Afrihost Uncapped ADSL Feedback (Pt3)

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Hogrod said:
I moved over from a 75gig capped account to an uncapped account 3 days ago. My main use is for Netflix. I migrated because it's been stated several times that real time services are not affected by shaping and so on. So may as well move over as I use 100 to 180 gig/month.

After using Netflix with uncapped, I'm absolutely positive that Netflix (realtime) is affected by shaping. Despite Afrihost saying it's not.

While on my capped account (over past 12 months) I could get anywhere between Netflix 480sd to 720p picture quality on a 4 meg line. Which is fine for me.
As soon as I switched over to uncapped I get 240SD, 288SD or 320SD(lower resolutions). I can't get 720p or 480sd. This was more noticeable when shaping was applied to the account yesterday night (18% download/6% P2P) between 8pm and 11pm.

I have no exchange issues either.

Is it fair to say that you simply can't run Netflix on Afrihost Uncapped with decent picture quality? It appears that Realtime services are indeed shaped on uncapped.
I'm happy I'm using uncapped, but I'm irritated that I went there because Afrihost claim Realtime is not affected, when it is.
Click to expand...

I have noticed the same thing when shaping is applied.

Would love to get some clarity on this.

Btw I'm also on 4mb uncapped.
 
Zertop said:
You visit the new clientzone, then find the link to protocol prioritization (should be under your business account's page, on the left)
Click to expand...

Thanks - done that and still only 100-150 kb/s
 
Hogrod said:
I moved over from a 75gig capped account to an uncapped account 3 days ago. My main use is for Netflix. I migrated because it's been stated several times that real time services are not affected by shaping and so on. So may as well move over as I use 100 to 180 gig/month.

After using Netflix with uncapped, I'm absolutely positive that Netflix (realtime) is affected by shaping. Despite Afrihost saying it's not.

While on my capped account (over past 12 months) I could get anywhere between Netflix 480sd to 720p picture quality on a 4 meg line. Which is fine for me.
As soon as I switched over to uncapped I get 240SD, 288SD or 320SD(lower resolutions). I can't get 720p or 480sd. This was more noticeable when shaping was applied to the account yesterday night (18% download/6% P2P) between 8pm and 11pm.

I have no exchange issues either.

Is it fair to say that you simply can't run Netflix on Afrihost Uncapped with decent picture quality? It appears that Realtime services are indeed shaped on uncapped.
I'm happy I'm using uncapped, but I'm irritated that I went there because Afrihost claim Realtime is not affected, when it is.
Click to expand...

We definitely don't shape Netflix. As a major service provider for media, we are fully aware of their traffic on our network and we wouldn't make that kind of oversight.

What I have noticed is that in times of peak demand, we see a little more latency than usual, especially when demand spikes and the network is adjusting to try to manage demand. In the North we had quite a few Netflix complaints on Uncapped right before we upgraded, and then they went away.

Are you in the South or the East, by any chance?
 
BladeV2.0 said:
Hi Afriman,

I have one of your free 1gb capped accounts, but every time i try and connect to it it just never does? Does it have the same type of authentication as your uncapped accounts where when you connect from a different line number it will not connect?
Click to expand...

Yes, becuase you sign it up with a line number, we lock it to that number, otherwise it's a normal capped account.

We can change the number, as long as its not in use elsewhere :)

PM me.
 
RoMark said:
I mentioned yesterday that browsing is a bit slow for me and that my mic is breaking up when I game on PS3.
I was asked to post test results:


Edit:
These test were done just before 18:00.
Click to expand...

Some of the intermittent spikes and timeouts on the trace are pretty concerning. Can you see what kind of throughput you're getting on saix.net, compared to guest@telkomadsl (password guest)?

You can PM me the results if you like :(
 
aktor said:
Do we not yet have an ETA on when we can expect IPC capacity upgrades in the South? I dunno what the hell changed in the last month, but shaping to 6% line speed is the norm nowadays.
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I don't have the ETA from Telkom yet, I do know that the order was placed ages ago. I think there is a backlog of IPC orders at the moment. I read somewhere that Telkom's ISP division was also waiting for IPC (didn't know they needed any before that) so we're waiting patiently here :(
 
I have mentioned a couple of times during this week that I'm just about in a permanent state of shaping (18% and 6%).

I also complained that real time services weren't snappy for me.
It has improved for me since yesterday.

I can stream Youtube videos @720p on my 4Mbps line.
Obviously that is not the same as Netflix streaming.

I have a feeling the AH network is under a lot of strain in the South and that might be the reason for some of the real time issues.
I do not believe for one second that AH would lie about shaping rules on protocols.
 
AfriMan said:
We definitely don't shape Netflix. As a major service provider for media, we are fully aware of their traffic on our network and we wouldn't make that kind of oversight.

What I have noticed is that in times of peak demand, we see a little more latency than usual, especially when demand spikes and the network is adjusting to try to manage demand. In the North we had quite a few Netflix complaints on Uncapped right before we upgraded, and then they went away.

Are you in the South or the East, by any chance?
Click to expand...

In Cape Town.
Latency would definitely impact the Netflix picture quality. But if there is a latency issue it would affect both capped and uncapped??? With that in mind, I'm not sold on your reasoning at all because I get better picture quality on capped compared to uncapped.
 
AxeManiac said:
Hi Afriman,

!!!PLEASE HELP!!!

I do not like to complain but after a month of intermittent internet and atrocious support I’m at wits end.

My story do far:
I switched from MWEB to your company after realizing that I have been shafted with bandwidth.
I was on their premium uncapped account. Their support people were excellent and I was very sad to leave them, but unfortunately I firmly believe that I want a quality product for the hard earned cash that I am spending on the product.
I am not going to rant and rave about their lack of bandwidth or shaping on a premium account.

I joined your company in December (2Meg ADSL business package) and was extremely happy with the speed and efficiency of your support staff. Your internet was lightning fast and I was extremely happy with your service.

--HOWEVER--

Things have changed drastically. On the 1st of this month I realised that something was drastically wrong with my lightning fast internet. The connections dropped for no reason. Throughput sucked and the best that I could achieve was just over 1 Meg on a 2 Meg line with speed testing.
Downloading something showed the true extend of the throughput woes. I could not achieve more than 10kb downloads. I won’t speculate about shaping services as it clearly indicates that shaping was applied here.
I won’t even talk about gaming as that was non-existent.
So I waited 2 days amidst my young ones crying about their beloved games and friends they could not play and speak with. I thought that it would pass but things got steadily worse.

I logged my first call on the 4th (call id: [WSC #WID-629-97794]) desperate to get my internet going again. To my surprise no response except for the automated one.
I tried again on the 5th (Call BSF-365-21388) involving accounts to try and get a response….. the same effect.
I called on the 6th and someone tried to assist over the phone, but the problem still remained.
I then received a sms asking how the service was and I rated the poor guy down as I was frustrated.
A quality controller (Keenan and Clayton later) contacted me and promised to intervene.
I finally received a response on the 7th asking that I should do some tests and forward the results.
I did this but only received a response on the 9th from Ronny stating that my noise ratio is low and that he is escalating to 2nd line support.
On the 10th Emmanuel responds with a Telkom fault number (28BTK090214) saying that there is definitely a problem with my line.

So 6 days to troubleshoot, but that is not the end of the story yet!

It seemed like someone was working on the problem as we sometimes actually had functional internet. Some days were better than others, but conditions changed rapidly the whole time.
But since Tuesday things have turned for the worse again
My router is now indicating for the last couple of days that my line is downgraded to 1Meg even though I’m paying Afrihost for a 2 Meg line.

It’s now 17 days later and not once did I get feedback to my problem!
Do I maybe expect too much for my hard earned cash here?
I just ask the courtesy of letting me know that someone is actually managing my incident and escalating to Telkom (I assume it’s still Telkom’s issue) that the problem is still not resolved.
I get the feeling after asking for an update yesterday again (and once again no response) that it is just too much to ask for common courtesy to update clients on their incidents.
At least I can praise MWEB there! They always updated me via e-mail and even called me to update me regularly on my status of my incidents with them. They escalated to Telkom that even the account managers from Telkom let me know that it was escalated again. Their support is top notch and I seriously think that after my experience so far with Afrihost that you guys can learn from them.

Please restore my faith in your company as I am seriously considering taking my business elsewhere.
Click to expand...

I'm really sorry to hear that this has all gone wrong. I'm truly sorry that we're not giving you the service you should be getting, and I know that we've let you down here.

I see you've PM'd me as well, so I will get into the issues there with you so we can sort all of this out ASAP :(
 
Hogrod said:
In Cape Town.
Latency would definitely impact the Netflix picture quality. But if there is a latency issue it would affect both capped and uncapped??? With that in mind, I'm not sold on your reasoning at all because I get better picture quality on capped compared to uncapped.
Click to expand...

I don't know if I can explain it on a technical level, but I'll try. Essentially, Capped and Uncapped are drawn from different "pools" of data, so that we can apply different rules on the data supply. Shaping only affects the Uncapped pool while changes are being made, though if there is high demand on the overall network, latency can cut across the entire network.

I just have noticed that a few people complained about Netflix in the North and although shaping had things mostly under control, some Uncapped guys had this issue. Once we upgraded, they seems to go away, and the problems always seemed to be when shaping was at it's most severe.
 
RoMark said:
I have mentioned a couple of times during this week that I'm just about in a permanent state of shaping (18% and 6%).

I also complained that real time services weren't snappy for me.
It has improved for me since yesterday.

I can stream Youtube videos @720p on my 4Mbps line.
Obviously that is not the same as Netflix streaming.

I have a feeling the AH network is under a lot of strain in the South and that might be the reason for some of the real time issues.
I do not believe for one second that AH would lie about shaping rules on protocols.
Click to expand...

I wouldn't say the network is under strain as such, but demand is definitely a lot higher than we'd like given the capacity we have, and we'd like to be able to have more room to shape less. But as far as I can see there are only short periods of heightened latency when demand peaks, otherwise realtime services should remain normal
 
AfriMan said:
I don't know if I can explain it on a technical level, but I'll try. Essentially, Capped and Uncapped are drawn from different "pools" of data, so that we can apply different rules on the data supply. Shaping only affects the Uncapped pool while changes are being made, though if there is high demand on the overall network, latency can cut across the entire network.

I just have noticed that a few people complained about Netflix in the North and although shaping had things mostly under control, some Uncapped guys had this issue. Once we upgraded, they seems to go away, and the problems always seemed to be when shaping was at it's most severe.
Click to expand...

Ok thanks, but still got this question:

If latency is across the entire network (and therefore both data pools I assume) then why is the Netflix quality worse on uncapped? It should be the same quality on both capped and uncapped if latency is the same for both?

I'm under the impression Realtime should be the same quality across all your products because it's loosely advertised as that in the clientzone and on this forum.

At the end of the day,from someone sitting in front of the TV it does not look like uncapped was a good choice. If I'm on the wrong product then say so. I don't yet see why I need to go back to capped or business uncapped because real-time is supposedly 100% speed and moving won't make any difference anyway, in theory anyway, in practice not so much.
 
AfriMan said:
I'm really sorry to hear that this has all gone wrong. I'm truly sorry that we're not giving you the service you should be getting, and I know that we've let you down here.

I see you've PM'd me as well, so I will get into the issues there with you so we can sort all of this out ASAP :(
Click to expand...

Thank you so much for responding.
It is nice to see someone reading and actually responding to matters.
 
Martian said:
I have noticed the same thing when shaping is applied.

Would love to get some clarity on this.

Btw I'm also on 4mb uncapped.
Click to expand...

We'll only really know if it's related when we get our upgrade and these issues disappear, as they seem to have in the North :(
 
Quag said:
Same here. I usually spike up to around 50% randomly after midnight, but rarely full capacity. I was also rarely shaped even during peak hours before that though :/.

Edit:
Ok now I'm getting very diminished browsing speeds. Did a google ping and trace only to timeout on most. Following a port reset their still not looking impressive.
Click to expand...

Can you run the full Network Test on our App and send me the results or post them here? Also, if you PM me, send me your DSL username so I can check out your shaping policy history.
 
AfriMan said:
We'll only really know if it's related when we get our upgrade and these issues disappear, as they seem to have in the North :(
Click to expand...

That's exactly my point, I am in the North.

Since the upgrades my Netflix has run flawlessly but when we were experiencing heavy shaping the quality was atrocious.

Surely that points to shaping of some sort?
 
Hogrod said:
Ok thanks, but still got this question:

If latency is across the entire network (and therefore both data pools I assume) then why is the Netflix quality worse on uncapped? It should be the same quality on both capped and uncapped if latency is the same for both?

I'm under the impression Realtime should be the same quality across all your products because it's loosely advertised as that in the clientzone and on this forum.

At the end of the day,from someone sitting in front of the TV it does not look like uncapped was a good choice. If I'm on the wrong product then say so. I don't yet see why I need to go back to capped or business uncapped because real-time is supposedly 100% speed and moving won't make any difference anyway, in theory anyway, in practice not so much.
Click to expand...

Latency really won't affect it that much - its more the bandwidth, and if the bandwidth on uncapped is shaped, there is less throughput for the video data. However - that bandwidth should not be shaped? I might be wrong, actually - I'll let afriman explain :D
 
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