Afrihost Uncapped ADSL Feedback (Pt3)

[AfriGuy]

AfriMan. PLEASE. How do you explain Turbocharge fixing everything. HOW do you explain this? Is there a problem with my account profile on your side that is causing a problem? What could it be then if you are too be believed?

Because from MY testing. It's pretty damn clear.

How do you explain my other ADSL accounts not having a problem. HOW.

I've personally been on a 4Mbps account for years and never had a problem with YouTube.
As for the tests you've run, I can't replicate anything on my end.

What I can say though, is I think we need to we need to work through some identical tests on both our sides and get to the bottom of it. Deal?
Drop me a PM with your user info and we can run through a few options.

 

[Sinbad]

You would be able to download pretty much anything either overnight or off-peak at closer to full line speed. And downloading updates at 1Mbps during peak is still OK for a shaped product, considering you can still get full speed on realtime at all times (as opposed to being throttled to 1Mbps on all services)

Off peak being after 10pm? Nope. I am in bed by then, I have a demanding job that starts early in the morning.
When I'm working on my PC (and I mean doing patching/updates/installations etc), I have certain expectations which until recently have been very happily met by Afrihost (barring the periods of severe IPC shortage). Lately, those expectations have not been met.
Waiting 30 minutes for a driver download that 3 months ago would have taken 3 minutes is not, IMHO, acceptable.

 

[whatwhat]

http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthr...s-Uncapped?p=13015561&viewfull=1#post13015561

Afriman, please correct your incorrect response here. You need to specify the 10% shaping, as this user is adamant that your shaping is not happening at all, and that you are actually not shaping anything.

 

[AfriGuy]

Off peak being after 10pm? Nope. I am in bed by then, I have a demanding job that starts early in the morning.
When I'm working on my PC (and I mean doing patching/updates/installations etc), I have certain expectations which until recently have been very happily met by Afrihost (barring the periods of severe IPC shortage). Lately, those expectations have not been met.
Waiting 30 minutes for a driver download that 3 months ago would have taken 3 minutes is not, IMHO, acceptable.

These accounts are designed around home use though, and have always been subjected to shaping. Maybe you've outgrown the account?

 

[AfriGuy]

http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthr...s-Uncapped?p=13015561&viewfull=1#post13015561

Afriman, please correct your incorrect response here. You need to specify the 10% shaping, as this user is adamant that your shaping is not happening at all, and that you are actually not shaping anything.

AfriMan's response is 100% correct on that thread. Let's rather keep feedback per thread, just to avoid confusion. Bit silly to bring in posts from other threads and visa versa

 

[Sinbad]

These accounts are designed around home use though, and have always been subjected to shaping. Maybe you've outgrown the account?

Negative. My patterns haven't changed (in fact, my usage has dropped, as I'm pretty much caught up on any "distros" I would have wanted). The performance of the account has declined drastically - and in fact below what the shaping values are reported to be in Clientzone. For instance, my NNTP was doing less than 3% of line speed, despite Clientzone reporting 6.5%.

In the past, I've been able to restrict NNTP to 500KB/sec (during peak times!) and play Diablo 3 with <200ms ping. Lately, ping has been all over the place, and with NNTP running at 30KB/sec, D3 is unplayable.

The account used to be awesome. The past month...well. I'm no longer an uncapped customer of yours. That's a big swing considering how happy I was 3 months ago.

 

[AfriGuy]

Negative. My patterns haven't changed (in fact, my usage has dropped, as I'm pretty much caught up on any "distros" I would have wanted). The performance of the account has declined drastically - and in fact below what the shaping values are reported to be in Clientzone. For instance, my NNTP was doing less than 3% of line speed, despite Clientzone reporting 6.5%.

In the past, I've been able to restrict NNTP to 500KB/sec (during peak times!) and play Diablo 3 with <200ms ping. Lately, ping has been all over the place, and with NNTP running at 30KB/sec, D3 is unplayable.

The account used to be awesome. The past month...well. I'm no longer an uncapped customer of yours. That's a big swing considering how happy I was 3 months ago.

But the way shaping is implemented (I'm talking about the policies here) haven't changed though. It's not really fair to expect the account to perform during peak times for your downloads, it's not designed for that.

 

[Sinbad]

But the way shaping is implemented (I'm talking about the policies here) haven't changed though. It's not really fair to expect the account to perform during peak times for your downloads, it's not designed for that.

It used to. I think it's fair to expect the performance to remain fairly constant?

 

[UnholyMunk]

Negative. My patterns haven't changed (in fact, my usage has dropped, as I'm pretty much caught up on any "distros" I would have wanted). The performance of the account has declined drastically - and in fact below what the shaping values are reported to be in Clientzone. For instance, my NNTP was doing less than 3% of line speed, despite Clientzone reporting 6.5%.

In the past, I've been able to restrict NNTP to 500KB/sec (during peak times!) and play Diablo 3 with <200ms ping. Lately, ping has been all over the place, and with NNTP running at 30KB/sec, D3 is unplayable.

The account used to be awesome. The past month...well. I'm no longer an uncapped customer of yours. That's a big swing considering how happy I was 3 months ago.

I concur with Sinbad, my usage hasn't changed much either, yet my experience has degraded dramatically. Apparently a lot of your customers have outgrown their home uncapped products overnight!

 

[AfriGuy]

It used to. I think it's fair to expect the performance to remain fairly constant?

Shaping is not a constant, realtime services are constant as they are left unshaped all the time.

 

[AfriGuy]

I concur with Sinbad, my usage hasn't changed much either, yet my experience has degraded dramatically. Apparently a lot of your customers have outgrown their home uncapped products overnight!

Sorry to hear that the experience hasn't been that great, what services are slow for you?

 

[Sinbad]

Shaping is not a constant, realtime services are constant as they are left unshaped all the time.

Except D3.
Also, sure I know shaping is not a constant. However, I don't think it's unreasonable for a customer to expect that the extent of the shaping should be consistent, and not be dramatically increased over a really short period, for extended lengths of time.
I refuse to believe that demand on your network increased by a factor of 10-15 times in the space of a couple of months - because that's what shaping to 6/10% (where previously unshaped) implies.

 

[AfriGuy]

Except D3.
Also, sure I know shaping is not a constant. However, I don't think it's unreasonable for a customer to expect that the extent of the shaping should be consistent, and not be dramatically increased over a really short period, for extended lengths of time.
I refuse to believe that demand on your network increased by a factor of 10-15 times in the space of a couple of months - because that's what shaping to 6/10% (where previously unshaped) implies.

Did you run any further tests with our team to get to the bottom of the D3 query?

We run our network to provide the best experience out there. In order to achieve this for Uncapped we need to shape non-essential, non-realtime services. These are downloads and P2P. Remember this isn't being done just because, this allows us to keep realtime services unshaped.

 

[Timber_MG]

We've seen the exact opposite, and discussed the move over to MTN many, many times
The move has allowed us to do things that weren't possible before - we have a lot of very satisfied clients.

I can honestly state that my uncapped IS account in the old days was beyond brilliant. The move to MTN hit rock bottom. Even a few months after and now it didn't come close to the old.

For me, driver downloads, working from home (VPN) OS updates (Linux and MS) count as normal use and there is no reason to throttle/shape these to all heck. I hate seeing <<10% capacity as it wastes my time. ISPs recon that the effect of wasting osmeone's time weans them off a service, but long term it's just frustrating.

Uncapped is one huge cross-subsidation scheme and in no way fair to low users who just want not to be bothered with another kind of airtime billing.

If Afrihost were to look at BitCo and the WISP community (higher end offerings and no IPC, I know) that is a model that is far more honest.

 

[Sinbad]

Did you run any further tests with our team to get to the bottom of the D3 query?

We run our network to provide the best experience out there. In order to achieve this for Uncapped we need to shape non-essential, non-realtime services. These are downloads and P2P. Remember this isn't being done just because, this allows us to keep realtime services unshaped.

You didn't give me what I needed to prove the fact, unfortunately (which is an account shaped to a very low p2p throughput, so I can pull graphs etc to prove that it's being shaped).
Also, another poster mentioned that for a similar problem, your systems detected p2p traffic while he was playing D3 - did you ever get to the bottom of that?

 

[AfriGuy]

I can honestly state that my uncapped IS account in the old days was beyond brilliant. The move to MTN hit rock bottom. Even a few months after and now it didn't come close to the old.

For me, driver downloads, working from home (VPN) OS updates (Linux and MS) count as normal use and there is no reason to throttle/shape these to all heck. I hate seeing <<10% capacity as it wastes my time. ISPs recon that the effect of wasting osmeone's time weans them off a service, but long term it's just frustrating.

Uncapped is one huge cross-subsidation scheme and in no way fair to low users who just want not to be bothered with another kind of airtime billing.

If Afrihost were to look at BitCo and the WISP community (higher end offerings and no IPC, I know) that is a model that is far more honest.

Our shaping is in line with international standards, if we wouldn't shape downloads/ P2P we wouldn't be able to allow realtime services like VoIP, streaming etc etc to run at the levels they do. A far better approach than applying blanket shaping over xGB of usage.

 

[AfriGuy]

You didn't give me what I needed to prove the fact, unfortunately (which is an account shaped to a very low p2p throughput, so I can pull graphs etc to prove that it's being shaped).
Also, another poster mentioned that for a similar problem, your systems detected p2p traffic while he was playing D3 - did you ever get to the bottom of that?

We looked into what we could and weren't able to replicate the issues. Sometimes we need to put our heads together and come to a solution together.
Not sure if you've PM'ed AfriMan but I can't find a PM from you around this? It was requested last week sometime.

 

[Sinbad]

Our shaping is in line with international standards, if we wouldn't shape downloads/ P2P we wouldn't be able to allow realtime services like VoIP, streaming etc etc to run at the levels they do. A far better approach than applying blanket shaping over xGB of usage.

Has realtime demand on your network increased so much over the last 2 months that this level of shaping has become the norm?

 

[Sinbad]

We looked into what we could and weren't able to replicate the issues. Sometimes we need to put our heads together and come to a solution together.
Not sure if you've PM'ed AfriMan but I can't find a PM from you around this? It was requested last week sometime.

I sent an email with the traffic captures during a D3 session to [email protected] - what is your email address, I will resend to you?

 

[AfriGuy]

Has realtime demand on your network increased so much over the last 2 months that this level of shaping has become the norm?

No.
Again, we're unshaping after hours - you can download as much as you like here. If your requirements dictate downloads to be run at 4pm (for eg) then the account cannot be expected to perform as such.