Afrihost CAPPED ADSL Feedback (MTN)

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caroper said:
So latency is high, and expected to be so in the South and yet the North should have seen no latency?
Are you saying then that you have Run out of IPC in the South again?
Or do you just treat the South as second class customers and give us a much higher contention ratio than your Premium customers in Jhb?
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We don't believe we don't have enough IPC to run the service as we envision it as optimal levels, but we do believe that some traffic that should be shaped on Uncapped accounts is creeping through and inflating demand, so we can't manage traffic effectively. We are identifying this traffic and shaping it (for Uncapped users) to bring demand back in line.

Our clients in the South are certainly not second class. The reality is we have done more upgrades, percentage wise, that any other region, although the North still has the biggest network in terms of capacity and number of clients. Each region has seen massive investment in network infrastructure and I think if it were to come down to a rand per user sort of stat (which I don't really have) my feeling is that it would be about equal.
 
Purply said:
Doubt Afrihost ever did IPC upgrades to start with as all the problems and issues are still exactly the same it was 6 months ago :p
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We definitely did upgrades last year, we confirmed here on MyBB, at a massive investment from both us and MTN. We would have seen major complaints here on the forums from November last year (which is round about when we upgrades). We also would have had to do something drastic to reduce demand without upgrading, which would also have been picked up by clients.
 
AfriMan said:
We don't believe we don't have enough IPC to run the service as we envision it as optimal levels, but we do believe that some traffic that should be shaped on Uncapped accounts is creeping through and inflating demand, so we can't manage traffic effectively. We are identifying this traffic and shaping it (for Uncapped users) to bring demand back in line.
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But if that is the case why is it not effecting your network as a whole? I find it hard to imagine that that the region with the lowest number of users also has the highest number of hackers, that are capable of bypassing your traffic management.
Will you then end up with a different set of traffic management rules in each region? Surely on the grand scale of things traffic should average out over the whole network, unless there is a specific bottleneck.
 
caroper said:
But if that is the case why is it not effecting your network as a whole? I find it hard to imagine that that the region with the lowest number of users also has the highest number of hackers, that are capable of bypassing your traffic management.
Will you then end up with a different set of traffic management rules in each region? Surely on the grand scale of things traffic should average out over the whole network, unless there is a specific bottleneck.
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Remember that each region's demand on the network is specific to the IPC they hit first. So we do see different trends in each region, in terms of when demand peaks and the types of traffic. P2P is something that does affect all regions, but hey, Cape Townians do love their Linux Distros. We actually see much higher demand for things like Apple updates from the South than the North, so it's unique for each region.
 
AfriMan, what are the people using to bypass the shaping?

It's probably ok if you don't want to post it here but is it just a special uTorrent client or are they using VPN or what?
 
AfriMan said:
We actually see much higher demand for things like Apple updates from the South than the North, so it's unique for each region.
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Strange that Apple opened their Offices in Jhb rather than Cape Town then as they must have considerably more users down here, Apple Updates are pushed by apple not pulled by the user :)
 
whatwhat said:
AfriMan, what are the people using to bypass the shaping?

It's probably ok if you don't want to post it here but is it just a special uTorrent client or are they using VPN or what?
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I don't know all the details but they are basically disguising the traffic as other packet signatures, using some sort of P2P service. So it comes through as a service that our system thinks it mustn't shape. I don't think it's using VPN or sandbox type methods, but it seems to be at the packet level. We are trying to find a way to identify all this traffic. It may be more than one method or service being used as well.
 
caroper said:
Strange that Apple opened their Offices in Jhb rather than Cape Town then as they must have considerably more users down here, Apple Updates are pushed by apple not pulled by the user :)
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That's just on our network, so I can't say what Apple's demographics look like. Maybe they just don't dig the mountain (or love our Joburg smog fuelled sunsets)
 
AfriMan said:
We are running tests with some clients from the gaming industry. We have also read reports online of bugs and unpredictable performance.
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I dunno so much hey. The other ISP connects perfectly. My friend also has no issues on OpenWeb. Just Afrihost that cannot connect.
 
Type RSA said:
I dunno so much hey. The other ISP connects perfectly. My friend also has no issues on OpenWeb. Just Afrihost that cannot connect.
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No issues with Openweb... now that's a bold statement.
 
Type RSA said:
I dunno so much hey. The other ISP connects perfectly. My friend also has no issues on OpenWeb. Just Afrihost that cannot connect.
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We are testing so we'll verify, but that was the feedback I got. Rockstar traffic all uses the same classifications, so the team initially felt that this a bug from initial forum reports :(
 
AfriMan said:
We are running tests with some clients from the gaming industry. We have also read reports online of bugs and unpredictable performance.
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Well how do you explain the same game, the same version of th game is running fine at another ISP?

It seems to be due to DNS errors or something. When I change to the google DNS settings(8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4) I could connect and see other players but it was extremely laggy. Afterwards I changed back to the Afrihost DNS (196.7.7.7, 196.7.8.9) I could connect and lag was gone. If I then restart my modem I once again can't connect/see other players. I then repeat above process and it starts working again. Just to add to the mix Youtube was also really slow, but was fine when using the google DNS settings and slow again when using Afrihost DNS settings.
 
DJZassie said:
I'll just leave this here: https://www.afrihost.com/site/page/uncapped_adsl_leader_board

40mbps on NON business uncapped and look at the difference he is pulling... :|
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ghostR said:
+1

I'm pretty sure he could be a culprit of bypassing the shaping??

He's doing more than the 40 meg business uncapped people are???
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I obviously can't give out the Client's details, but I can confirm he is in the North, and that most of the bandwidth is being moved during 00h00 to 08h00 period. We do monitor the higher Uncapped accounts closely, and that specific account is being shaped correctly.
 
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AfriGenie said:
I obviously give out the Client's details, but I can confirm he is in the North, and that most of the bandwidth is being moved during 00h00 to 08h00 period. We do monitor the higher Uncapped accounts closely, and that specific account is being shaped correctly.
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If that is the case then why is it taking so long to pinpoint the accounts bypassing the p2p shaping? surely this breaches your T&C's? Send them a warning or something... because as you make it sound in this thread. A minority is ruining the network for the majority...

Also if they are obscurificating the packets you would see a huge change of bandwidth to the "End Packet Type" Then you can do research onto what programs are able to do this and fix it... Or even shape that spcific account...

What i don't get is why you have T&C's to protect your network but they are not enforced strongly enough to actually do that....
If somebody is in breach then do something about it... then you can look at how to stop it in future!
 
AfriMan said:
I don't know all the details but they are basically disguising the traffic as other packet signatures, using some sort of P2P service. So it comes through as a service that our system thinks it mustn't shape. I don't think it's using VPN or sandbox type methods, but it seems to be at the packet level. We are trying to find a way to identify all this traffic. It may be more than one method or service being used as well.
Click to expand...

Is this why MTN are going to start using deep packet inspection?
 
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