Afrihost Gaming PPTP [alpha]

[MakoPC]

Luckily it won't benefit me, but I wouldn't since I am on 1Gbps, too much of a reduction, but I am glad Afrihost is doing something to assist gamers, still so many games with no local servers...

 

[William1102]

Hi guys

As someone from Durban will this have any benefit ?

 

[frost717]

90% speed reduction for better ping?

That's the sacrifice i'm willing to make.

yeah to be fair you don't need much bandwidth for just gaming anyway.

 

[chrisGolf]

Luckily it won't benefit me, but I wouldn't since I am on 1Gbps, too much of a reduction, but I am glad Afrihost is doing something to assist gamers, still so many games with no local servers...

my understanding is that you can switch between your normal connection and this VPN server.
for most of the time, leave your 1Gbps connection, and if you need better latency because you're connecting to EU servers, then switch over to this VPN ?

 

[MakoPC]

my understanding is that you can switch between your normal connection and this VPN server.
for most of the time, leave your 1Gbps connection, and if you need better latency because you're connecting to EU servers, then switch over to this VPN ?

All my traffic gets routed through CPT anyways, so it wouldn't make much of a different, Afrinatic did confirm earlier on in the thread
I wish it did improve latency, might just test to see

 

[Minazetsu]

Hey, Do we just have to reset the password in Clientzone Conectivity -> Access details -> Reset Password for it to work?
Afrihost on Openserve. Is it still not working with Openserve? Reseting Password still didn't work sadly for me.

 

[MakoPC]

Hey, Do we just have to reset the password in Clientzone Conectivity -> Access details -> Reset Password for it to work?
Afrihost on Openserve. Is it still not working with Openserve?

Yes try resetting password

 

[Minazetsu]

Yes try resetting password

Reseting the password didn't fix it sadly for me.

 

[MakoPC]

Reseting the password didn't fix it sadly for me.

It can take up to 30 minutes for it to actually update the credentials, what FNO are you on?

 

[ronnie_94]

Hey, Do we just have to reset the password in Clientzone Conectivity -> Access details -> Reset Password for it to work?
Afrihost on Openserve. Is it still not working with Openserve? Reseting Password still didn't work sadly for me.

If you are with Openserve or Vodacom, I get the same and @AfriNatic had to create a test account for me to use the vpn.

Okay, I see the issue. Openserve and Vodacom clients are not working currently. Let me see what a can do

Access-Reject
You are already logged in - access denied

 

[Minazetsu]

If you are with Openserve or Vodacom, I get the same and @AfriNatic had to create a test account for me to use the vpn.

I see thanks for letting me know!

 

[CapoPlays]

I'm working with the network engineers on deploying pptp vpn servers in CPT (first) and then DUR and JHB later on as a trial for gamers on the Afrihost network that are experiencing less than-ideal routing from the northern region.

I took all the complaints to heart and hope we can come up with a solution that can work for gamers and for clients that just want to download as fast and as much as they want.

We starting with a CPT PPtP server hosting in our CPT core to force routing to Europe via West Coast cables without having to make major network changes that could impact other services as well as pricing. Below are the details for clients that want to give it a go.

Server : 169.1.2.37
username and password from clientzone (pppoe details)

make sure to enable pap as the authentication method.

View attachment 1514285

This project has only just started and we appreciate any feedback.

We have limited speeds via pptp to 10Mbps as a start. We will look at how we can improve this and how popular it is. We chose pptp as it's unencrypted for speed and because it already integrates with what we have built in clientzone for password resets. PPtP is also supported in the Huawei router we supply.

Afrihost pptp3 [BETA!]

If you are enabling it in the router please make sure you are aware of the 10Mbps speed cap for now.

View attachment 1514289

i hate to ask lol Vuma Reach users? react with a laugh if its the Ont pppoe username and password i can extract it lol

 

[ronnie_94]

I just gave this a quick try using Dota 2. My normal latency without using the VPN looks like this:

Using the Afrihost VPN things get worse, even within SA, but I suspect that's because I am in KZN and there isn't a Durban server yet.

Lastly I also included an ExitLag result because it is able to bring the latency to SE Asia down to 128ms. I think it does this by routing the traffic to SEA via Singapore. So this might be worth investigating as I know there are a lot of people who would like to play ranked Dota 2 in South Africa and this would provide the best latency to do so.

Correct it is due to you being routed via CPT which brings your south african latency to 40+, DBN server would not have such a big impact if any.

 

[Soul Assassin]

The VPN feels good.

 

[Polymathic]

I just gave this a quick try using Dota 2. My normal latency without using the VPN looks like this:

Using the Afrihost VPN things get worse, even within SA, but I suspect that's because I am in KZN and there isn't a Durban server yet.

Lastly I also included an ExitLag result because it is able to bring the latency to SE Asia down to 128ms. I think it does this by routing the traffic to SEA via Singapore. So this might be worth investigating as I know there are a lot of people who would like to play ranked Dota 2 in South Africa and this would provide the best latency to do so.

Based on geography Dubai and India should be lower than SE Asia, perhaps something to look at in the future

 

[Polymathic]

Based on geography Dubai and India should be lower than SE Asia, perhaps something to look at in the

 

[William1102]

I just gave this a quick try using Dota 2. My normal latency without using the VPN looks like this:

Using the Afrihost VPN things get worse, even within SA, but I suspect that's because I am in KZN and there isn't a Durban server yet.

Lastly I also included an ExitLag result because it is able to bring the latency to SE Asia down to 128ms. I think it does this by routing the traffic to SEA via Singapore. So this might be worth investigating as I know there are a lot of people who would like to play ranked Dota 2 in South Africa and this would provide the best latency to do so.

Really amazing how Exitlag pulls this off especially Asia

Wonder if ISPs can get a similar thing going?

 

[AfriNatic]

Really amazing how Exitlag pulls this off especially Asia

Wonder if ISPs can get a similar thing going?

So Exitlag uses various VPS servers hosted on multiple networks that they chain up to provide low latency.

With networking this setup is not possible and let me briefly explain why.

The internet is basically a bunch of networks all connecting to each other. Not everyone is in every IXP (exchange point or data centre) and they can buy what is called ip transit from tier 1 providers to take their traffic to certain parts or the internat as a whole.

Let's say ISP A has a direct link to London which gives 160ms from JHB. To reach a server in France they have a second "pop" in Amsterdam which they connect to first then send the traffic over Cogent to reach France because they don't have any links to France. This causes latency to France to be 195ms on ISP A.

ISP B has a direct link to France from JHB which gives a latency of 165ms but to reach Londoin they go via Germany which gives 195ms to London.

Exitlag basically gets a VPS on both of these networks and get a VPS in London and France and changes which route is used by chaining the respective VPS's

BGP for networks doesn't work like this. There are extra costs involved even if you have all the routes it doesn't mean that the network in France that is hosting the gaming server sends traffic back to you via France they might want to send traffic back to you via Amsterdam and so all of these factors make it difficult to steer traffic.

Our brothers in blue (Cool Ideas) get this sorted because they have a direct transit link to London which they then peer with other networks at LINX and reach the rest of the internet via Cogent from London which basically forces traffic JHB >< CPT <> LON whereas with Afrihost we have transit providers in SA. This means they can use whichever route makes sense based on traffic and outages and not always the lowest latency routes.

Exitlag has at least 6 networks in South Africa that I could see. i3d, CDN77 (Angola Cables), ECN, Cloudflare, Vultr

The CDN77 uses Angola Cables. Low latency to Angola and Brazil but 210ms to London. You can test this with Mulvad vpn which I also tested to get an idea of how CDN routes traffic from SA.
Vultr uses SAFE via China Mobile so they have low-latency routes to Singapore and Hong Kong but again 200ms to London
i3d has low latency routes to Singapore and London and ECN also has a low latency route to London.

Hope this long message gives some clarity on how they manipulate traffic by using a bunch of networks to get favourable routes.

 

[William1102]

Wow thanks Afrinatic for that great explanation

I see it’s quite a complex issue but with service in the Middle East the 120-130ms ping is pretty good

 

[giggity]

With networking this setup is not possible and let me briefly explain why.

Is it possible to control routing within South Africa without using a VPN? For example by routing UDP connections in a certain IP range from JHB to CPT?