Afrihost Uncapped ADSL Feedback (Pt2)

[Paul Hjul]

You can't tell me they can't identify this kind of abuse from their side?

there are ways to monitor and detect but for the most part the ISPs would be loathe to do any sort of monitoring without a RICA issued directive, even checking the logs will say very little and goes into the land ISPs shouldn't

At the end of the day unless they have a reason to hold that somebody is intentionally causing harm to the network the odd bastard circumventing the system is just that.

 

[zik]

So 4 days into November this conversation looks very much like the conversation looked like in the first week of October... Already seen the movie ... Keep the popcorn...

Afriman and Afriguy will tell all that the solution to this is eminent ..please wait... Soon...and 30 days later..the same song.

Bottom line... AH does not have the network capacity (IPC, backhaul etc.) to serve the paying customers they happily signed up.


Don't make the mistake I did... cut your losses and run!

....

 

[b1scu1t]

I find it interesting that when someone asks a question and gets 10 misleading answers, you're silent, but as soon as the truth gets said, you get extremely upset and complain loudly.

The actual issue here is that someone is unhappy with Mweb because they have announced that they might throttle somtimes, and they're looking into Afrihost as an alternative. Well, Afrihost throttles 24/7, so if you're unhappy with Mweb because they might throttle sometimes, then clearly Afrihost isn't for you. If you can't accept that actual information is given, then tough luck for you. Go cry somewhere else.

I would like proof of this "24/7 throttling".

 

[Brenden_E]

1:24 am. 18.8% Download/ 6.25% P2P
For real Afrihost?

My Afrihost account became useless during the day as it's throttled to death, but it's fine as I'm at work anyway. But now even at night I'm getting 10kb/s on a 4mb line. This is absurd.

 

[Brenden_E]

Even capped is borked. Afrihost so over subscribed at the moment it's frustrating to no end.

 

[Jhbgirl]

Even capped is borked. Afrihost so over subscribed at the moment it's frustrating to no end.

I was going to switch to Afrihost capped but...thanks for the heads up.

 

[FHTheron]

I currently find Afrihost Capped way more usable than OpenWeb Capped. 200KBps is much better than 12KBps on a 10Mbps line, and usually Afrihost Capped gives me much more. Moved right back to Afrihost second day of the month, I cut my losses on the other side.

Everyone seems to have different and sometimes exactly opposite experiences. I find that every few months it's worth trying out all your favourite ISPs and picking the one that works best for you at the times you need it. It doesn't always match public opinion.

 

[pjjdp]

Funny enough here in Durbs, I have no shaping. Also, maybe because I'm a reasonably light user. Only averaging 4gb a day on my 2mb line.

Last night Youtube was crap, but mainly because of exchange congestion. It eased after 9. I loaded 2 small torrents and it came down at full speed. Exchange congestion did not affect that.

 

[dazzazzad]

Is usenet working for everyone else? Started getting "article not found" errors yesterday.

 

[Jhbgirl]

Funny enough here in Durbs, I have no shaping. Also, maybe because I'm a reasonably light user. Only averaging 4gb a day on my 2mb line.

Lucky you. Our one line averages 565.56 MB a day and is shaped 18.8% Download/ 6.25% P2P. On a 4MB line.

 

[AfriMan]

Is usenet working for everyone else? Started getting "article not found" errors yesterday.

That's probably an issue on your client - as far as I know news services are running as normal (on our server as well)

 

[AfriMan]

Funny enough here in Durbs, I have no shaping. Also, maybe because I'm a reasonably light user. Only averaging 4gb a day on my 2mb line.

Last night Youtube was crap, but mainly because of exchange congestion. It eased after 9. I loaded 2 small torrents and it came down at full speed. Exchange congestion did not affect that.

Each IPC has it's own capacity and the region trafficked through is shaped accordingly. So the "East" region has it's own trends and shaping analysis. We generally see much lighter demand relatively speaking and therefore we can shape a lot less

 

[AfriMan]

Even capped is borked. Afrihost so over subscribed at the moment it's frustrating to no end.

I'm not sure this is the case. I've tested a capped account at home on a normal 10Mbps line and get max speeds of 8.4Mbps - which is as good as my line has ever done.

What tests have you run to establish this?

 

[AfriMan]

1:24 am. 18.8% Download/ 6.25% P2P
For real Afrihost?

My Afrihost account became useless during the day as it's throttled to death, but it's fine as I'm at work anyway. But now even at night I'm getting 10kb/s on a 4mb line. This is absurd.

Even with maximum shaping, your realtime services can all achieve full throughput on your line. Are you referring to diminished speeds on torrents or NNTP?

 

[AfriMan]

So 4 days into November this conversation looks very much like the conversation looked like in the first week of October... Already seen the movie ... Keep the popcorn...

Afriman and Afriguy will tell all that the solution to this is eminent ..please wait... Soon...and 30 days later..the same song.

Bottom line... AH does not have the network capacity (IPC, backhaul etc.) to serve the paying customers they happily signed up.


Don't make the mistake I did... cut your losses and run!

....

I'm sorry you are having such a poor experience. I think we have covered the how's and why's of what happened to get us here, but I can promise that every possible thing that could have been done has been actioned and ordered as quickly as possible. We are waiting for new capacity to be added and lit up, and we're really hopeful that Telkom can do so quickly - we're completely on their timetable now.

I know it sounds like we're not giving you more information - but I promise we are sharing everything we have and as soon as we have a firm indication of when that ETA is, we'll make sure you guys know about it.

At the end of the day we are a business, and your patronage is how we support our families. We're not going to leave our network to descend into crapness because eventually we'll have no clients left. We also won't NOT share information that we know will keep some doubtful clients with us (like a date for new capacity) as it's clearly in our interests to share that with all our clients.

I absolutely promise that our clients will soon be back to the great experience we have become used to, and hopefully the last few weeks will behind us very very soon

 

[grim]

I'm sorry you are having such a poor experience. I think we have covered the how's and why's of what happened to get us here, but I can promise that every possible thing that could have been done has been actioned and ordered as quickly as possible. We are waiting for new capacity to be added and lit up, and we're really hopeful that Telkom can do so quickly - we're completely on their timetable now.

I know it sounds like we're not giving you more information - but I promise we are sharing everything we have and as soon as we have a firm indication of when that ETA is, we'll make sure you guys know about it.

At the end of the day we are a business, and your patronage is how we support our families. We're not going to leave our network to descend into crapness because eventually we'll have no clients left. We also won't NOT share information that we know will keep some doubtful clients with us (like a date for new capacity) as it's clearly in our interests to share that with all our clients.

I absolutely promise that our clients will soon be back to the great experience we have become used to, and hopefully the last few weeks will behind us very very soon

I do hope that you've ordered lots of extra capacity as the usage will only increase now that everyone's lines are getting upped and if you get caught out again with too little capacity you're going to be stuck until at least Feb waiting for Telkom to install more.

 

[Stoner]

I do hope that you've ordered lots of extra capacity as the usage will only increase now that everyone's lines are getting upped and if you get caught out again with too little capacity you're going to be stuck until at least Feb waiting for Telkom to install more.

I agree. Afrihost and all ISP's better get ready for the new year. Got a feeling once the new generation of consoles and gaming entertainment kicks off the networks are going to experience a massive increase in traffic. Especially considering digital game downloads on consoles are going to be much bigger and the new upload features.

I'm just waiting for the Telkom upgrades to go through and see what everyone will offer. Really want to change from Mweb to Afrihost but don't want to sit with all this shaping/throttling nonsense all over again come the new year because of the lack of capacity.

 

[AfriMan]

I do hope that you've ordered lots of extra capacity as the usage will only increase now that everyone's lines are getting upped and if you get caught out again with too little capacity you're going to be stuck until at least Feb waiting for Telkom to install more.

I'm sure this was taken into account - I think a lot of favours were called in just to get the quick turnaround time to already have an order imminent. I'm not sure what will be delivered but we're hoping that it will be sufficient to keep us going for a while

 

[Sinbad]

Account Overview
Account Status: Account Active
Shaping Policy: 12.5% Download/ 6.25% P2P

Highly sub optimal while I have to rebuild my PC after Windows corrupted itself... Thanks goodness 1) for turbocharge and 2) for Diablo game client downloads being classified as realtime...

 

[AfriMan]

I agree. Afrihost and all ISP's better get ready for the new year. Got a feeling once the new generation of consoles and gaming entertainment kicks off the networks are going to experience a massive increase in traffic. Especially considering digital game downloads on consoles are going to be much bigger and the new upload features.

I'm just waiting for the Telkom upgrades to go through and see what everyone will offer. Really want to change from Mweb to Afrihost but don't want to sit with all this shaping/throttling nonsense all over again come the new year because of the lack of capacity.

I think consoles are actually getting better at streamlining bandwidth consumption as well. The reality is that the high cost of IPC at the moment - and the cost to consumers - means that we're still getting people online with fixed broadband much slower than we'd like. We'd love to have heaps of extra capacity to plan for every eventuality - but that just isn't viable or sustainable. For now, we have to play things very closely and try to be as reactive as possible to changes so that we can keep our clients costs down