Afrihost Uncapped ADSL Feedback (Pt2)

[Leatherman]

I think it's a little unfair to post comments made out of context and without giving any context to the entire discussion that has evolved over more than a month. We did not believe this was a capacity issue, but we always were open that demand had exceeded our available resources but we were initially confident that it would return to normal levels, which it unfortunately not.

The discussion and our responses evolved as we understood more about the problem. I don't feel there was ever any dishonesty in our answers - this was the information we had available at the time.

I know I said I wont post here any more, but I just can help myself. Afri people denied they were spin doctors right from the word go but I disagree and will disagree as long as they keep spinning this garbage. The words they seem to be using a lot is SORRY, OUT OF CONTEXT and TRY. Now I would really like to know how they would feel if their clients TRIED to pay them and don't. If they then query the non payment answers We know it is not ideal but we are doing the best we can, and to be honest we think we are doing a brilliant job at it.
Definition of spin doctor. http://www.thefreedictionary.com/spin+doctor

 

[AfriMan]

All assuming of course that you have sufficient capacity not to shape huge swathes of your customer base to stupid levels...

I think the gist of it is that any bandwidth management from your side must be tiered. Under normal conditions you cannot treat people moving a 100GB a month the same as you do those moving a terabyte. I sincerely hope I understand correctly that this will be the case once capacity allows.

But we don't and we never have prior to the demand spike in late September. This has been the case for months (since the beginning of the year) where light users have been relatively unshaped 24 hours a day. I think it's only fair to also acknowledge that component.

While the issue of capacity will need to be addressed, I don't think we'll be changing our system as we still believe that it is the most fair and balanced system - and I still have not had any reasonable alternatives put forward that would satisfy the majority of our Uncapped clients.

 

[AfriMan]

I know I said I wont post here any more, but I just can help myself. Afri people denied they were spin doctors right from the word go but I disagree and will disagree as long as they keep spinning this garbage. The words they seem to be using a lot is SORRY, OUT OF CONTEXT and TRY. Now I would really like to know how they would feel if their clients TRIED to pay them and don't. If they then query the non payment answers We know it is not ideal but we are doing the best we can, and to be honest we think we are doing a brilliant job at it.
Definition of spin doctor. http://www.thefreedictionary.com/spin+doctor

I'm sorry that you feel this way. I guess you are entitled to your opinion.

I feel confident that we have been as honest and open about the information that we have and we have consistently answered every query and assisted our clients where we can.

 

[AfriMan]

Slower then normal? I was shaped the entire night, a well seeded torrent downloaded a grand total of 40mb's. i have been officially shaped for 48hours straight. Afrihost, you owe me some free turbocharges

I'll have to check your account to see if you were not unshaped when shaping when relaxed some time overnight. It was slower, but we definitely unshaped pretty everyone but the heaviest users according to our general reports. But I'd need to review your specific account to comment further on your specific situation and audit history.

 

[AfriMan]

View attachment 80143

I think what has become clear is that Afrihost was ill prepared for this upturn in demand, and that they initially didn't think in terms of outright capacity because their projections didn't align with what was transpiring. Of course the question then becomes whether some anomalous tipping point was reached, or whether their projections - just like their shaping implementation - perhaps weren't as clever as they had hoped.

Regardless, I appreciate the few posts from the AfriPeeps confirming that additional capacity is being planned, and I hope that will come to pass sooner rather than later. Hopefully this episode holds a few lessons in terms of planning for future demand, and we won't see a repeat of the past 6 weeks' ridiculousness. Because ridiculous it has been...

I think it's very easy to look back and say in hindsight why didn't we do this or that, but the fact is that we have systems in place, designed by international network and ISP experts, to predict and plan for capacity and the upsurge was sudden and unpredictable - these things happen in the ISP world, which I've learned from experience. I think we still have a strong system and I still think that what we offer is the best Uncapped experience and closer to the spirit of Uncapped than other products I've tried personally.

 

[GreatD7007]

It stands for IP Connect

What is the purpose of them? How many are in SA? Do they connect to your MTN backbone Sorry I'm a noob and I'd like to know how it works in easy but detailed terms

 

[HapticSimian]

But we don't and we never have prior to the demand spike in late September. This has been the case for months (since the beginning of the year) where light users have been relatively unshaped 24 hours a day. I think it's only fair to also acknowledge that component.

While the issue of capacity will need to be addressed, I don't think we'll be changing our system as we still believe that it is the most fair and balanced system - and I still have not had any reasonable alternatives put forward that would satisfy the majority of our Uncapped clients.

Read my post prior to the one you quoted; you might have missed it. [edit] I see you responded whilst I was posting this.[/edit]

I think it's fairly obvious looking back, but the combination of (relatively) light users having their connections turn useless overnight and your initial collective insistence that there isn't any discernible issue caused an avalanche that is only starting to slow now.

And while you can believe what you want - to keep referring to the same issue - being able to watch a wacky chick swingin' around on a wrecking ball in 1080p whilst not being able to download a bloody driver is not OK. If your system breaks down when strained to its limits then best you see to it that those limits aren't reached again, ever. But stop trying to defend the ludicrously indefensible.

 

[Chris83]

Quote Originally Posted by Macabre25:
People keep complaining about the same thing every single time all I read is I've done X amount (doesn't matter) and they get shaped. What people need to realise is they aren't shaped according to their use but rather with a blanket shaping method where everyone is most likely shaped. They just need to take a bit of time to read and understand that its not individual shaping. It's not like you guys are trying to hide the methods that you use to shape, people just don't understand these methods. I'm very happy with my Afrihost account for the most part, sometimes twitch.tv suffers abit when I think it should never but otherwise no complaints./quote
Thanks for posting this, I'm glad that you get exactly where we're coming from

Bull****?
From Afrihost website:
Why do some people not get shaped as heavily as others?
We analyse usage patterns of the individual user, which in turn groups them into batches of users who are given different levels of priority. Users can be changed from group to group in a short space of time, which is dynamically managed by the system, but users on the extreme end of the spectrum will have differing experiences, i.e. heavy users will consistently get slower downloads during peak times, while light users may not experience this to the same degree.
So am I not supposed to think based on the above that Afrihost does individual shaping based on usage??

 

[AfriMan]

What is the purpose of them? How many are in SA? Do they connect to your MTN backbone Sorry I'm a noob and I'd like to know how it works in easy but detailed terms

IPC is basically a very expensive piece of Telkom hardware that allows you to break out of their network and onto an external network - in our case, the MTN network. So essentially this sets the rate at which traffic can break out of their network and get onto our network.

We have three IPC's - in JHB, DBN and CPT - but most major ISPs also each have their own IPC which sets their network capacity. The only one's who don't are Telkom - who just run on their own network

 

[AfriGuy]

Read my post prior to the one you quoted; you might have missed it. [edit] I see you responded whilst I was posting this.[/edit]

I think it's fairly obvious looking back, but the combination of (relatively) light users having their connections turn useless overnight and your initial collective insistence that there isn't any discernible issue caused an avalanche that is only starting to slow now.

And while you can believe what you want - to keep referring to the same issue - being able to watch a wacky chick swingin' around on a wrecking ball in 1080p whilst not being able to download a bloody driver is not OK. If your system breaks down when strained to its limits then best you see to it that those limits aren't reached again, ever. But stop trying to defend the ludicrously indefensible.

I think there is a lot more that actually goes into a consideration, and a network of this size. Simply posting "we're waiting for more capacity" isn't something we decide on, on the way to work. It's way, way more complicated than that

 

[AfriMan]

Bull****?
From Afrihost website:
Why do some people not get shaped as heavily as others?
We analyse usage patterns of the individual user, which in turn groups them into batches of users who are given different levels of priority. Users can be changed from group to group in a short space of time, which is dynamically managed by the system, but users on the extreme end of the spectrum will have differing experiences, i.e. heavy users will consistently get slower downloads during peak times, while light users may not experience this to the same degree.
So am I not supposed to think based on the above that Afrihost does individual shaping based on usage??

This is still saying the same thing. We determine by how much demand is exceeding available resources. We then use that to calculate how many users need to be shaped and start applying shaping from the heaviest users (based on their usage patterns, not just their totals). It does say experience may differ, but lighter users are unshaped much faster than heavier users. So very aggressive users are shaped quicker and ushaped much slower - and lighter users the opposite.

When demand is so heavy that every user will need to be shaped - that can occur - but the lightest users will be unshaped first, with the heaviest users unshaped last - depending on when and how much demand decreases in real time -so each user will always have a slightly different experience based on their usage patterns and shaping profile.

 

[Type RSA]

I think it's a little unfair to post comments made out of context and without giving any context to the entire discussion that has evolved over more than a month. We did not believe this was a capacity issue, but we always were open that demand had exceeded our available resources but we were initially confident that it would return to normal levels, which it unfortunately not.

The discussion and our responses evolved as we understood more about the problem. I don't feel there was ever any dishonesty in our answers - this was the information we had available at the time.

I also think it is unfair to say you never denied it??

 

[GreatD7007]

IPC is basically a very expensive piece of Telkom hardware that allows you to break out of their network and onto an external network - in our case, the MTN network. So essentially this sets the rate at which traffic can break out of their network and get onto our network.

We have three IPC's - in JHB, DBN and CPT - but most major ISPs also each have their own IPC which sets their network capacity. The only one's who don't are Telkom - who just run on their own network

Thanks for the explanation, you said early you increasing your capacity to withstand demand from your network so you in turn increasing the amount of IPC's on the MTN network? Correct? This will result in lesser shaping?

 

[Smokey_sa]

I'll have to check your account to see if you were not unshaped when shaping when relaxed some time overnight. It was slower, but we definitely unshaped pretty everyone but the heaviest users according to our general reports. But I'd need to review your specific account to comment further on your specific situation and audit history.

Well I can't jusge the eintire night, seeing that I was in bed for a protion of it. But what I can say is that every time I check my shaping it is at 12.5/6.25 for days now.

I did 130 Gb lst month on a 10 Mbit line.

Seeing that I must assume that I am concidered a download power user. Futhermore the ones doing 3 TB most have lost their connection entirely as it was mentioned that the shaping is put in place as per usage pattern.

@ AfriMan: Up to now I did not have a reason to complain about the shaping policy as you guys usually only shaped when really required or if there was a problem with the network, and only for a limited time. Now we are looking at quite servere shaping over a long period of time without any prospect of improvement.
Would it be possible to give us a idea what is going on and whether there is any ETA of when the shaping will be redduced?

 

[grim]

This is still saying the same thing. We determine by how much demand is exceeding available resources. We then use that to calculate how many users need to be shaped and start applying shaping from the heaviest users (based on their usage patterns, not just their totals). It does say experience may differ, but lighter users are unshaped much faster than heavier users. So very aggressive users are shaped quicker and ushaped much slower - and lighter users the opposite.

When demand is so heavy that every user will need to be shaped - that can occur - but the lightest users will be unshaped first, with the heaviest users unshaped last - depending on when and how much demand decreases in real time -so each user will always have a slightly different experience based on their usage patterns and shaping profile.

Please explain this then:

10Mbps	br******[email protected]	1,583.72 GB
4Mbps	ch******[email protected]	838.88 GB
2Mbps	an********[email protected]	599.16 GB
1Mbps	ar**********[email protected]	298.46 GB

A 1Mbps line would need to run full speed 24/7 to achieve 300GB and so would a 2Mbps to achieve 600GB

Why aren't those users being shaped?

 

[Orihalcon]

Bull****?
From Afrihost website:
Why do some people not get shaped as heavily as others?
We analyse usage patterns of the individual user, which in turn groups them into batches of users who are given different levels of priority. Users can be changed from group to group in a short space of time, which is dynamically managed by the system, but users on the extreme end of the spectrum will have differing experiences, i.e. heavy users will consistently get slower downloads during peak times, while light users may not experience this to the same degree.
So am I not supposed to think based on the above that Afrihost does individual shaping based on usage??

What you seem to forget here is that the load on the network is simply so high that the system deems it necessary to apply shaping to all clients.

Of course there are shaping groups. When there is light load, only the top tier guys will get shaped of course. The load is simply so heavy that everything get's shaped fully.

What is unclear here?

 

[AfriGuy]

I also think it is unfair to say you never denied it??

I think AfriMan covered this quite nicely here
http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthr...back-(Pt2)?p=11465337&viewfull=1#post11465337

 

[Chris83]

It's not the same thing.
First you say people aren't shaped according to their usage, now you say heavy users get shaped first.
First you say you use a blanket shaping method, now you say based on individual usage patterns not just totals.

 

[GreatD7007]

Well I can't jusge the eintire night, seeing that I was in bed for a protion of it. But what I can say is that every time I check my shaping it is at 12.5/6.25 for days now.

I did 130 Gb lst month on a 10 Mbit line.

Seeing that I must assume that I am concidered a download power user. Futhermore the ones doing 3 TB most have lost their connection entirely as it was mentioned that the shaping is put in place as per usage pattern.

@ AfriMan: Up to now I did not have a reason to complain about the shaping policy as you guys usually only shaped when really required or if there was a problem with the network, and only for a limited time. Now we are looking at quite servere shaping over a long period of time without any prospect of improvement.
Would it be possible to give us a idea what is going on and whether there is any ETA of when the shaping will be redduced?

I don't think Afriguy or Afriman can give an ETA at the moment on when available capacity will finally be implemented into there network and thus reduce shaping, think it will be awhile when an ETA is given. It's a long term kinda thing

 

[Chris83]

The load is simply so heavy that everything get's shaped fully.
What is unclear here?

The fact that the Afrihost Network Status reports "All systems are performing within specified parameters".