Afrihost throttling speeds?

A

avaratz

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Hey

Just a check to see if anyone else is having this problem.

I have a 10GB Afrihost Account. Since the release of their "uncapped" accounts, my download speeds have been pathetic. 10kb/s on a 4mb line?? And 450kb/s on a telkom account? I can understand the whole Seacom issue and all, and I have given it a week or so to settle down, and yet still my pathetic speeds persist. Is anyone else having this problem?
 
im on their 4mb uncapped, also getting pathetic speed, was fine for 2 days now its super slow
 
Same here, sent them an email and they replied that i should phone telkom. WTF?
 
I've sent them an email. If their reply isn't satisfactory, I think it's time to cancel my accounts with them. It's sad because I have recommended them to a lot of people... they've given me only good service in the past.
 
Copy of their reply:

Hi Steven,

Thank you for your email. :)

We are currently investigating reports of slow speed and latency. We apologise for the inconvenience and trust the problem will be resolved as soon as possible.

Thank you for your patience and support. :)

Well, at least they acknowledge that there is an issue - but it doesn't help us much. Some indication of what they suspect the problem is would be nice, because it's too much of a coincidence that the problem suddenly appears when they release their uncapped accounts. If they don't have the infrastructure to supply it, they shouldn't offer it - simple as that.
 
Let's see, maybe they figure it out....
 
My 384 uncapped is fine as well - no speed problems. I experienced some long latencies earlier in the week, but that is much better now. Strange this differential between users of the same ISP.
 
The reason I think I'm being throttled is this:

My line seems to do alright - so why are my speeds so pathetic? I can't figure it out.
 
avaratz said:
The reason I think I'm being throttled is this:

My line seems to do alright - so why are my speeds so pathetic? I can't figure it out.
Click to expand...

You mean shaped then. Throttling affects all protocols and effectively turn your line into a lower spec one. Shaping only affects certain protocols (p2p, news, etc etc). Do an international speed test though, since the international traffic seems to be the worst affected.
 
I have been experiencing slow speeds on a 4 meg line since the seacom outage. My Telkom line flies, but afrihost is very slow. So I canceled. There service is pathetic.
 
synapseZA said:
You mean shaped then. Throttling affects all protocols and effectively turn your line into a lower spec one. Shaping only affects certain protocols (p2p, news, etc etc). Do an international speed test though, since the international traffic seems to be the worst affected.
Click to expand...

My mistake :D

Here's a speedtest to London:



Funny thing I noticed was that my download would shoot up to 150 - 300kb/s and then back down to 20 - 30 kb/s. I'm not sure exactly what that means but I assumed it was due to the ISP actively doing something to cut down the download speed.
 
That is not great and I don't know why the 4Mb users are getting such bad speeds. I saw in another thread that someone posted a message by Axxess that IS is investigating it...Probably not worth much though :( I am getting half your speed on my little 384 line...
 
Strange that 384 is unaffected?

If we were all being affected I would think it's something to do with Seacom again. But as it stands it just looks like the ISPs have bitten off more than they can chew and can't give the bandwidth that they are supposed to - I had a feeling this would happen when I saw them all rushing to release their new offerings in the wake of Mweb's announcement.

I hope it doesn't last too long. Feels like having a 4mb line is a real waste of time atm :(.
 
See, yet again i say... it's a 4m,b user thing. I'm sure of it!!!

Speeds still cruizing here...

Quick n0ob question, what's the max download speed on a 384k and 512k line?
 
Adrenalin said:
See, yet again i say... it's a 4m,b user thing. I'm sure of it!!!

Speeds still cruizing here...

Quick n0ob question, what's the max download speed on a 384k and 512k line?
Click to expand...

TCP/IP overhead varies and is around 15%. So:

384 Kbps => 48 KBps - 15% => 40.8 KBps
512 Kbps => 64 KBps - 15% => 54.4 KBps

That is just an estimate, but the 384 figure corresponds very closely to what I get in practice (if I look at GBs downloaded within a certain period).
 
Last edited:
Thanks synapseZA,

Not really worth upgrading my current Afrihost 384k then to a 512k for r100 extra really... 14kb extra for R100. Is tempting though...
 
It is going to be more than R100. Telkom still wants their cut as well, taking it up to almost R300 more.
 
I have also noticed on various threads that it is mainly 4Mbit users getting shafted all over IS's network. Either they have a major glitch with their bandwidth structuring or they really can't handle the load, although I can't see how the load could have increased this much in a couple of days so that doesn't make sense. Axxess, Afrihost, OpenWeb, Imagine.. everyone depending on IS seems to be affected.

My 384k Afrihost account on the other hand, has been just dandy since the outage - getting full line speed all day.
 
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