Afrihost Uncapped ADSL Feedback (Pt2)

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Having to use turbocharges on a Sunday afternoon, the turbocharges aren't working. my downloads continue to stay at the same speed
 
Okay, I noticed some interpersonal disputes on page 412, and one poster asking for usage stats of ppl currently with AH. That's a reasonable request I'm happy to fulfill:

Uncapped 10240 kbps
6.984 GB

So, any wiser now? :whistle:

Fact is, I'm with AH since quite a long time now, first on capped 50GB (4MB speed) now on uncapped 10MB. Since we're on uncapped our average usage is between 150 - 200 GB/mth and never, not even once. did I notice any signs of throttling. Once we used like 280 GB and AH showed no signs of getting slower or anything.

Of course the speed is way low sometimes, particularly during office hours (I'm not on business acc), but that is no throtteling. It's congestion, lack of available bandwith, moderation, telkom issues and what have you ... but no wilful throtteling. There is a difference between deprioritizing say, P2P traffic, and throtteling your account.

Of course when our area was in the process of getting upgraded to 20/40 MB speed there were some service disruptions but for those we must blame Telkom, not AH. And the whole AH network switchover from IS to MTN caused some major trubbel, particularly for us Slaapstaders, but in the end it turned out ok-ish. Just last week I had a 10 MB Telkom test account for one day and it was not as great as I expected. Latency was much much worse than on the MTN backbone. For gamers that's the most important part. I want my data to travel on Seacom and WACS, not on outdated SAIX, so my choice is clearly Afrihost.

Interwebz is SA is a bloddy mess, it's a fact we gotta deal with. Each of us has to find an ISP we can trust with for outr specific needs. And of the couple reliable ISPs I guess Afrihost is the bestest partner to navigate with thru this mess. At least for me they are. They are on the best network and have the best prices and best conditions. Period!
 
From what I can see, many of the connection problems are caused by Telkom exchange congestion.

As I understand it, when running a tracert, if the first hop to a non local net address, normally hop 2, has a high number, this is indicative of a congested exchange, something entirely under Telkom's control, not the ISP.

Hopefully the Telkom infrastructure upgrades will do something to alleviate this problem.
 
bekdik said:
From what I can see, many of the connection problems are caused by Telkom exchange congestion.

As I understand it, when running a tracert, if the first hop to a non local net address, normally hop 2, has a high number, this is indicative of a congested exchange, something entirely under Telkom's control, not the ISP.

Hopefully the Telkom infrastructure upgrades will do something to alleviate this problem.
Click to expand...

Surely it would affect all ISPs then?
 
new_in_za2 said:
Afriman threw a hissy fit and terminated my account after I pointed out that OpenTTD is, in fact, a game and not a P2P file transfer application, so starting this month, I'm no longer with Afrihost. As for usage stats, I totalled 20GB in June, 32GB in July and 135GB in August on a 4Mbps account, and I was throttled all the way through. In the end I managed to find a hole in their throttling setup so I could get semi-decent speeds out of them and managed 350GB in September and October. Please note that without using that hole in their throttling setup, I would have been limited to about 20-30kB/s at most at every time except in the middle of the night where I could go slightly higher.

Edit: Since people here get extremely angry when you point out how Afrihost performs and will try to drown it out with spam and personal attacks, feel free to send me a private message if you want more information.
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Good lord you have no idea what throttling is, you just admitted you found a way around it which means you weren't throttled but certain ports were shaped, if you were throttled you would not be able to bypass it because all protocols would have their speeds cut. If you're going to harp on about something you should in the very least understand the concepts before hand.
 
HermanTheGerman said:
And of the couple reliable ISPs I guess Afrihost is the bestest partner to navigate with thru this mess. At least for me they are. They are on the best network and have the best prices and best conditions. Period!
Click to expand...

Couldn't have said it better !!
 
Nduimiso said:
Good lord you have no idea what throttling is, you just admitted you found a way around it which means you weren't throttled but certain ports were shaped, if you were throttled you would not be able to bypass it because all protocols would have their speeds cut. If you're going to harp on about something you should in the very least understand the concepts before hand.
Click to expand...

Bypassing our shaping is actually a violation of our AUP - definitely not cool at all :(
 
bekdik said:
From what I can see, many of the connection problems are caused by Telkom exchange congestion.

As I understand it, when running a tracert, if the first hop to a non local net address, normally hop 2, has a high number, this is indicative of a congested exchange, something entirely under Telkom's control, not the ISP.

Hopefully the Telkom infrastructure upgrades will do something to alleviate this problem.
Click to expand...

This article mentions about 25% of Telko exchanges being congested - which is very concerning since this was already published in July :(
http://mybroadband.co.za/news/adsl/82301-telkom-downplays-adsl-exchange-congestion-concerns.html
 
m.zakariyya.g said:
Having to use turbocharges on a Sunday afternoon, the turbocharges aren't working. my downloads continue to stay at the same speed
Click to expand...

We weren't running at capacity over the weekend, so you should definitely have got use of your Turbocharge. Are you 100% sure that the Turbocharge executed.

PM me and I've have a look at your account :(
 
new_in_za2 said:
Afriman threw a hissy fit and terminated my account after I pointed out that OpenTTD is, in fact, a game and not a P2P file transfer application, so starting this month, I'm no longer with Afrihost. As for usage stats, I totalled 20GB in June, 32GB in July and 135GB in August on a 4Mbps account, and I was throttled all the way through. In the end I managed to find a hole in their throttling setup so I could get semi-decent speeds out of them and managed 350GB in September and October. Please note that without using that hole in their throttling setup, I would have been limited to about 20-30kB/s at most at every time except in the middle of the night where I could go slightly higher.

Edit: Since people here get extremely angry when you point out how Afrihost performs and will try to drown it out with spam and personal attacks, feel free to send me a private message if you want more information.
Click to expand...

Bypassing shaping rules on our network is a violation of our AUP.

"Are there ways around QoS so I can download more?

The QoS is an important feature which protects the integrity of the network and ensures that all clients get the best experience. We strongly discourage (and take active measures to prevent) clients from using means which bypass or override our network management. This constitutes abuse of our network, and will be dealt with as such."
 
rulerofiron99 said:
How much can you use on the 1mb before being throttled?

I'm currently with Mweb, and after upgrading to the 2mb I immediately got throttled for using 76gb last month.

According to the afrihost leaderboard (terrible idea IMO), some users are doing 250-300 gb on the 1mb uncapped. It's obviously a bad idea to go by that (fair use policy and all), so I'd like to hear some feedback from regular afrihost users - how much you're able to use without being throttled.

Thanks
Click to expand...

We don't throttle - we shape P2P filesharing (and downloads to a lesser extent) to ensure that priority real time services remain at premium levels. Shaping applied is determine by demand on our available capacity - not on individual totals. However, once we determine that we need to apply shaping, we shape our heaviest users first as determined by their usage patterns. Our aim is to shape the least number of clients to the least extent at all times (or not at all) :)
 
eddief1 said:
I say massively reduce IPC costs :) then everyone is happy, users and ISP's alike
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Here, here!!

If we could see a massive reduction in IPC, we could offer so much more capacity and possibly even have spare unlit capacity for heavy demand spikes (like OS releases, etc).

The high costs and long turnaround times make it hard for ISPs to be as reactive as we'd like to be.

As Gian said at the MyBB conference - massive cuts across the board on IPC and the introduction of Naked ADSL will really bolster market interest in DSL - which is currently way behind Mobile in terms of numbers. If the per GB price gap between DSL and Mobile starts closing, Telkom could lose a lot of fixed line business :(
 
AfriMan said:
However, once we determine that we need to apply shaping, we shape our heaviest users first as determined by their usage patterns. Our aim is to shape the least number of clients to the least extent at all times (or not at all) :)
Click to expand...

Could you please define heavy usage? On a 4mb account. I would love some numbers please.
 
Jhbgirl said:
Could you please define heavy usage? On a 4mb account. I would love some numbers please.
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It's all relative so there are no values to give. We basically analyse the amount of traffic moved over the time connected, as well as other usage patterns, and that gives us a profile of each user. We then determine the users with most aggressive usage profile, so that we can shape the least amount of users to manage demand in real time as quickly as possible.

So someone who moves 10GB's in a day, will be classified as more aggressive that someone who moved 10GB in a week (presuming they are connected and moving data for the entire period) and therfore shaping the more aggressive user first will bring demand down faster than shaping the second user. However - if demand is high enough, both users could be shaped.

Make sense?
 
Sunday night:

4mbps line, 10GB data done for the month = 50% shaping

Monday morning:

4mbps line, 16GB data done for the month = 0% shaping

Could you please explain the thought process behind that, a tad ridiculous and if the prices don't drop to match other ISP's then I think I'm going to move. A bit sick of the shaping for low usage at the moment...
 
@AfriMan / Guy / Girl

I'll be moving house in about 2 weeks time. I know now that I can pause my ADSL account for up to 6 months to get back up and running once I've settled in.

However, my line is managed through Afrihost. I have taken a look in Clientzone at the options there and I would just like to know exactly which steps to take.

I'll need to get my line back to Telkom, have them install my line at new place asap and then move the line back to AH afterwards. However I do not want to have any downtime between now and when I move (not sure if I can cancel the line now or if I should wait).

Please guide me through the necessary steps and advise on when cancellation/line moving should be done.

Thanks
 
All it means is that the network experienced enough demand to warrant the system shaping you to the extend that it did. Simple as that.
 
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