Afrihost Uncapped ADSL Feedback (Pt2)

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I am so unhappy with the shaping with Afrihost, seriously guys, here's my story:

So last week I did away with my DSTV and gave it over to someone else who had no entertainment at all. The only thing I ever watched on DSTV was sport, specifically football/soccer. So I purchased a subscription to NTV last night so that I could watch the Liverpool derby, thinking what an awesome situation where I can use my Afrihost connection to watch my team play! 4MB/s should be fine for SD right? NOPE! Not when you are shaped to 18.8% DL / 6.25% P2P (which would be fine if that was the case and it only affected DL + P2P), but ALL realtime services are shaped. I couldn't stream the game AT ALL, maybe 2 seconds of play, 10 seconds of buffer. So out of desperation, after spending R215.00 on NTV to watch 1 game a week (that I can't use because my ISP's shaping policy at 10PM is a joke, and not a very funny one!!!), I decided to purchase a turbo charge just to test if they are in fact just shaping every service or not, guess what, 20 seconds after I make that purchase, the game streamed perfectly for an hour!! As soon as that turbo charge expired (+- 11PM), the game stream came to a standstill again.

I have complained via the support site, live support which NEVER works unless you change your email and name, e-mail, to AfriGuy, AfriMan, NOTHING! Fix your **** Afrihost, what am I paying you for???
 
aybbleek said:
I am so unhappy with the shaping with Afrihost, seriously guys, here's my story:

So last week I did away with my DSTV and gave it over to someone else who had no entertainment at all. The only thing I ever watched on DSTV was sport, specifically football/soccer. So I purchased a subscription to NTV last night so that I could watch the Liverpool derby, thinking what an awesome situation where I can use my Afrihost connection to watch my team play! 4MB/s should be fine for SD right? NOPE! Not when you are shaped to 18.8% DL / 6.25% P2P (which would be fine if that was the case and it only affected DL + P2P), but ALL realtime services are shaped. I couldn't stream the game AT ALL, maybe 2 seconds of play, 10 seconds of buffer. So out of desperation, after spending R215.00 on NTV to watch 1 game a week (that I can't use because my ISP's shaping policy at 10PM is a joke, and not a very funny one!!!), I decided to purchase a turbo charge just to test if they are in fact just shaping every service or not, guess what, 20 seconds after I make that purchase, the game streamed perfectly for an hour!! As soon as that turbo charge expired (+- 11PM), the game stream came to a standstill again.

I have complained via the support site, live support which NEVER works unless you change your email and name, e-mail, to AfriGuy, AfriMan, NOTHING! Fix your **** Afrihost, what am I paying you for???
Click to expand...

I'm sorry you're having this horrible experience. I'm very confident that we don't shape realtime services. I've personally tested this several times with YouTube, Twitch.tv and a few other services. This specific service is something I have not tested, and we could definitely investigate further to find out why this is the case. We also need to recreate what is happening on your local network, or test the streaming on a clean network / line.

Drop me a PM and I'll put you in touch with our specialist testing team and see how we can get this going.
 
AfriMan said:
I'm sorry you're having this horrible experience. I'm very confident that we don't shape realtime services. I've personally tested this several times with YouTube, Twitch.tv and a few other services. This specific service is something I have not tested, and we could definitely investigate further to find out why this is the case. We also need to recreate what is happening on your local network, or test the streaming on a clean network / line.

Drop me a PM and I'll put you in touch with our specialist testing team and see how we can get this going.
Click to expand...

Before I bother to go through that (which I have done in the past but no response), explain to me, and everyone else on this forum, why when I use a turbo charge my STREAMING services are unshaped, but when not using a turbo charge under those shaping policy the streaming is shaped? This applies to Netflix too btw. Both of these are REALTIME services. I await your explanation.
 
aybbleek said:
Before I bother to go through that (which I have done in the past but no response), explain to me, and everyone else on this forum, why when I use a turbo charge my STREAMING services are unshaped, but when not using a turbo charge under those shaping policy the streaming is shaped? This applies to Netflix too btw. Both of these are REALTIME services. I await your explanation.
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I've received a few similar complaints, but my own tests show me that I can stream flawlessly even on the harshest shaping profile without turbocharging. This is why it's important for us to either recreate what is happening on your local network and see what is currently contending for bandwidth, or run the same service on a clean line and network, using your account, and show that it's not due to shaping. Obviously if we see the same results as you, then we can escalate the query to the guys who manage the network and shaping and get them to test further.
 
Basically.
I asked yesterday. I have 2 DSL line rentals with AH, I should have gotten one free account per line. So 2 accounts, one per line. This is not the case, I received one account, which doesn't work on either lines. Whenever i try to add the second free account. AH spits out an error that the lines already BOTH have am active 1GB account. My CZ doesn't reflect this.
 
Woodlands said:
Basically.
I asked yesterday. I have 2 DSL line rentals with AH, I should have gotten one free account per line. So 2 accounts, one per line. This is not the case, I received one account, which doesn't work on either lines. Whenever i try to add the second free account. AH spits out an error that the lines already BOTH have am active 1GB account. My CZ doesn't reflect this.
Click to expand...

Please PM so I can look at your ClientZone, because I can't comment without knowing more details. Each 1GB Free is attached to specific line, so at least one of the should work.
 
AfriMan said:
I've received a few similar complaints, but my own tests show me that I can stream flawlessly even on the harshest shaping profile without turbocharging. This is why it's important for us to either recreate what is happening on your local network and see what is currently contending for bandwidth, or run the same service on a clean line and network, using your account, and show that it's not due to shaping. Obviously if we see the same results as you, then we can escalate the query to the guys who manage the network and shaping and get them to test further.
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Look bud, I understand what you are saying, but you're creating a reductio ad absurdum example of the problem. If you are required to use a turbo charge to alleviate the shaping for a realtime service (not changing ANYTHING else in your environment, fyi in my environment nothing is contending for bandwidth, trust me i've checked), clearly that realtime service is shaped. That is just logic pure and simple. What have your results been from the other complaints for the exact same issue? And if there are more than one complaint for this issue why are those services still shaped?
 
I am already been shapped on afrihost on my 4th day of been with them and I have only download like 9 gigs and they shapped me already. Not a great start with afrihost.
 
aybbleek said:
What have your results been from the other complaints for the exact same issue? And if there are more than one complaint for this issue why are those services still shaped?
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Same issue on my side, reported a few times, got the same responses, gave up, moving elsewhere.

Carbon copy of my issues, and I would love to know how many others this have happened to. I was under the impression it was just me.
 
aybbleek said:
Look bud, I understand what you are saying, but you're creating a reductio ad absurdum example of the problem. If you are required to use a turbo charge to alleviate the shaping for a realtime service (not changing ANYTHING else in your environment, fyi in my environment nothing is contending for bandwidth, trust me i've checked), clearly that realtime service is shaped. That is just logic pure and simple. What have your results been from the other complaints for the exact same issue? And if there are more than one complaint for this issue why are those services still shaped?
Click to expand...

If all streaming services or realtime services were shaped, then every single client on our network would experience them as shaped. That would be a static rule, rather than a variable experience. We have to take this out of the realm of dealing in absolute values and deal with individual experience here. If 100 out of 100 clients experience the same thing, we can say this is a rule or policy. If one out of 100, or even 10 out of 100 experience something different to the majority, it stands to reason that it is not a rule, and therefore we need to look at individual circumstances and commonalities between those sharing the experience. For example, what DNS providers are being used, what services are they experiencing this on, is it across all realtime services or only particular ones, what is the packet signature of the individual service (if that's the case).

I think just assuming that the network is the problem as our first port of call is probably more counter-productive as it means we may spend hours looking in the wrong place.
 
AfriMan said:
If all streaming services or realtime services were shaped, then every single client on our network would experience them as shaped. That would be a static rule, rather than a variable experience. We have to take this out of the realm of dealing in absolute values and deal with individual experience here. If 100 out of 100 clients experience the same thing, we can say this is a rule or policy. If one out of 100, or even 10 out of 100 experience something different to the majority, it stands to reason that it is not a rule, and therefore we need to look at individual circumstances and commonalities between those sharing the experience. For example, what DNS providers are being used, what services are they experiencing this on, is it across all realtime services or only particular ones, what is the packet signature of the individual service (if that's the case).

I think just assuming that the network is the problem as our first port of call is probably more counter-productive as it means we may spend hours looking in the wrong place.
Click to expand...
Just to pitch in here for a second - maybe there's a middle ground? Could it be that his particular streaming service (NTV, it seems, in this case) is being misidentified as P2P or some such?
 
davidcupcake said:
I am already been shapped on afrihost on my 4th day of been with them and I have only download like 9 gigs and they shapped me already. Not a great start with afrihost.
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We're still waiting for our additional capacity to go live very soon, but for now we could potentially shape any Uncapped client when demand is very high.
 
eye_suc said:
Same issue on my side, reported a few times, got the same responses, gave up, moving elsewhere.

Carbon copy of my issues, and I would love to know how many others this have happened to. I was under the impression it was just me.
Click to expand...

We are aware of some clients having this experience, but as far as we can tell there are many more clients not experiencing this - and we're also unable to replicate these issues under test conditions.
 
aktor said:
Just to pitch in here for a second - maybe there's a middle ground? Could it be that his particular streaming service (NTV, it seems, in this case) is being misidentified as P2P or some such?
Click to expand...

Like I said, we need to reconstruct the client's experience in our environment to be able to know exactly what is going on. I haven't seen enough evidence thus far to convince me that the network is not working or shaping as it should. My own tests show streaming in general and realtime services are working as they should :(
 
AfriMan said:
Like I said, we need to reconstruct the client's experience in our environment to be able to know exactly what is going on. I haven't seen enough evidence thus far to convince me that the network is not working or shaping as it should. My own tests show streaming in general and realtime services are working as they should :(
Click to expand...
Of course - my suspicion was more directed at the streaming service provider than at your shaping mechanisms. Some of them use some bloody strange ways of transmitting their streaming data, and it can easily be "seen" as P2P or simply just HTTP.
 
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