this myself in 5 minutes.

You should normally have to deal with Telkom. In terms of available infrastructure, Telkom do provide this info to us mostly. However, their systems are sometimes out of date, but we can confirm with them verbally.

If it's a straight DSL upgrade, that should usually happen within 48 hours. VDSL upgrades seem to take a little longer as the process hasn't been fully automated yet. This is sometimes the case for old DSLAM's, but that's pretty rare these days.

 

[kohlhtor]

We're definitely seeing better results, but I do see that some clients are not quite back to normal.

We'll keep working on this and I'm sure that we'll get performance back to what we expect.

You tell this now for 3 week every time you say changes fix it but it getting every day worse
Yesterday evening i get 120 KB/s normally i get 630 KB/s
This in in PE

 

[AfriMan]

Seems to have sorted itself out when I checked at about 3am.
Thanks

Awesome - really glad to hear that

 

[AfriMan]

You tell this now for 3 week every time you say changes fix it but it getting every day worse
Yesterday evening i get 120 KB/s normally i get 630 KB/s
This in in PE

We did a major software rollout to the system on Monday/Tuesday. This would have affected shaping policies on Uncapped and overall traffic management. For now we have to monitor and see if there are additional areas we can tighten up to optimise overall traffic management.

 

[aucampia]

You tell this now for 3 week every time you say changes fix it but it getting every day worse
Yesterday evening i get 120 KB/s normally i get 630 KB/s
This in in PE

They have no intention to solve the problems. Their only intention is to curb the mass exodus of their customers by acting asif there is nothing wrong or as if you are the only one with issues when they clearly know what is wrong and probbably caused it themselves.

 

[Aquiva]

Just a note to Afrihost. I'm not sure what the drive was for getting in bed with MTN, but they are holding you guys back. Since starting with them there has never been 'n moment of smooth sailing for Afrihost. I would put a mandate on MTN to give their absolute best to avoid running Afrihost into the ground!

To the Afrihost Clients...Afrihost is a reseller of MTN bandwidth. They need to manage the traffic as efficiently as possible, but if someone (MTN) give you R20 and say you need to live a week of that, then there's only so much you can do.

My advice to Afrihost is that these posts are the warning signs, either stand up to MTN and get what they promised (unless they promised the very least of their infrastructure to Afrihost) or suffer the consequences if losing a lot of clients and going the same road as MWeb!

 

[AfriMan]

Is anyone else experiencing slow upload speeds? Feels like I'm getting less than 300Kbps, I haven't run an actual Speedtest yet, but with other ISP's I get around 400Kbps.

I understand that there's a network issue due to "IOS Updates", but if it carries on like this I'll have to cancel. I don't know how long it's been like this, as I haven't had to use this account for uploading yet.

Downloads are working quite well though.

Upload speeds are not affected by any policies, so we generally give the lines full access. However, upload and download traffic still constitutes network traffic (ADSL is asynchronous) so it would be affected by overall network traffic, as well as traffic on your local network.

 

[AfriMan]

Just a note to Afrihost. I'm not sure what the drive was for getting in bed with MTN, but they are holding you guys back. Since starting with them there has never been 'n moment of smooth sailing for Afrihost. I would put a mandate on MTN to give their absolute best to avoid running Afrihost into the ground!

To the Afrihost Clients...Afrihost is a reseller of MTN bandwidth. They need to manage the traffic as efficiently as possible, but if someone (MTN) give you R20 and say you need to live a week of that, then there's only so much you can do.

My advice to Afrihost is that these posts are the warning signs, either stand up to MTN and get what they promised (unless they promised the very least of their infrastructure to Afrihost) or suffer the consequences if losing a lot of clients and going the same road as MWeb!

I don't think that there would be any benefit to MTN to lower Afrihost's standard or cause the company to collapse. The real logic behind their deal with us is to acquire a business that they themselves don't have or provide. So to acquire that capacity and then destroy it would be a huge waste of their resources. I think that if anything they would (once the deal is approved and they are officially on board) pump a lot of resources and time into making Afrihost better, or otherwise letting what works continue to work and improve. That's also why they've let the current executives and management stay on. They want Afrihost to continue to be Afrihost. I'm sure there will always be challenges, and we'll strive to make sure that we always handle them in the Afrihost way, by putting clients first and making sacrifices wherever we can to give our clients a great product and service experience.

 

[AfriMan]

@Afriman / @Afriguy
You guys need to come clean about what's happening.
There's a slew of reports right here that suggest things are still far from being normal.
My situation has not improved with both Local and International maxing out at 4mbps today.
Far cry from the typical stable state of 8mbps.

Latency appears to have stabilized but something is still wrong somewhere. I'm betting it's related to the software changes you guys have communicated. That being so I cannot fathom why it's taking the combined might of Afrihost and MTN to... well... draw blanks in terms of resolution. Your customer's are feeling the pain. This is not cool guys!!!

Pings to www.afrihost.com - no issues

Ping statistics for 197.242.144.102:
    Packets: Sent = 15, Received = 15, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 32ms, Maximum = 45ms, Average = 34ms

Ping statistics for 197.242.144.102: [www.afrihost.com]
    Packets: Sent = 15, Received = 15, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 32ms, Maximum = 59ms, Average = 38ms

Tracert to www.afrihost.com - no issues

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

  1     1 ms     1 ms     1 ms  192.168.0.1
  2     8 ms     7 ms     7 ms  105-236-240-129-esr-lo.mtnbusiness.co.za [105.236.240.129]
  3    12 ms    10 ms    10 ms  41.181.221.254
  4    11 ms    14 ms    11 ms  tb-dca-2.za--qux-c.za.mtnbusiness.net [41.181.198.188]
  5    12 ms    11 ms    11 ms  compj-cpt-1.mtnns.net [196.44.18.2]
  6    12 ms    20 ms    11 ms  ct-cr-2.za--tb-cr-1.za.mtnns.net [196.44.31.134]
  7    34 ms    33 ms    34 ms  rb-cr-1.za--ct-cr-2.za.mtnns.net [196.44.31.69]
  8    33 ms    32 ms    31 ms  196.44.31.97
  9    35 ms    33 ms    33 ms  196.31.220.12
 10    34 ms    32 ms    33 ms  196.31.220.25
 11    32 ms    51 ms    34 ms  196.31.63.206
 12    34 ms    40 ms    59 ms  vl9-ah-ha-2.za.mtnbusiness.net [196.30.42.133]
 13    35 ms    31 ms    47 ms  cms-gm.afrihost.com [197.242.144.102]

Trace complete.

The ping results seem pretty normal, which is consistent with what we're seeing in terms of latency. There are two issues. We've been seeing demand slowly decrease as Apple service traffic has subsided, and we've also rolled out updates to the network management software to improve traffic management. Generally we've seen throughput improve and overall improved performance, so it would be strange to see that your performance has gotten poorer in that time

 

[AfriMan]

I must say that in the past 12 months I've had some pretty dismal service from some ISPs, but this current level of service from Afrihost really takes the cake.

Nothing has improved in the week and a half I've been a (re)subcriber.

Only positive is that I'm sure I'll qualify for the double-money-back-guarantee when I cancel this garbage.

10mbp/s, Cape Town, can't even stream a YouTube in 720p. Afrihost sucks if you're in Cape Town, bottom line.

I'm sorry that you're experiencing such poor performance. From what you're saying it's pretty poor on a normal 10mbps line. I do think that our last week has not been the best time to rejoin, with the demand issues we've been sorting out in that time.

What sort of throughput are you getting on the line on speedtest?

 

[AfriMan]

Youtube for me here in CPT seems back to normal.

Awesome

 

[Zadomino]

This looks like it could be congestion or possibly a line fault. We'll only be able to confirm when we troubleshoot. If you get the same 2nd hop ping on another network, like Telkom, then we'll know it's definitely the exchange or the line

So how do i get you guys this info to sort it out, starting to get frustrated with this?!?!?!

 

[AfriMan]

THANKS FOR THAT! How do you know which traces to look for to ID the problem?

The 2nd hop of a trace (if you're not using bridged mode or routing via an exchange) should be the hop from your PC via the exchange to the MTN network gateway. If this is higher than 30ms, it would indicate either congestion or line issues (assuming there are no other factors at play). I would say anything close to 30ms would be cause for concern though, you should really see sub 20ms normally.

 

[Aquiva]

I don't think that there would be any benefit to MTN to lower Afrihost's standard or cause the company to collapse. The real logic behind their deal with us is to acquire a business that they themselves don't have or provide. So to acquire that capacity and then destroy it would be a huge waste of their resources. I think that if anything they would (once the deal is approved and they are officially on board) pump a lot of resources and time into making Afrihost better, or otherwise letting what works continue to work and improve. That's also why they've let the current executives and management stay on. They want Afrihost to continue to be Afrihost. I'm sure there will always be challenges, and we'll strive to make sure that we always handle them in the Afrihost way, by putting clients first and making sacrifices wherever we can to give our clients a great product and service experience.

From a business/logical perspective this is true. But unfortunately the issues of late paint a completely different picture.

 

[Zadomino]

The 2nd hop of a trace (if you're not using bridged mode or routing via an exchange) should be the hop from your PC via the exchange to the MTN network gateway. If this is higher than 30ms, it would indicate either congestion or line issues (assuming there are no other factors at play). I would say anything close to 30ms would be cause for concern though, you should really see sub 20ms normally.

Ok so where / who do i report this to to get it fixed?

 

[Aquiva]

That looks pretty poor. Latency seems to be all over the place. Did you run full traces so we can see where those pings are spiking in the routing?

This is now this morning, and am hitting pretty high pings to Afrihost.com:

 

[MrGray]

Pretty much the only time I ever see anything close to max line speed at the moment from the south is early morning before 8am on capped and business uncapped. From 8am it drops to about 50% of line speed and stays that way all day, tending to deteriorate even further from about 4pm onwards daily.

Feels like this is fundamentally a capacity issue at AH (at least in the south) and the only way it will be resolved is either a lot of users cancel or AH increases capacity. Having said that, it is not logical to expect 100% line speed constantly on a contended service, so the criteria becomes what AVERAGE percentage of max speed you'll accept, and what AH is providing at the moment seems way too low.

 

[AfriMan]

From a business/logical perspective this is true. But unfortunately the issues of late paint a completely different picture.

Remember that MTN are not operationally involved at any level, even management. At this point they are simply an upstream provider until the competition board approves the proposed deal.

 

[AfriMan]

This is now this morning, and am hitting pretty high pings to Afrihost.com:

View attachment 152304

Does seem pretty high, but our website has been iffy this morning. Should be back up again now.

 

[AfriMan]

Pretty much the only time I ever see anything close to max line speed at the moment from the south is early morning before 8am on capped and business uncapped. From 8am it drops to about 50% of line speed and stays that way all day, tending to deteriorate even further from about 4pm onwards daily.

Feels like this is fundamentally a capacity issue at AH (at least in the south) and the only way it will be resolved is either a lot of users cancel or AH increases capacity. Having said that, it is not logical to expect 100% line speed constantly on a contended service, so the criteria becomes what AVERAGE percentage of max speed you'll accept, and what AH is providing at the moment seems way too low.

We're still monitoring the effects of the additional software rollouts we've done and mostly we're getting good reports. We'll keep at it until we see performance at what we expect.