Afrihost - Pure Fibre Feedback Thread

[Fjorko]

@bratwurst @wingnut771 @Fjorko

Cloudflare local CDN unavailability

@rpm So on 11th of September Cloudflare switched off if I can say that the local CDN for all cloudflare services not on their enterprise package. I tried to get info regarding this but it's not forth coming. Currently all traffic is routed by the ISP to the next CDN with some going to London...

mybroadband.co.za

Cloudflare has dropped all traffic from their local CDNs for everyone not on Enterprise Cloudflare.

Examples:

mybroadband.co.za
xwire.co.za
takealot.com

examples of local CDN availability

1.1.1.1
emby1.baconfeet.xyz
discordapp.com
ghost.io


Right now Liquid Telecom announces prefixes in Kigali as the closest Cloudflare CDN so we get Kigali. CISP goes to London. Vodacom goes to Netherlands. Telkom(including Telkom ISP),Rain and MTN goes to Djibouti so they are worse than Afrihost,Axxess and Webafrica.

The only issue I have is that I'm doubting Cloudflare Kigali capacity during peak time but off peak time it's pretty decent still.

OK so now what - is this permanent or just a temp thing ? Anything that AH can do to NOT route us via Kigali, coz that sounds like a long detour.....

 

[cavedog]

OK so now what - is this permanent or just a temp thing ? Anything that AH can do to NOT route us via Kigali, coz that sounds like a long detour.....

Well Kigali is ~80ms from us compared to the UK 160ms,France 175ms and Netherlands 185ms.... So technically we are at a decent place now but I guess Mozambique or Kenya would have been a better place. The issue is not distance or hops but rather what bandwidth capabilities Kigali Cloudflare CDN has. I doubt Kigali will be better equip than SA so I think Kigali CDN is taking a strain. 3 big ISPs are routing to them currently. Afrihost, Axxess and Webafrica.

I actually asked Afrihost NOC about it via email but he did not respond so I doubt it will change. We hope that Cloudflare gets their issues sorted so the traffic can come back home.

 

[Fjorko]

Well Kigali is ~80ms from us compared to the UK 160ms,France 175ms and Netherlands 185ms.... So technically we are at a decent place now but I guess Mozambique or Kenya would have been a better place. The issue is not distance or hops but rather what bandwidth capabilities Kigali Cloudflare CDN has. I doubt Kigali will be better equip than SA so I think Kigali CDN is taking a strain. 3 big ISPs are routing to them currently. Afrihost, Axxess and Webafrica.

I actually asked Afrihost NOC about it via email but he did not respond so I doubt it will change. We hope that Cloudflare gets their issues sorted so the traffic can come back home.

Yeah i really hope so. Thanks for the info Cavedog

 

[The_Ogre]

Moer. My line is a complete mess

 

[DeSLAM]

Oh hell

I just read about all this routing via Africa on fibre as well....

So its not only Afrihsot DSL routing that has the problem ... Nairobi killed my access completely on DSL

I was getting a ping of 2000ms...on DSL, and that made me move to fibre. As the problem persisted.

But clearly the problem WAS Afrihost routing as suspected- they just weren't prepared to admit to it.

So the same issues are happening on FTTH routing

 

[Adenoid Hynkel]

OK so now what - is this permanent or just a temp thing ? Anything that AH can do to NOT route us via Kigali, coz that sounds like a long detour.....

We experienced a few incidents due to external factors which caused our datacenters in this region to return many 502 errors - We are working on this to deliver a solution. I apologise for the communication side of things, there isn’t really an effective channel to communicate this and we will work to improve such events in the future.
Please let us know if you have any further questions.

Cloudflare not caching locally in South Africa

thanks for your help @matteo its appreciated Opened a ticket - 1762073

community.cloudflare.com

 

[Loppas]

Oh hell

I just read about all this routing via Africa on fibre as well....

So its not only Afrihsot DSL routing that has the problem ... Nairobi killed my access completely on DSL

I was getting a ping of 2000ms...on DSL, and that made me move to fibre. As the problem persisted.

But clearly the problem WAS Afrihost routing as suspected- they just weren't prepared to admit to it.

So the same issues are happening on FTTH routing

The routing issues in the last couple posts are referring to cloudfare cached stuff and this is an issue on cloudfare’s side not afrihost, so everyone using their services in za is being affected.

Sounds like you may be having other issues.

 

[dews]

I have been a customer since just before September.

I am happy to report that there wasn't any slowdowns applied, and also that the 'peak time' bandwidth was not being shaped at all.
So they were not lying when they said its not shaped or throttled.
There was an issue with latency to local servers, but that was due to Seacom apparently not doing open peering, but that seems to be back to normal now.
Happy so far, thumbs up!

 

[DeSLAM]

Well, I'm holding thumbs that this "pure" FTTH product will make the difference from how things were going last week. No point in paying a cent more for the same problems.

This IP was causing the packet loss on our DSL connection.

41.223.224.175

netname: XIOCOM
descr: Xiocom infrastructure and client IP address
country: RW
admin-c: AA110-AFRINIC
tech-c: AA110-AFRINIC
status: ASSIGNED PA
mnt-by: LIQUID-TOL-MNT
source: AFRINIC # Filtered
parent: 41.223.224.0 - 41.223.227.255

person: Andrew Alston
address: Block A, Sameer Business Park,
address: Mombasa Road,
address: Nairobi
address: Kenya
phone: tel:+254-20-5000000
nic-hdl: AA110-AFRINIC
mnt-by: AA110-MNTR

descr: Maintainer Liquid Telecommunications Operations Limited
origin: AS30844
org: ORG-LTOL1-AFRINIC
mnt-lower: LIQUID-TOL-MNT
mnt-by: AFRINIC-HM-MNT

 

[The_Ogre]

@AfriFella and @Afrigirl I've sent you both a PM

 

[The_Ogre]

This is confusing to me.

I currently am on the 1gbps uncapped service, but because I never get that speed, I want to downgrade to 200mbps as it makes more sense. I'm now being told that I have to pay the 1500 before I can downgrade. The kicker is my line is currently suspended due to the non payment thereof and I've received no invoice or a reminder to tell me to pay.

So I'm basically held ransom now.

 

[cavedog]

Well, I'm holding thumbs that this "pure" FTTH product will make the difference from how things were going last week. No point in paying a cent more for the same problems.

This IP was causing the packet loss on our DSL connection.

41.223.224.175

netname: XIOCOM
descr: Xiocom infrastructure and client IP address
country: RW
admin-c: AA110-AFRINIC
tech-c: AA110-AFRINIC
status: ASSIGNED PA
mnt-by: LIQUID-TOL-MNT
source: AFRINIC # Filtered
parent: 41.223.224.0 - 41.223.227.255

person: Andrew Alston
address: Block A, Sameer Business Park,
address: Mombasa Road,
address: Nairobi
address: Kenya
phone: tel:+254-20-5000000
nic-hdl: AA110-AFRINIC
mnt-by: AA110-MNTR

descr: Maintainer Liquid Telecommunications Operations Limited
origin: AS30844
org: ORG-LTOL1-AFRINIC
mnt-lower: LIQUID-TOL-MNT
mnt-by: AFRINIC-HM-MNT

That IP is an exchange in Kigali, Rwanda. Because of the cloudflare outage in South Africa Liquid Telecoms is routing to Kigali Rwanda. I'm suspecting that that specific exchange between Liquid telecoms and Cloudflare in Rwanda is congested during peak times. I doubt that Kigali has better bandwidth capabilities than South Africa and all the cloudflare traffic from Webafrica, Afrihost, Axxess and Liquid telecoms are served from there so I'm thinking it's congested.

 

[cavedog]

Liquid Telecoms routing was not a big issue until I actual notice the difference gaming over a VPN makes on League of Legends.

Afrihost Direct


NordVPN. South African Server #46 which uses host1plus servers and they use DET Africa for transit.

 

[MisterV]

Liquid Telecoms routing was not a big issue until I actual notice the difference gaming over a VPN makes on League of Legends.

Afrihost Direct
View attachment 721364

NordVPN. South African Server #46 which uses host1plus servers and they use DET Africa for transit.

View attachment 721366

Goodness, that is a huge difference, not only in ping but the amount of hops as well. Very interesting i must add

 

[Loppas]

Liquid Telecoms routing was not a big issue until I actual notice the difference gaming over a VPN makes on League of Legends.

Its silly that they don't want to change their routing when clearly its very bad (30-40ms+ from what it should be)

 

[luckystrike]

@AfriFella @AfriMan

I also found something strange... You are never guaranteed to get the fastest route to London. Since i use expressvpn in London as a workaround for routing to EU. I find that the routing to London is random. Sometimes great and sometimes its 10 ms more. And this doesn't happen when you do a normal ping to london servers. That's always low. But as soon as you make a permanent connection to a server in London (Vpn server or gameserver ) Its your luck of the draw if you get fast connection or the slower one. Look at my two tracert below at the first hop. Its the exact same server in London.


|------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| WinMTR statistics |
| Host - % | Sent | Recv | Best | Avrg | Wrst | Last |
|------------------------------------------------|------|------|------|------|------|------|
| 10.123.0.1 - 0 | 28 | 28 | 158 | 159 | 163 | 159 |
| Request timed out. - 100 | 5 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| h185-198-188-94.reverse.clouvider.net - 0 | 28 | 28 | 159 | 160 | 169 | 167 |
| ldn-b1-link.telia.net - 5 | 24 | 23 | 159 | 160 | 165 | 160 |
| ldn-bb3-link.telia.net - 0 | 28 | 28 | 166 | 167 | 174 | 173 |
| adm-bb3-link.telia.net - 0 | 28 | 28 | 167 | 167 | 171 | 168 |
| adm-b2-link.telia.net - 0 | 28 | 28 | 167 | 168 | 169 | 168 |
| blizzard-ic-348623-adm-b2.c.telia.net - 0 | 28 | 28 | 168 | 172 | 215 | 215 |
| ae1-br02-eqam1.as57976.net - 0 | 28 | 28 | 166 | 175 | 277 | 169 |
| et-0-0-67-pe01-eqam1.as57976.net - 0 | 28 | 28 | 167 | 172 | 221 | 192 |
| 185.60.112.157 - 0 | 28 | 28 | 167 | 167 | 173 | 168 |
|________________________________________________|______|______|______|______|______|______|
WinMTR v1.00 GPLv2 (original by Appnor MSP - Fully Managed Hosting & Cloud Provider)

|------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| WinMTR statistics |
| Host - % | Sent | Recv | Best | Avrg | Wrst | Last |
|------------------------------------------------|------|------|------|------|------|------|
| 10.123.0.1 - 0 | 26 | 26 | 170 | 170 | 171 | 170 |
| 45.41.136.1 - 6 | 19 | 18 | 187 | 661 | 4157 | 4157 |
| h185-198-188-94.reverse.clouvider.net - 0 | 26 | 26 | 170 | 172 | 184 | 172 |
| ldn-b1-link.telia.net - 0 | 26 | 26 | 171 | 171 | 176 | 171 |
| ldn-bb3-link.telia.net - 0 | 26 | 26 | 178 | 178 | 187 | 178 |
| adm-bb3-link.telia.net - 0 | 26 | 26 | 179 | 179 | 181 | 180 |
| adm-b2-link.telia.net - 0 | 26 | 26 | 179 | 179 | 181 | 181 |
| blizzard-ic-348623-adm-b2.c.telia.net - 0 | 26 | 26 | 179 | 182 | 224 | 180 |
| ae1-br02-eqam1.as57976.net - 0 | 26 | 26 | 178 | 178 | 186 | 178 |
| et-0-0-67-pe01-eqam1.as57976.net - 0 | 26 | 26 | 179 | 183 | 228 | 180 |
| 185.60.112.157 - 5 | 23 | 22 | 178 | 179 | 180 | 180 |
|________________________________________________|______|______|______|______|______|______|
WinMTR v1.00 GPLv2 (original by Appnor MSP - Fully Managed Hosting & Cloud Provider)

Only way for me to control it is to keep connecting and disconnecting to the vpn server until i am lucky and get the fast route. I always see this in Apex legends when i don't use a vpn. Sometimes London will have 160-162 ping . Other times 170-173.

And just on a side-note, Even if you get the slow route to london link i listed above. It is still faster to IP : 185.60.112.157 than the default route for afrihost

|------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| WinMTR statistics |
| Host - % | Sent | Recv | Best | Avrg | Wrst | Last |
|------------------------------------------------|------|------|------|------|------|------|
| pfSense.localdomain - 0 | 10 | 10 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 102-182-106-1.ip.afrihost.co.za - 0 | 10 | 10 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 |
| 169-1-21-101.ip.afrihost.co.za - 0 | 10 | 10 | 2 | 2 | 3 | 2 |
| ae-21.lza.pr1-jhb.liquidtelecom.net - 0 | 10 | 10 | 2 | 7 | 39 | 2 |
| 46.17.232.152 - 0 | 10 | 10 | 157 | 157 | 157 | 157 |
|te-0-1-0-7.lfr-pe1-mrs.liquidtelecom.net - 0 | 10 | 10 | 157 | 157 | 157 | 157 |
| 80.249.208.83 - 0 | 10 | 10 | 187 | 192 | 240 | 187 |
| ae1-br02-eqam1.as57976.net - 0 | 10 | 10 | 187 | 189 | 208 | 187 |
| et-0-0-67-pe01-eqam1.as57976.net - 0 | 10 | 10 | 184 | 184 | 185 | 184 |
| 185.60.112.157 - 0 | 10 | 10 | 184 | 184 | 185 | 184 |
|________________________________________________|______|______|______|______|______|______|
WinMTR v1.00 GPLv2 (original by Appnor MSP - Fully Managed Hosting & Cloud Provider)

 

[luckystrike]

@cavedog

I saw your ping and i also did a ping with my "Fast vpn connection" as I explained above. See the result below.
IP:185.21.217.10
|------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| WinMTR statistics |
| Host - % | Sent | Recv | Best | Avrg | Wrst | Last |
|------------------------------------------------|------|------|------|------|------|------|
| 10.123.0.1 - 0 | 16 | 16 | 160 | 160 | 160 | 160 |
| 45.41.136.1 - 0 | 16 | 16 | 165 | 173 | 209 | 179 |
| h185-198-188-94.reverse.clouvider.net - 0 | 15 | 15 | 160 | 161 | 163 | 161 |
| Request timed out. - 100 | 4 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Request timed out. - 100 | 4 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Request timed out. - 100 | 4 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Request timed out. - 100 | 4 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| thisis.feralhosting.com - 0 | 15 | 15 | 167 | 167 | 169 | 167 |
|________________________________________________|______|______|______|______|______|______|
WinMTR v1.00 GPLv2 (original by Appnor MSP - Fully Managed Hosting & Cloud Provider)

 

[R4m80]

@AfriMan @AfriFella
I am moments away from cancelling my Afrihost account. If I do not get someone competent to help me, I'm finding me a new ISP.

 

[AfriMan]

Well Kigali is ~80ms from us compared to the UK 160ms,France 175ms and Netherlands 185ms.... So technically we are at a decent place now but I guess Mozambique or Kenya would have been a better place. The issue is not distance or hops but rather what bandwidth capabilities Kigali Cloudflare CDN has. I doubt Kigali will be better equip than SA so I think Kigali CDN is taking a strain. 3 big ISPs are routing to them currently. Afrihost, Axxess and Webafrica.

I actually asked Afrihost NOC about it via email but he did not respond so I doubt it will change. We hope that Cloudflare gets their issues sorted so the traffic can come back home.

We don't have a whole lot of insight into how Cloudflare manage their network, but I know there is a lot going on to try and resolve this. Lots of key online entities are affected, so we're all trying to get things back to normal.

 

[AfriMan]

Oh hell

I just read about all this routing via Africa on fibre as well....

So its not only Afrihsot DSL routing that has the problem ... Nairobi killed my access completely on DSL

I was getting a ping of 2000ms...on DSL, and that made me move to fibre. As the problem persisted.

But clearly the problem WAS Afrihost routing as suspected- they just weren't prepared to admit to it.

So the same issues are happening on FTTH routing

It sounds like this issue is related to the Cloudflare issue we've been discussing for a few weeks now. Not sure what their approach is, but we're seeing strange routing artefacts affecting some client's experience