Afrihost throttling speeds?

my download speeds have dropped by almost 50% in the last day.Was syncing at 3.6 MB/s a day ago on speedtest and now only syncing at 2 MB/s.
Would that mean the fault lies with Afrihost or Telkom?Is it possible to tell?
Have already rebooted my router countless occasions
 
Gargmel said:
Getting horrible speeds today too. I haven't used enough data yet to be throttled either...







4 meg uncapped :mad:
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Yip, exactly the same symptoms here on Afrihost 4Mbps. Local has been at around 1-2Mbps and international at 0.2 - 0.5Mbps for the best part of the last week. Very rarely and only for short bursts, the international works at around 1Mbps, but for the most part it's been consistently < 0.5Mbps. Their support guys say I'm definitely not throttled, as I have only downloaded about 8GB this month.

They've also checked some logs their side and apparently my line is resyncing sporadically, so that might explain the local issue - something I need to take up with Telkom when I've got time to sit on hold...

But, it doesn't explain the shoddy international performance. I usually get the 0.2Mbps international when the local is flying (not at exactly the same time, one test immediately after the other).

The worst part of it all, is I explain the symptoms precisely to the Afrihost support guys and all I get back from them is the "your line is the problem contact Telkom" line.

There may well be a problem with my line... However, that's certainly not the _only_ problem. There's something pear shaped their side too (and according to this forum I'm not the only user seeing this).
 
epeer said:
Yip, exactly the same symptoms here on Afrihost 4Mbps. Local has been at around 1-2Mbps and international at 0.2 - 0.5Mbps for the best part of the last week. Very rarely and only for short bursts, the international works at around 1Mbps, but for the most part it's been consistently < 0.5Mbps. Their support guys say I'm definitely not throttled, as I have only downloaded about 8GB this month.

They've also checked some logs their side and apparently my line is resyncing sporadically, so that might explain the local issue - something I need to take up with Telkom when I've got time to sit on hold...

But, it doesn't explain the shoddy international performance. I usually get the 0.2Mbps international when the local is flying (not at exactly the same time, one test immediately after the other).

The worst part of it all, is I explain the symptoms precisely to the Afrihost support guys and all I get back from them is the "your line is the problem contact Telkom" line.

There may well be a problem with my line... However, that's certainly not the _only_ problem. There's something pear shaped their side too (and according to this forum I'm not the only user seeing this).
Click to expand...

Losing sync would cut your connection completely? I don't see how it would affect your international speeds. I've had a line that was losing sync a lot, and when it was up, it was 100%, only problem was it would disconnect every 5 minutes. You may very well have a problem on your line, but my opinion is it's unrelated to this issue. They have acknowledged there's a problem and that it's being investigated, but won't reveal anything more than that...
 
My 384k account is faster during the day and slower at night this week, I wonder why? coz I get 48Kbs speeds midday and 38kbs speeds at night. And I am not even there to enjoy the midday speeds, my brother is
 
avaratz said:
Losing sync would cut your connection completely? I don't see how it would affect your international speeds. I've had a line that was losing sync a lot, and when it was up, it was 100%, only problem was it would disconnect every 5 minutes. You may very well have a problem on your line, but my opinion is it's unrelated to this issue.
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Precisely. That's what I've been trying to explain to them. At very worst, the line issues would affect local and international equivalently. So, my international speed should be at least the same as local if, for the sake of argument, the line is what is causing the degraded speed.

In any event, my sync issues are not as bad as yours were. I am only losing sync 5 - 6 times per day at the moment.

avaratz said:
They have acknowledged there's a problem and that it's being investigated, but won't reveal anything more than that...
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I don't think their support team knows what they are doing. They tell one customer one thing and then another customer something else. Officially, they have not acknowledged the problem to me. They simply blame my line sync issues outright and refuse to even consider the argument regarding international .vs. local speed discrepancies being independent of the line issues.
 
I honestly don't think many of their staff have a good working knowledge of how anything works. They have one or two things that they tend to blame everything on, and then refuse to clarify the situation.

Their support is good with giving extremely vague answers to questions, but when asked to clarify further, I get another vague response 6 hours later (if any). It's extremely frustrating and I feel as their customers we have a right to know exactly how what's going on.

Surely it can't be too hard for them to compile a reasonable explanation along with likely causes? And notify all their staff of the situation? The communication within the company seems to be lacking slightly.
 
My love affair with Afrihost is over and the cynic in me told me that having full 4MB's at low latencies won't last forever and that I better appreciate it while I have it..... the cynic was right. I've had crappy speed combined with crappy latency since they started rolling out the uncapped accounts. Before that I was in latency heaven, I could play games internationally, download at full speed and I was as happy as Julius Malema singing his next best hit about about killing white people. I will be looking for an alternative ISP that's for sure. Back to good ol' SAT3 I guess?
 
Maximus said:
I will be looking for an alternative ISP that's for sure. Back to good ol' SAT3 I guess?
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I don't know of any ISPs offering (budget/home) uncapped on that is solely on SAT3. WA has the Titan medium (~50GB) usage packages and Telkom has 5GB capped... MWEB uses both, but their 4Mb users are also reporting very slow speeds...
 


My speeds on torrents... and yet I get good speedtest results. :(
 
Incase anyone's interested, Afrihost requested that I do some line diagnostics for them to help pinpoint the source of the problem. I compared the Afrihost results with Telkom results, and here's what I found:

Speed tests:

Afrihost Account: (I have attached 3 of each tests to international servers, as the speed varies wildly – which I believe is the root of the problem).

Speedtest to nearest server (Durban): http://www.speedtest.net/result/807840441.png

Note: The local speeds are relatively constant, and report good performance.

Speedtest to London: Test 1: http://www.speedtest.net/result/807841308.png
Test 2: http://www.speedtest.net/result/807842233.png
Test 3: http://www.speedtest.net/result/807842770.png

Note: As you can see here, Test 3 reports much higher speeds than Test 1 and 2. I have noticed this often – a spike in bandwidth, followed by a slump. It mirrors my up and down download speeds.

Speedtest to New York: Test 1: http://www.speedtest.net/result/807844065.png
Test 2: http://www.speedtest.net/result/807844590.png
Test 3: http://www.speedtest.net/result/807845160.png

Note: Once again notice the varying speeds.

OK, next I’ll perform the same tests using a Telkom account.

Speedtest to nearest server (Durban): http://www.speedtest.net/result/807846609.png

Note the MUCH lower ping here. This shouldn’t be the case as to the best of my knowledge SAIX and IS share the same local infrastructure.

Speedtest to London: Test 1: http://www.speedtest.net/result/807847655.png
Test 2: http://www.speedtest.net/result/807848434.png
Test 3: http://www.speedtest.net/result/807848969.png

See the difference? This leads me to believe there is STILL a Seacom issue. Something is not right. Judging by the amount of IS-backboned ISPs having similar problems, I believe this problem definitely deserves further investigation.

Speedtest to NY: Test 1: http://www.speedtest.net/result/807850083.png
Test 2: http://www.speedtest.net/result/807850583.png
Test 3: http://www.speedtest.net/result/807851017.png

Again note the constant decent performance, in contrast with IS based performance.

I think that IS really needs to look into this... something is not right at all :(
 
Hey avaratz, i was required to do the exact same tests by afrihost, but they told me that they were picking up port errors from my side and that i should resync the line too. Did that but didnt make a difference. I have a question for you though, how many gig cap do you have on your telkom account? because i have a 1 gig cap on my 4mb line just for backup, but i havent come close to reaching the results u are getting to the london server on your telkom account.
 
Afrihost do not have the bandwith to cope with uncapped, they must stick to capped accounts. Before uncapped, I had great speeds from them. At the end of this month I will be leaving them.
 
Done 700mb since 12am last night. azooooooooooobaaaaa!!! Go 384k GGOOO!!!
 
Spynx said:
Afrihost do not have the bandwith to cope with uncapped, they must stick to capped accounts. Before uncapped, I had great speeds from them. At the end of this month I will be leaving them.
Click to expand...

^ this. I'm not concerned with linespeed, but my latency to Europe has degraded terribly since the release of uncapped accounts, obviously especially at peak times. The issue is that the same thing has happened for my Cybersmart (unshaped) and WebAfrica (unshaped) accounts also. What is there left to turn to :( ? I'm beginning to feel like I'd be willing to pay an ISP not to offer any uncapped services, just to maintain my normal quality of internet access. Although, if I had that kind of money, I'd probably sue one or two of these ISPs first for false advertising...
 
Skratch said:
Hey avaratz, i was required to do the exact same tests by afrihost, but they told me that they were picking up port errors from my side and that i should resync the line too. Did that but didnt make a difference. I have a question for you though, how many gig cap do you have on your telkom account? because i have a 1 gig cap on my 4mb line just for backup, but i havent come close to reaching the results u are getting to the london server on your telkom account.
Click to expand...

It's just a standard Telkom account - I'm not sure what the package is, it's my father's business account. My line is fairly decent as I'm less than 1.5km from my exchange... Pity I can't DO anything with it thanks to my amazing 1 - 5kb/s downloads.
 
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