Ok I apologize so long, this is going to be a super long post, mostly pictures to tell a 1000 words, on just how
bad my free Afrihost 1GB capped account is. Don't believe me on how
bad? Have a look at these Smokeping graphs for your perusal.
How it works, I have multiple ISP accounts dialed up on my mikrotik router at the same time. I then ping the 1st hop on each with Smokeping to test the quality of the account, and the ISP's IPC links. So this will be relevant to capped accounts, on the Cape Town region.
Account 1: Afrihost 1GB free capped
Account 2: Telkom guest account (this is to benchmark the ADSL line without IPC)
Account 3: Web Africa (IS) 120GB home capped account
Example traceroute on account 1: Afrihost capped
Code:
root@fs1:~# traceroute 105.236.9.65
traceroute to 105.236.9.65 (105.236.9.65), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 router (10.0.0.1) 0.781 ms 0.621 ms 0.501 ms
2 105-236-9-65-esr-lo.mtnbusiness.co.za (105.236.9.65) 8.933 ms 6.456 ms 6.117 ms
3 ipc-recieve-tb-2a.mtnbusiness.net (41.181.54.86) 8.449 ms 8.727 ms 8.618 ms
4 tb-dca-2.za--qux-c.za.mtnbusiness.net (41.181.198.188) 8.905 ms 11.498 ms 11.327 ms
5 qux--tb-dca-2.za-b.za.mtnbusiness.net (41.181.184.31) 8.147 ms 8.842 ms 10.054 ms
6 41.181.54.213 (41.181.54.213) 9.167 ms 41.181.223.105 (41.181.223.105) 8.836 ms 41.181.223.225 (41.181.223.225) 9.743 ms
7 105-236-9-65-esr-lo.mtnbusiness.co.za (105.236.9.65) 14.695 ms * 305.971 ms
Example traceroute on account 3: Web Africa capped
Code:
root@fs1:~# traceroute 196.210.201.1
traceroute to 196.210.201.1 (196.210.201.1), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 router (10.0.0.1) 0.749 ms 0.510 ms 0.503 ms
2 196-210-201-1.dynamic.isadsl.co.za (196.210.201.1) 11.626 ms 6.510 ms 7.345 ms
3 cdsl1-ctn-vl2173.ip.isnet.net (196.38.72.113) 8.942 ms 9.315 ms 10.222 ms
4 196.35.115.128 (196.35.115.128) 8.925 ms 9.014 ms 8.091 ms
5 196.35.115.131 (196.35.115.131) 8.897 ms 9.325 ms 8.833 ms
6 cdsl1-ctn-vl2375-ipc.ip.isnet.net (196.38.72.202) 8.901 ms 9.227 ms 9.342 ms
7 196-210-201-1.dynamic.isadsl.co.za (196.210.201.1) 9.370 ms * 397.229 ms
Thus the packets go via the ADSL line, over the DSLAM to the Telkom BRAS/BNG to the ISP's IPC links, and then back again to the Telkom BRAS/BNG. A very good test to purely test the performance up and down the ISP's IPC links, but not furhter upstream, and it excludes random other issues on the internet.
So the graphs:
Afrihost capped:
View attachment 168489
Telkom guest:
View attachment 168491
Web Africa/IS capped:
View attachment 168487
So Afrihost is awesome with their packet loss on the IPC links in Cape Town.