UnholyMunk
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Decent Service??? We pay for excellent service! You guys are really not doing yourselves any favours...
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Afrihost Uncapped ADSL Feedback (Pt3)
- Thread starter bwana
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Decent Service??? We pay for excellent service! You guys are really not doing yourselves any favours...
AGREED!
10Mbps package
Account Overview
Account Status: Account Active
Shaping Policy: 12.5% Download/ 6.25%
Really poor service..
Webafrica 10Mbps uncapped = R499
Afrihost = R797
Only reason I stuck with Afrihost was because I thought by paying more I would get less shaping.
Account Overview
Account Status: Account Active
Shaping Policy: 12.5% Download/ 6.25%
Really poor service..
Webafrica 10Mbps uncapped = R499
Afrihost = R797
Only reason I stuck with Afrihost was because I thought by paying more I would get less shaping.
Last edited:
Exactly! guess what the 2mb account user is only paying around R300 and his being shaped the same as you so his getting the same practically the same service, tell you how do you feel about that?
I think the fact that we offer a double money back guarantee is something unique. I think it's only something like 10 working days max for the refund to be paid, so I don't think it's unreasonable.
Ultimately, there is no way to make a decision until you try it out, so paying you more than what you paid us is about the best guarantee any company could really offer. My opinion
From our monitoring you should generally see throughput and download speeds improve over that period, not worsen. It could be a variety of factors, but if you could post your Network Test App results here or in a PM, this will tell us a lot more.
OMB
Mountain Man
look, I appreciate that you guys are here and do what you can, I think the thing to keep in mind and I'm hazarding a guess here, is that the guys that frequent myBB and these threads are probably representative of your "cream of the crop" users, these are the guys that demand a good service because they need it, they're your tech/geek mob, not your everyday FB/Pintrest/email/surfing crowd who probably don't even realise they're being shaped.
the other thing to bare in mind is that the mentality of complaining is not a major part of the South African psyche, however it is pretty well know that for every one person that complains there are 10 that don't, it is also known that on average the person that does complain frequently tells 10 of their friends about their unhappiness, so what you guys need to consider is that even though you may only be dealing with what appears to be a small number of complaining users based on your total user base, you may have a whole lot more unhappy people out there than you realise and don't underestimate the power of influence of those that are complaining
TEXTILE GUY
Honorary Master
As much as the bad sentiment prevails on this forum at the moment, for whatever issues prevail - and the unfortunte service I had last week, I have to say, that this week has been great. I can honestly say I am happy with AH.
The migration of the line has gone well, as has the package change.
I asked about this at 2h00 this morning and woke up to a done deal .... really good stuf IMHO.
Support tickets have been dealt with promptly and info via SMS has been great.
Thanks AH.
I reckon its because Afriman has come back -
The migration of the line has gone well, as has the package change.
I asked about this at 2h00 this morning and woke up to a done deal .... really good stuf IMHO.
Support tickets have been dealt with promptly and info via SMS has been great.
Thanks AH.
I reckon its because Afriman has come back -
You will never win I left AH coz of their home uncapped's useless p2p and http shaping. Moved to Openweb and the bowsing is just pathetic during peak hours and everything comes fine after 7pm (sometimes). And thats one thing I cant fault AH for is their real-time prioritization is top notch but non real-time is rubbish for home uncapped so I decided ill pay R200 more and just get bus uncapped from AH. A friend of mine let me try his for a week and I must say its brilliant. So come end of march im coming back to AH but on the bus package.
It all depends on what's important for you. Uncapped is still one of our most popular products because most people value real time services. But remember that we also offer a very affordable turbocharge option to essentially give your the Business DSL experience whenever you need it
Sorry to hear that you're already thinking of moving. We do know that some clients are not having a great experience and upgrading is our priority. Unfortunately it's mostly in Telkom's hands, but we're bringing the full weight of MTN and our management teams to bear to get a solution as quickly as possible.
Netflix is a realtime service, so we do optimise ( as in we don't shape) for this service.
It's difficult to measure if there is high demand in the region, because there may be higher contention than we'd like. It would be best to compare once our capacity upgrades come through in the region.
AfriMan,
I have two questions/requests:
QUESTION 1:
Regarding Netflix (using UnoDNS) on the Home Uncapped account. I've noticed that it is indeed affected by shaping. While watching Netflix this evening, I was unable to get anything higher than 360p quality. I ran a bandwidth monitor, and noticed that the bandwidth usage doesn't go above 70kBps. I ran a traceroute, and it came back perfectly fine across the board.
Then I switched to my capped account, and lo and behold, Netflix came streaming down in much higher quality, with bandwidth usage sitting between 260kBps and 400kBps. (If I ran the test on the capped account for longer it would've eventually reached SuperHD quality, as the bandwidth rate kept on climbing). Traceroute looked pretty much identical to the one I ran on uncapped.
Here is the bandwidth monitor screenshot. The first spikes are the Netflix streaming on Uncapped, the second (higher) spikes are the Netflix streaming on the capped account:
http://i.imgur.com/RKk5RiT.png
You can see a very very clear difference there, and you can also see that the uncapped downstream rate appears limited (in other words, shaped), while the capped downstream rate just kept on climbing until I stopped the test).
And here is the traceroute (as I mentioned, this was pretty much identical between the capped and uncapped accounts as far as hop times were concerned):
So can I ask: please forward this info to your technical team so that they can revisit the shaping rules, because evidently some realtime services ARE being shaped. And can you please let us know what they say?
I know you don't "officially" support Netflix because we have to use the UnoDNS workaround, but surely it's possible (actually it was confirmed earlier by an Afri-rep) that shaping rule exceptions can be made per service. Please, look into this and get Netflix unshaped?
And if it's a case of you not wanting to unshape Netflix because the HD streaming is negatively affecting your network capacity then fine - but then at least confirm that, too. The signature line "realtime services aren't shaped" is obviously not correctly applying here.
PS: I'm in the South IPC region.
QUESTION 2:
I know you can't confirm a timeframe for delivery of the extra IPC capacity in the South. That's fine, but can you at least confirm how much capacity we're getting in the South and, based on current peak usage and shaping, what the nett effect would be?
"The capacity will ease shaping" is very unspecific. You mentioned that your network capacity is increasing by 21% nationally. How much % on the South IPC? And how will that % affect the shaping we're seeing now? You know what your peak usage/demand is, you know what your capacity is, and you know what % capacity increase you're getting. I know those figures are probably proprietary information, and we're not asking for those. We simply want you to use those 3 figures (and whatever other factors are applicable) to make a calculation and tell us what to expect here.
What I have noticed is that when there is high demand, capped accounts seem to perform better on streaming than Uncapped. This would only be over short periods of very high demand. It's very difficult to address this on a technical level, as the ultimate issue is that we need to install more capacity.
I don't have an ETA ( I wish I did cos I know that would reassure affected clients) but I do know this is being pursued as priority by our Technical Director with MTN and Telkom. I can't say exactly how much IPC is going in, but I will be able to say once it goes live how we're performing against our available capacity.
As much as the bad sentiment prevails on this forum at the moment, for whatever issues prevail - and the unfortunte service I had last week, I have to say, that this week has been great. I can honestly say I am happy with AH.
The migration of the line has gone well, as has the package change.
I asked about this at 2h00 this morning and woke up to a done deal .... really good stuf IMHO.
Support tickets have been dealt with promptly and info via SMS has been great.
Thanks AH.
I reckon its because Afriman has come back -
Haha - must be!
Thank you
I think the fact that we offer a double money back guarantee is something unique. I think it's only something like 10 working days max for the refund to be paid, so I don't think it's unreasonable.
Ultimately, there is no way to make a decision until you try it out, so paying you more than what you paid us is about the best guarantee any company could really offer. My opinion
Money doesn't fix the amount of time I've wasted logging tickets, tracerts, phone call costs, and general frustration AH have caused.
.
Chevron
Serial breaker of phones
AfriMan,
I have two questions/requests:
QUESTION 1:
Regarding Netflix (using UnoDNS) on the Home Uncapped account. I've noticed that it is indeed affected by shaping. While watching Netflix this evening, I was unable to get anything higher than 360p quality. I ran a bandwidth monitor, and noticed that the bandwidth usage doesn't go above 70kBps. I ran a traceroute, and it came back perfectly fine across the board.
Then I switched to my capped account, and lo and behold, Netflix came streaming down in much higher quality, with bandwidth usage sitting between 260kBps and 400kBps. (If I ran the test on the capped account for longer it would've eventually reached SuperHD quality, as the bandwidth rate kept on climbing). Traceroute looked pretty much identical to the one I ran on uncapped.
Here is the bandwidth monitor screenshot. The first spikes are the Netflix streaming on Uncapped, the second (higher) spikes are the Netflix streaming on the capped account:
You can see a very very clear difference there, and you can also see that the uncapped downstream rate appears limited (in other words, shaped), while the capped downstream rate just kept on climbing until I stopped the test).
And here is the traceroute (as I mentioned, this was pretty much identical between the capped and uncapped accounts as far as hop times were concerned):
So can I ask: please forward this info to your technical team so that they can revisit the shaping rules, because evidently some realtime services ARE being shaped. And can you please let us know what they say?
I know you don't "officially" support Netflix because we have to use the UnoDNS workaround, but surely it's possible (actually it was confirmed earlier by an Afri-rep) that shaping rule exceptions can be made per service. Please, look into this and get Netflix unshaped?
And if it's a case of you not wanting to unshape Netflix because the HD streaming is negatively affecting your network capacity then fine - but then at least confirm that, too. The signature line "realtime services aren't shaped" is obviously not correctly applying here.
PS: I'm in the South IPC region.
Did you check if your uncapped account does better on Netflix when you use a Turbo Boost?
I've heard those rule of thumb figures before, but I'm really not that interested in unmeasurable metrics. At the end of the day, it's impossible to measure how positive or negative sentiment spreads, and I've personally put a lot of time into researching this.
What I do know is that the only thing one can really do is engage authentically and participate in "communities" to create a continuous dialogue with our clients. Our aim is to always be engaging and available to do so.
MyBB is definitely a priority for us, but not for any reason other than it's a vibrant community and it makes sense for us to engage here, and engage on the appropriate technical level. Our FB, Twitter and G+ communities are also very important to us, and our community managers try to ensure that we speak to our clients there in the right way as well. Basically, I'm saying that every client is important to us. It may sound like a cliche, but I truly believe that this is true for every Afrihost employee. We're all Client Service agents in some ways
At the end of the day, all our clients should demand and expect good service, and we do our best to exceed even those expectations.
Does that kinda answer your question?
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