Afrihost Uncapped ADSL Feedback (Pt2)

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Talentloos said:
We are lucky in having tge exchange right next to our flat. So our line stats are awesome. My biggest problem is with streaming. I watch nfl. So I got a 10mb line to stream the nfl games. Its from sunday evenings at 7pm till the next morning. I am lucky if I can get to stream at 800kB/s. I mean past 10 on a sunday night should not be a busy time. I just want to watch some football on near perfect hd resolution.
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The exchange is in the basement of our apartment building I think (BIG building in the heart of Cape Town CBD)... well that is where the telkom guys went to connect everything so I assume that is it. I am 4 floors above that so it should not be a problem.

First week or two i was getting a steady 8.5 mbps + - which was great, i could download 3 gig files in less than a hour... I could stream HD perfectly on any tv in our house and this was still at the same time everyone was complaining about shaping... THEN something went belly up and since then my service has been... well BAD. Line speed fluctuations and last night I sat for an hour with a 60 meg game update after using turbo charge...

That is far from the service i had about 3 weeks ago.
 
Looks like we're back to full performance on our DSL network. Although Cape Town was pretty much unaffected, there seemed to be a link between the Durban and Joburg issues. We did some emergency repairs at our main Joburg node and that seems to have sorted out the problem.

We're keeping an eye on things from here, but it's looking pretty good at the moment.

I saw people mentioning international traffic on social media, but I think this may have been a backhaul issue related to whatever was repaired. Now that we're back up, our tests are looking good again.

Thanks for the patience and for bearing with us. It's been a pretty rough morning, I guess :)
 
My netflix is super fast, web browsing also. I struggle to download ANYTHING though. Nzb 7KB/s and HTTP maxes out at 70KB/s on a 4mbps line.
 
AfriMan said:
Looks like we're back to full performance on our DSL network. Although Cape Town was pretty much unaffected, there seemed to be a link between the Durban and Joburg issues. We did some emergency repairs at our main Joburg node and that seems to have sorted out the problem.

We're keeping an eye on things from here, but it's looking pretty good at the moment.

I saw people mentioning international traffic on social media, but I think this may have been a backhaul issue related to whatever was repaired. Now that we're back up, our tests are looking good again.

Thanks for the patience and for bearing with us. It's been a pretty rough morning, I guess :)
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Full performance or just back to where it was yesterday with the shaping?
 
I haven't seen any kind of shaping for almost a week on my 4mb Afrihost uncapped account. There might have been instances where it might have been, but every time I checked for interest sake it's been unshaped.

Bought a game last night and just noticed steam is downloading it at full line speed.

Faith being restored bit by bit every day :D
PS. This is in the Cape area.
 
thomascmyk said:
The exchange is in the basement of our apartment building I think (BIG building in the heart of Cape Town CBD)... well that is where the telkom guys went to connect everything so I assume that is it. I am 4 floors above that so it should not be a problem.

First week or two i was getting a steady 8.5 mbps + - which was great, i could download 3 gig files in less than a hour... I could stream HD perfectly on any tv in our house and this was still at the same time everyone was complaining about shaping... THEN something went belly up and since then my service has been... well BAD. Line speed fluctuations and last night I sat for an hour with a 60 meg game update after using turbo charge...

That is far from the service i had about 3 weeks ago.
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We also used turbo charge on sunday but that did ****all. Now I saw we are also being shaped after about 80gigs of downloads this month. 80gig on a 10mb line? Cmon
 
grim said:
Windows 8.1 is going live this week, should be fun to see what that's going to do to the network.
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Let's hope we can manage the impact on demand. I think nationally it should not be a big issue as we're not seeing much shaping, but the North is where we may see issues. Let's hope it's not the case, and that as many as possible will download overnight :(
 
In all honestly i dont mind being shaped when there is a big demand on the network... i just want someone at afrihost to actually think further than resetting stuff and as such actually find the real problem so that it can be fixed because the line speed fluctuations are killing me... and buffering 360p youtube on a 10mbps account is just not on... neither is waiting an hour for a 60meg update...
 
Talentloos said:
We also used turbo charge on sunday but that did ****all. Now I saw we are also being shaped after about 80gigs of downloads this month. 80gig on a 10mb line? Cmon
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Shaping is related to usage/demand and the capacity we have available at that point in time. It is never related to total usage or a permanent shaping policy. As much as we hate throttling, we also didn't want to use any system that is essentially punitive. So regardless of your usage, we want to make sure that when we have capacity available at any time of the day, you can make use of it.

I am concerned about what you've mentioned about using Turbocharge though. Can you PM me about this?
 
thomascmyk said:
In all honestly i dont mind being shaped when there is a big demand on the network... i just want someone at afrihost to actually think further than resetting stuff and as such actually find the real problem so that it can be fixed because the line speed fluctuations are killing me... and buffering 360p youtube on a 10mbps account is just not on... neither is waiting an hour for a 60meg update...
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Of course. That's why email should actually be the preferred support channel, as it can show the history of the query. If guys are still doing the same repetitive (and not working) fix then there is really no excuse on our side :(

Apparently you're chatting with our twitter team to get this sorted? Otherwise PM me if you're not getting any joy :(
 
just checking:
at the moment the network is operational for Cape Town guys and most users are not having any shaping applied (checked my and my brother in laws account) so if somebody is experiencing poor connectivity it is a problem rather than network strain?
but the last few weeks have seen more than an ideal (from Afrihost's perspective) need to shape usage.

Because ADSL is a multipartner, best effort service lots of reasons can exist why a particular account and line is experiencing a problem and little things breaking can have a cataclysmic affect.
 
AfriGuy said:
We definitely have capacity available on our network, I'm sorry about the incorrect info was passed onto you. I'll follow up with our team on this in the next few minutes.
As far as I'm aware we haven't sent out any mailers.

Please also PM me the conversation.
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There we go. We have capacity available. Now I'm confused... One example.

Said on 07-10-2013, 12:34 PM

AfriMan said:
I don't think we ever denied that this was a capacity issue, but we tried to clarify that this was not due to poor planning on our part, but a sudden change in usage that resulted in unprecedented demand that we were not equipped to meet. We shape on demand versus capacity, so there was an issue with the demand we were seeing way exceeding our available capacity. If we simply oversold our network to the point where we ran it into the ground, that would be grossly unfair and it would be a very stupid way to run our business. If consumer patterns change suddenly and we're doing our best to compensate (while trying to understand the impact) then it's a very different thing.
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AfriMan said:
Of course. That's why email should actually be the preferred support channel, as it can show the history of the query. If guys are still doing the same repetitive (and not working) fix then there is really no excuse on our side :(

Apparently you're chatting with our twitter team to get this sorted? Otherwise PM me if you're not getting any joy :(
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Yes I am chatting with them at the moment as well, to be honest I am posting everywhere I can think of, not to shame afrihost in any way so please do not take it that way, I am just trying to find someone that can actually help me find the problem.

I just got a call and after explaining my situation I unfortunately had to ask him to phone me back as I had to run into a meeting quick. Waiting for the call back now.
 
Paul Hjul said:
just checking:
at the moment the network is operational for Cape Town guys and most users are not having any shaping applied (checked my and my brother in laws account) so if somebody is experiencing poor connectivity it is a problem rather than network strain?
but the last few weeks have seen more than an ideal (from Afrihost's perspective) need to shape usage.

Because ADSL is a multipartner, best effort service lots of reasons can exist why a particular account and line is experiencing a problem and little things breaking can have a cataclysmic affect.
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Hey Paul

Yeah, the Cape has been running pretty smoothly and we've had to do very little shaping on Uncapped, so we're pretty happy with performance.

DSL is a chain of technologies and infrastructure. A small issue can be compounded or snowball, depending on the issue. So some additional shaping, combined with congestion on your exchange could be horrible, especially if you're streaming while running a heavily shaped torrent (for example). We try to test different scenarios but it's pretty much impossible to cover everything, and that's why we always need to test individually and troubleshoot each scenario specifically. I had a guy who was having terrible speeds but every now and again his speedtests would jump to over 40mbps. We had to keep stripping the layers of the query away until we just systematically eliminated each issue until we found out that his firewall was messing with his ICMP traffic and messing up his speed results. Once his speedtests were normal, he was happy again - but the real question should always be what is the experience which leads you to believe that speeds or performance is bad.
 
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