Afrihost CAPPED ADSL Feedback (MTN)

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AfriMan said:
We've been pretty open since the iOS release that we were struggling with demand, and I think it was very prudent to monitor at first before incurring a huge cost that could affect clients in the long term (it may not be a price increase, but it could ultimately affect the degree to which we can plan future price cuts, etc). While we did make significant improvement as demand subsides and network efficiency was improved, we did also accelerate our planned network capacity upgrades as quickly as possible. Due to the nature of our agreements with our upstream providers, we obviously couldn't promise upgrades until they were approved.
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You know what I see happened is this: You got the extra capacity, but not enough for future growth or maybe enough for growth without exhilarated growth campaigns. You received the said capacity and immediately gave back to your customers in the form of double your cap for free. Fantastic marketing strategy so much so that the capacity you bought got eaten up in a very short period of time.

It is almost as throwing a party for 20 of your closest friends and ten of those friends go and post on Facebook that their will be a party for all to join, and 200 people rock up for the party.

I guess what I want to say is your giving away of double your capped attracted way more customers than you could cope with.
 
Orihalcon said:
Fair answer.

However you cannot deny that since your network optimisations have been brought in the last couple weeks, that a lot of people have complained about the same problem - p2p being just about non workable. So if nothing on our side changed...something on your side did. Now I am not saying you have a specific ruleset in place on this service, but SOMETHING that was tweaked is sure as hell effecting it. That cannot be denied.

As long as you guys are actually looking into it I'll be happy to accept that. Still 14 days to see if I stick around or leave. Hoping this improves by then.
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I know P2P has been probably the most affected. My own tests haven't been great but also very intermittent.
 
Leatherman said:
You know what I see happened is this: You got the extra capacity, but not enough for future growth or maybe enough for growth without exhilarated growth campaigns. You received the said capacity and immediately gave back to your customers in the form of double your cap for free. Fantastic marketing strategy so much so that the capacity you bought got eaten up in a very short period of time.

It is almost as throwing a party for 20 of your closest friends and ten of those friends go and post on Facebook that their will be a party for all to join, and 200 people rock up for the party.

I guess what I want to say is your giving away of double your capped attracted way more customers than you could cope with.
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Then why did they decide to extend the promotion? It expired on the 30th of Sept and they subsequently extended it until the 31st of Dec.
 
Aquiva said:
I do understand this, but this is exactly what Afrihost is doing wrong, having too little IPC and not planning for the busy times/growth factoring in the lead time.
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I know it may seem that way, but I can promise there were already plans to upgrade on the cards and we had started with the feasibility and financial planning.
 
Leatherman said:
You know what I see happened is this: You got the extra capacity, but not enough for future growth or maybe enough for growth without exhilarated growth campaigns. You received the said capacity and immediately gave back to your customers in the form of double your cap for free. Fantastic marketing strategy so much so that the capacity you bought got eaten up in a very short period of time.

It is almost as throwing a party for 20 of your closest friends and ten of those friends go and post on Facebook that their will be a party for all to join, and 200 people rock up for the party.

I guess what I want to say is your giving away of double your capped attracted way more customers than you could cope with.
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We discussed this extensively some time ago and doubling data cap really has very little to do with realtime demand. Essentially a client cannot use more than their current capacity whether they have more data or not. There could be an argument that some users may use more data over a period, but that would not affect realtime overall demand on the network at any single point in time.

Double Data promotion was solely based on savings and value that we could pass onto our clients, not extra capacity that we needed to use up on the network.
 
I cant connect to muliplayer servers.. on my capped account ...very frustrating...(change to any other ISP and I connect instantly). I hear you guys had an upgrade on your shaping management system software....mmmm.. lets shape/throttle capped accounts too.... end of this month I will rather pay more at another ISP if you guys cant give us realistic dates to fully restored services....
 
Kayoss said:
Then why did they decide to extend the promotion? It expired on the 30th of Sept and they subsequently extended it until the 31st of Dec.
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Cant answer you there I for one would not have done it. Trouble started before then but again they thought lets take from the uncapped and gave to the other clients with optimizing the network but it spilled over to the other packages unfortunately. Which simply points to over subscription.
 
AfriMan said:
I know it may seem that way, but I can promise there were already plans to upgrade on the cards and we had started with the feasibility and financial planning.
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This is what was said about 3 weeks ago. So who is lying???

AfriMan said:
Well, it's maybe not correct to say that. If we added more IPC, the problem would go away. But we're maintaining a delicate balance between keeping our overheads as low as possible, so that we can maintain current pricing, since we subsidise our bandwidth. We believe the tightening up our network management and shape what should be shaped (let less slip through the AUP) then we could provide the right level of performance without substantially increasing upstream costs, which will ultimately affect our clients in the long term.

If it comes to an IPC upgrade, then that is something we will consider if that is the appropriate course of action.
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Aquiva said:
This is what was said about 3 weeks ago. So who is lying???
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I think we're getting confused here. Our technical team does capacity planning and forecasting based on current usage and trends, etc. Based on that data, they had made plans to upgrade the network according when they felt those upgrades would be needed, but capacity was not ordered.

Once we'd decided to place the order ahead of the planned time, we had to wait for approval from MTN, and only then could we confirm that capacity has now been ordered and the upgrade process is underway.
 
krono9 said:
I cant connect to muliplayer servers.. on my capped account ...very frustrating...(change to any other ISP and I connect instantly). I hear you guys had an upgrade on your shaping management system software....mmmm.. lets shape/throttle capped accounts too.... end of this month I will rather pay more at another ISP if you guys cant give us realistic dates to fully restored services....
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We're not shaping capped accounts, and our shaping system in any event only acts on non-realtime traffic, so it's definitely not a question of shaping.

Which games are you having problems playing?
 
Had a good night last night. Not a single buffer on Hulu and full hd all night. This has been the first night in a long time that I have had that on Afrihost.
 
Kayoss said:
Then why did they decide to extend the promotion? It expired on the 30th of Sept and they subsequently extended it until the 31st of Dec.
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As I mentioned in my reply to Leatherman, capped data provisioning has pretty much nothing to do with realtime demand. A single user can only consume a fixed amount of data at one point in time limited by their line speed, etc. Giving them more data could mean they may consume over a longer period of time, but this doesn't really affect overall realtime demand or contention.
 
OK so to clarify, Network Upgrades are on Afrihost/MTN side and Capacity is with Telkom? OK so with all the complaints the last few weeks, why was Network Upgrades decided on and why did it not make a difference? I'm not shooting the messenger here, I think we are all just trying to get a straight answer from all this mess.
 
Aquiva said:
OK so to clarify, Network Upgrades are on Afrihost/MTN side and Capacity is with Telkom? OK so with all the complaints the last few weeks, why was Network Upgrades decided on and why did it not make a difference? I'm not shooting the messenger here, I think we are all just trying to get a straight answer from all this mess.
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No worries, if we all understand each other that's progress in my book :)

So IPC belongs to Telkom. Even though we order it, it never belongs to us or MTN. The hardware is within MTN's data centre, where your traffic leaves Telkom's network and then goes onto MTN's national fibre network.

When we decided that we would need to upgrade the network, we had to seek approval from MTN. We couldn't make promises before MTN gave that approval and then placed the official order with Telkom. When this happened, our Technical Director signed off on us confirming publicly that we have now placed an upgrade.

So the upgrades have not taken effect yet. Essentially we are waiting for Telkom to despatch their technicians to the site to light up the additional IPC. We don't have an ETA just yet, but I don't expect it will be very long.
 
AfriMan said:
No worries, if we all understand each other that's progress in my book :)

So IPC belongs to Telkom. Even though we order it, it never belongs to us or MTN. The hardware is within MTN's data centre, where your traffic leaves Telkom's network and then goes onto MTN's national fibre network.

When we decided that we would need to upgrade the network, we had to seek approval from MTN. We couldn't make promises before MTN gave that approval and then placed the official order with Telkom. When this happened, our Technical Director signed off on us confirming publicly that we have now placed an upgrade.

So the upgrades have not taken effect yet. Essentially we are waiting for Telkom to despatch their technicians to the site to light up the additional IPC. We don't have an ETA just yet, but I don't expect it will be very long.
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Thanks Afriman! This helps a lot in our understanding! OK so if there are routing issues (too many hops or latency) with MTN's international partners, does Afrihost actually have a say or weight in the resolving of it. It seems that most of the unsatisfactory is around international traffic (streaming/gaming etc.)
 
Aquiva said:
Thanks Afriman! This helps a lot in our understanding! OK so if there are routing issues (too many hops or latency) with MTN's international partners, does Afrihost actually have a say or weight in the resolving of it. It seems that most of the unsatisfactory is around international traffic (streaming/gaming etc.)
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It depends on where the routing issues occur. Remember that we peer with some overseas networks, like Level3 in the EU, but they in turn may peer with other networks so we don't always have a direct relationship. This is mostly true for the us, because each state is basically the size of a small country, so there is sometimes multiple network peering in place. But we can always log queries directly with those networks or via our partner networks to try to improve efficiency.
 
Since when does an over contended network = shaping of capped accounts? It's quite simple to understand....WRT that shaping test - do the test after the IPC upgrades.
 
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