Afrihost Uncapped ADSL Feedback (Pt3)

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Large amounts of data on those protocols are used for content that is in the grey area between illegal and legal, pirated content, content not officially supported or available in South Africa. I am just wondering what the impact on an ISP's capacity will be when the content in the grey areas is blocked and to what extent the IPC and other infrastructure of ISP's are used to provide bandwidth for that content.

Of course people will be highly upset if they cannot get their pirated content or cannot use their methods to circumvent restrictions and will just leave to another ISP, but I am just wondering what strain those content is putting on the network.

That's not the users problem. p2p is already shaped and if you want unshaped people get business accounts.

This works well.
 
That's not the users problem.

I know, but should it now be the ISP's problem when people are downloading content they should not really have access to in the first place, by bypassing restrictions? It is a bit like paying fees to play golf at the Roodepoort golf course, but then I climb over the fence to play at Sandton golf course, and then Roodepoort must take the strain of my fence climbing tactics.
 
Large amounts of data on those protocols are used for content that is in the grey area between illegal and legal, pirated content, content not officially supported or available in South Africa. I am just wondering what the impact on an ISP's capacity will be when the content in the grey areas is blocked and to what extent the IPC and other infrastructure of ISP's are used to provide bandwidth for that content.

Of course people will be highly upset if they cannot get their pirated content or cannot use their methods to circumvent restrictions and will just leave to another ISP, but I am just wondering what strain those content is putting on the network.

Those very services/protocols are creating the demand for the uncapped accounts. Without them, the majority of uncapped subscribers would just move to capped and watch DSTV
 
Large amounts of data on those protocols are used for content that is in the grey area between illegal and legal, pirated content, content not officially supported or available in South Africa. I am just wondering what the impact on an ISP's capacity will be when the content in the grey areas is blocked and to what extent the IPC and other infrastructure of ISP's are used to provide bandwidth for that content.

Of course people will be highly upset if they cannot get their pirated content or cannot use their methods to circumvent restrictions and will just leave to another ISP, but I am just wondering what strain those content is putting on the network.

Seriously? And who appoints the moral police to decide which protocols we can and cannot have? Or are you just trolling?
 
Someone suggested, a while back in this thread, a QoS feature being placed in the ClientZone. I know that this is a huge task to implement, but if done properly, I think it could work very well and solve a lot of people's problems. I know it'd solve mine.

If we could, via the ClientZone, choose which services we wanted to give priority to at any given moment, we could in essence be in control of our own data. This is quite a nice ideal to move towards.

There could be buttons for prioritizing realtime, P2P and downloads and, for instance, when we choose to prioritize our P2P, if we want a download quickly, other services are shaped heavily (like the heavy shaping users are experiencing now for P2P), so then browsing would be slow, but it'd be our own doing. As soon as we wanted to change back, we could just press another button, and we could do so. Basically, users could just switch based on the usage they know they'll be doing, giving themselves the best experience tailored to their own specific needs.

I'm not sure just how possible that all is, but I genuinely believe that it should at least go through to management for consideration.

I definitely like the idea of users having more control, but there is also something to be said for the honesty approach - in that everyone would need to understand the priorities of managing the network. The danger would be that everyone would just not shape themselves, or open up P2P for themselves and and expect everyone else to do the opposite. Essentially, you would have potential to be unshaped whenever you wanted, regardless of whether that is good for the network or not, and it would be very risky in terms of the service that other users would experience and latency and throughput on the network. If we had an open system where we could communicate in a forum like this - whereby we all agreed to turn torrents off for now - maybe it could works, but I reckon that's pretty much what's happening now with the dynamic system managing shaping.

Also remember that realtime services use a lot less bandwidth (generally) than P2P. Torrents saturate your line and create multiple download threads in a pretty unique way, which is why shaping is mostly aimed to minimise network resources to P2P.

I really like the concept though - I think we should keep talking about this, and perhaps we'll hit on something that we could implement eventually :)
 
Not sure how workable this is, but here goes. This should also alleviate the headache of managing turbos.

So my thinking process.

First I listed the home accounts speeds and pricing, then did the same for business and worked out the price increase in % terms and listed the rand value.

So it looks like this:


The reason I this is is to see how far away the home guys are from 100% unshaped.

So my idea is to offer a bolt on where you remove the turbos, but offer a guaranteed minimum shaping value on downloads/p2p for a nominal fee.

eg.

The 2meg that's currently on 18%/6.25% can pay an extra R50 a month and will never get shaped worse than 55%/45% ever on his account.

4meg would pay R150 for this privilege and the 10meg guys R100.

If I understand this correctly, it would be like a partial monthly turbocharge, instead of a per-minute based one. I know that generally we've tried to steer away from bolt on packages - but I guess Turbocharge is effectively a short term bolt on so there is something in this.

We'd have to do a lot of calculations on whether this is viable. We'd also have to look at the value offering. If someone pays R50 to partially shaped, where the could pay R100 to be fully unshaped, it may not make sense - but I definitely see the thinking behind this :)
 
If I'm not mistaken the business uncapped package does something like this, where in the clientzone you can decide whether or not you want http has priority over p2p or not. It's not as complex as what is suggested here but the basic ground work exists to some extent. If Afrihost can do this I can forgive whatever headaches we had with capacity problems.

The thinking behind protocol prioritization is not about protecting the network, but rather a tool for businesses who can't afford firewalls or internet exchanges to prevent their employees from abusing their network.

Like I said, I really do like the concept of a user drive honesty system - but we'd need to put a lot more thought into to make it practical :)
 
Large amounts of data on those protocols are used for content that is in the grey area between illegal and legal, pirated content, content not officially supported or available in South Africa. I am just wondering what the impact on an ISP's capacity will be when the content in the grey areas is blocked and to what extent the IPC and other infrastructure of ISP's are used to provide bandwidth for that content.

Of course people will be highly upset if they cannot get their pirated content or cannot use their methods to circumvent restrictions and will just leave to another ISP, but I am just wondering what strain those content is putting on the network.

  1. Streaming probably uses a fair bit less bandwidth than what you'd imagine, because you're only transferring what you're actually consuming as you do so. My wife and I watch a fair bit - a couple of hours every night and the odd whole day over weekends - and we barely approach the 150gb per month level. But a blip on the uncapped radar.
  2. You pay your ISP for a connection to the 'net. What you do with that connection is not for your ISP to police, firstly, and secondly the eventual dismantling of artificial content boundaries will be forced by more people not submitting to them. Your position would cement monopolies and cartels; it's short-sighted and counter to everything that arguably makes the Internet humanity's greatest achievement.
 
Hi there

How do you cancel here by Afrihost? This is s>>>>> service. Being with them now since 19th, and suddenly everything died here. Bulls<>< this!!

I changed back to my OW account........8kb/ps jumps to 200kb/ps??????--------MAybe its my router or line or maybe my dog is sick or maybe the cat died. Come on man. I cannot believe I even made my friend join Afri!!!!!

Sorry to hear this. I see you have dropped me a PM and I'll reply ASAP to assist you :(
 
Block all p2p, nntp and file sharing sites. And all methods to connect to hulu and netflix.

A surf/stream only option. I think that would only work for a very small subset of clients. But that's my opinion. Maybe the forum could give us an idea of how many would consider something like this.
 
12.5% Download/ 6.25% P2P from a 10Mbps account @ 10:17
WTF

So I am paying R700 odd for a 1.25 Mbps line???

:mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad:

Really sorry that shaping is still so severe. Just remember that we're recalibrating after the upgrade to find the best balance between protecting the network from contention and latency, and giving back unshaped bandwidth to Uncapped users. We don't want to end up in a situation where we sit with contention and poor overall service, even on realtime service. We are relaxing controls, but very cautiously, to ensure we keep priority services at premium at all times.
 
It's getting earlier each day for full shaping to begin. Already, the 12.5%/6.25% has started. Its getting worse, not better. So much for easing up of shaping. Yesterday, it started at 10 am, the day before at 12 am and today at 8 am.
 
Is there an estimate time (in months or years) when afrihost performance will be restored to how it was before moving to MTN?

I don't think it ever will - cos I personally believe that we're a lot better off than we were after the move. I've seen much better speeds and throughput since we changed networks on my personal home account, on realtime and non-realtime services and I also believe that the demand-based system we've implemented has given our clients access to a lot more bandwidth. We've seen this in the overall amount of bandwidth moved monthly - we're moving a lot more in real terms, accounting for client base growth and line upgrades in that time.
 
I know, but should it now be the ISP's problem when people are downloading content they should not really have access to in the first place, by bypassing restrictions? It is a bit like paying fees to play golf at the Roodepoort golf course, but then I climb over the fence to play at Sandton golf course, and then Roodepoort must take the strain of my fence climbing tactics.

Unless there are legal or ISPA requirements to prevent certain content, it's not really up to the ISP. However, we do expect our clients to make the right choices and respect the intellectual property and copyright laws in place and avoid pirate or illegal content.
 
I don't see how a car can be compared to a demand driven product? It's a fixed product with guaranteed working parts and components, no variables at all. So probably not a good analogy to really work with, in my opinion.

But comparisons aside, as I've said, we're open to suggestions. If you think you have an idea on how we can make the product better, I'm here to listen, and I promise if it's something that can be actioned, we'll look at it.

I need an eye-roll emote. It wasn't meant as an analogy to your product, but to the end-user experience you've created over the last half a year, and to your offering changing materially despite all your protestations to the contrary.

That left there, if you ever succeed in finding a 'balance' that does not result in indefensible levels of shaping at ungodly hours of the day I'll happily jump on the wagon again - as I've said before Afrihost is one of the few companies I don't begrudge my monthly debit order. But until that time I think I'm done with Afrihost 'uncapped'.
 
Large amounts of data on those protocols are used for content that is in the grey area between illegal and legal, pirated content, content not officially supported or available in South Africa. I am just wondering what the impact on an ISP's capacity will be when the content in the grey areas is blocked and to what extent the IPC and other infrastructure of ISP's are used to provide bandwidth for that content.

Of course people will be highly upset if they cannot get their pirated content or cannot use their methods to circumvent restrictions and will just leave to another ISP, but I am just wondering what strain those content is putting on the network.

There is more and more focus being placed on "grey" content and how ISPs should react. In the States they've experimented with a three strikes approach where the ISP eventually terminates your service after the third copyright infringement - but I believe this got scrapped eventually.

Ultimately the issue of policing the internet also infringes on too many personal privacy issues for the ever to be a clear cut issue. In Germany they ruled that personal privacy rights trump the crime of copyright infringement - and only capital crimes would warrant invasion of privacy where ISPs could reveal private information to police or copyright protection bodies.
 
It's getting earlier each day for full shaping to begin. Already, the 12.5%/6.25% has started. Its getting worse, not better. So much for easing up of shaping. Yesterday, it started at 10 am, the day before at 12 am and today at 8 am.

I'm sorry that we're not able to unshape as quickly as we've done in the past. I do believe that once we've gotten the metrics we need to find that perfect balance, we'll have a better overall internet experience for our Uncapped clients.
 
I need an eye-roll emote. It wasn't meant as an analogy to your product, but to the end-user experience you've created over the last half a year, and to your offering changing materially despite all your protestations to the contrary.

That left there, if you ever succeed in finding a 'balance' that does not result in indefensible levels of shaping at ungodly hours of the day I'll happily jump on the wagon again - as I've said before Afrihost is one of the few companies I don't begrudge my monthly debit order. But until that time I think I'm done with Afrihost 'uncapped'.

Fair enough :(
 
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