Afrihost Uncapped ADSL Feedback (Pt3)

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Vorastra said:
Trying to watch Twitch (Since Youtube doesn't use my full line anymore...). Even that's impossible. It's a known issue with Afrihost that always gets the same response. "Must be Twitch."

I remember one of your topics, you were on a WebAfrica Business. How's Twitch for you ?
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Perfect on high 99% of the time. The 1% of the time it's medium.

My Netflix is always in HD.
 
Does Afrihost have any visibility into the MTN network? I ask this because whenever there is an issue I have the impression it comes to light purely based on feedback from social media, including this forum, which leads me to believe that there is no proactive network health monitoring by Afrihost apart from forum and twitter feedback. "We are receiving reports of..." precedes most network notices.
 
Chevron, I can concur. I get on TI speedtest to Rosebank 35Mb/s and to Captetown average of 30. Mybroadband runs about the same.....so why the F*&@ can I not stream? I have been at this for months now and I am gatvol of the promises. The its your line ...lets run some more tests.. all absolute BS. International capacity is not there period. I spend almost 2.5k a month on a service that does not work. If I had to do work for someone and give less than 100%, I will not get paid. I wish someone will come out and just say that they are over subscribed and cannot rectify the issue.
 
saa044 said:
Have you done a trace route? Like I mentioned last night, I am on the same policy as you and many others on my 4mbps line, I streamed YouTube last night at 720P, no buffering at all. Wife and daughter also watched a mix of Netflix and YouTube yesterday, the whole day without it buffering. Or maybe the shaper is effecting your account different-lie, a PM to Afriman/Afriguy might sort this out then?
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Firstly, you are not in Cape Town, so you can't really compare your experience.
Secondly, my line is perfect... all spikes and intermittent behaviour is isolated to MTN hops. The line works on EVERY other ISP account that I have (MWEB, WebAfrica, Telkom) without a hiccup at all. This has been on-going since beginning of March. I have waited patiently since then, a midst all the empty promises, delays regarding IPC upgrades, and comments of "we don't see any issues at all". It is now 4 months on, and 2 "upgrades" later, and things are even worse then before. Technically, it shouldn't matter what I use the line for, as the current "shaping" actually amounts to throttling - if your line is restricted to a certain throughput for the same amount of time EVERY day (20 hours), that is called throttling/limiting, no matter how you spin it. What is more infuriating, is that support is none existent, and even the reps are now ignoring ALL attempts at contact... not to mention the fact that ANY tests I post in the forum are not even acknowledged. The same can be said for these issues now affecting my Business "unshaped" account, which cost a lot more than the Home Uncapped :(
 
cortexenslaver said:
Firstly, you are not in Cape Town, so you can't really compare your experience.
Secondly, my line is perfect... all spikes and intermittent behaviour is isolated to MTN hops. The line works on EVERY other ISP account that I have (MWEB, WebAfrica, Telkom) without a hiccup at all. This has been on-going since beginning of March. I have waited patiently since then, a midst all the empty promises, delays regarding IPC upgrades, and comments of "we don't see any issues at all". It is now 4 months on, and 2 "upgrades" later, and things are even worse then before. Technically, it shouldn't matter what I use the line for, as the current "shaping" actually amounts to throttling - if your line is restricted to a certain throughput for the same amount of time EVERY day (20 hours), that is called throttling/limiting, no matter how you spin it. What is more infuriating, is that support is none existent, and even the reps are now ignoring ALL attempts at contact... not to mention the fact that ANY tests I post in the forum are not even acknowledged. The same can be said for these issues now affecting my Business "unshaped" account, which cost a lot more than the Home Uncapped :(
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I've noticed that any arguments or reasoning that cannot be easily rebutted by the Afrihost PR team are generally ignored. I'd take it as a sign that what you and all of us are experiencing is baffling their experts, and they have no solid answer for us... but to admit that would be to admit defeat, so we must all just sit in silence while they ignore the problem.
 
AfriMan said:
Our aim is to improve your experience, and I know that usually when we set our minds to something like this we come out on the right side of these issues. From what I am seeing, Uncapped is now delivering the kind of experience we envision for the product. Excellent and consistent realtime performance at all times, with a good portion of time where clients can do downloads and P2P where they are less shaped (or unshaped) to get as much data as they want. We'll obviously tweak here and there to find the best possible balance, but it feels like this could be a good thing overall. But let me just remind everyone that it's not necessarily the way we'll go, this what we're doing for now to see what could work, and what won't.
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If it were a good portion of time, it would have been fine, but it is not. P2P shaping I get, but direct downloads. I am an opensource enthusiast and developer, and I download a new linux distro weekly, but now it takes me 6 hours for a 1.5 Gb iso, on a 10 mbps line. Any time I try.
 
Lord Nikon6 said:
If it were a good portion of time, it would have been fine, but it is not. P2P shaping I get, but direct downloads. I am an opensource enthusiast and developer, and I download a new linux distro weekly, but now it takes me 6 hours for a 1.5 Gb iso, on a 10 mbps line. Any time I try.
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I hear you, man...

I am not expecting miracles on this type of account... but to make it virtually unusable 90% of the time, is ridiculous. I would like to think that one should be able to do at least 500GB in a month on this account. Currently, I have only managed to do about 220GB, and that was only because a lot of that was via SSH. There are times that even that doesn't work (SSH, that is).

....and just in case some "wisenheimer" tells me that 500GB is a lot, just remember that the theoretical limit of a 10MB line downloading at full speed the whole month, is in excess of 2TB. It is not unreasonable to expect a 250KB/s average download rate for the month at all times. Case in point, my previous 4MB MWEB Uncapped gave me 450GB per month without a hint of trouble, or slowing (even though that was shaped in the day on P2P).
 
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cortexenslaver said:
I hear you, man... I am not expecting miracles on this type of account... but to make it virtually unusable 90% of the time, is ridiculous. I would like to think that one should be able to do at least 500GB in a month on this account. Currently, I have only managed to do about 220GB, and that was only because a lot of that was via SSH. There are times that even that doesn't work (SSH, that is).

....and just in case some "wisenheimer" tells me that 500GB is a lot, just remember that the theoretical limit of a 10MB line downloading at full speed the whole month, is in excess of 2TB. It is not unreasonable to expect a 250KB/s average download rate for the month at all times. Case in point, my previous 4MB MWEB Uncapped gave me 450GB per month without a hint of trouble, or slowing (even though that was shaped in the day on P2P).
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I don't expect too much of it either, but at least some hassle free downloads, And I did about 80 gb last month, before I got so frustrated that I signed up for a capped account just to get my essentials downloaded.
 
hmm tested a buddy's vpn service tonight, and the joy that they shape a vpn service... sigh

* note only way to fix p2p issues with games like wildstar and diablo is getting a vpn solution like hot spot shield, proper paid services like that by pass any shaping due to the intense tunneling and encapsulation of packets. but who wants to pay R899 for uncapped and then $10 + a month just to be able to play your games that cost $60+ .... #lifeofonlinegamers
 
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Just throwing in my two cents here... I'm a long-time 10mbps uncapped user, and have generally been very happy with the service. Over the last week, I've noticed that my http downloads max out at about 200kB/sec. I'm used to 1MB/sec. I admit I haven't kept track of exactly when I've tried, but I know that it has been at various times throughout the day. I'm currently working on porting an Android ROM to my tablet, so I'm building the ROM on my overseas server multiple times a day and downloading the 220MB file each time (port 80). Every time I've checked the Clientzone, it says "Shaping Policy: 12.5% Download/ 6.25% P2P". Again, this is something I'm not used to seeing regularly from Afrihost; in the past, I'd only notice the shaping policy enforced during peak times of the day.

And so I arrived here to see if anyone else is experiencing the same, and the news is not good! AfriMan, your comments are particularly concerning to me. I was under the impression that Afrihost's shaping was dynamic 24/7. Are you telling me that between 07h30 and 22h00, I am to expect no more than 2mbps from my 10mbps account due to the fact that your shaping policy is manually enforced?! For me, that is just unacceptable and quite frankly, extremely misleading. I'd definitely like some clarity on that please!
 
StNick said:
Just throwing in my two cents here... I'm a long-time 10mbps uncapped user, and have generally been very happy with the service. Over the last week, I've noticed that my http downloads max out at about 200kB/sec. I'm used to 1MB/sec. I admit I haven't kept track of exactly when I've tried, but I know that it has been at various times throughout the day. I'm currently working on porting an Android ROM to my tablet, so I'm building the ROM on my overseas server multiple times a day and downloading the 220MB file each time (port 80). Every time I've checked the Clientzone, it says "Shaping Policy: 12.5% Download/ 6.25% P2P". Again, this is something I'm not used to seeing regularly from Afrihost; in the past, I'd only notice the shaping policy enforced during peak times of the day.

And so I arrived here to see if anyone else is experiencing the same, and the news is not good! AfriMan, your comments are particularly concerning to me. I was under the impression that Afrihost's shaping was dynamic 24/7. Are you telling me that between 07h30 and 22h00, I am to expect no more than 2mbps from my 10mbps account due to the fact that your shaping policy is manually enforced?! For me, that is just unacceptable and quite frankly, extremely misleading. I'd definitely like some clarity on that please!
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The recent responses from the Afripeeps feels very much like a corporate, we do not care about individual clients anymore, so a couple of us moaning won't change much. I think they have now gone to that level.
 
I keep on hearing for the moment the shaping is being manually forced for 15.5 hours a day...

What is "for the moment"? It's already been a week. Has the full new IPC capacity been delivered to CT? Because it sure does not feel like it.

And having never been an online gamer - but looking at playing a bit now - hearing all this talk of games being shaped is not a comforting sign Afrihost. Not comforting at all.
 
SIlvRav said:
PM sent...
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afriman did you get my pm? no response

and here is proof...going well for the first couple of days them after that you can clearly see i am being throttled

Capture_zps53ad58bc.png

as i sit here i am getting 10kbs dl max!
 
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AfriMan said:
We have quite a few staff that do use Netflix, but we've mentioned several times that it's region locked so our DNS can't support it. So there are many other options in order get around this, but that introduces an element outside of our control. Unless we officially support a DNS provider, which I don't think we can, that will always be the difficulty there.

We use a system that is used internationally (and by the ISPs that have their own IPC) to do packet analysis and traffic shaping. They update their policies regularly with new services. But remember that we also analyse the traffic packet signature, so we don't identify by the service as much as the nature of the traffic itself. If we are misdiagnosing the traffic to a specific service, then we'll need to verify that in real time so that we can request that the policies be updated.
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Sorry, but I'm calling BS here.

How is it possible I can stream at 1080p with Mweb and Web Africa, but not with Afrihost.
That has got zero do with not supporting a DNS provider and the fact that it geographically locked.

You guys need to get your international bandwidth sorted, or identify your traffic properly.
Either way, it's Afrihost's mess up, no one else.
 
SIlvRav said:
afriman did you get my pm? no response

and here is proof...going well for the first couple of days them after that you can clearly see i am being throttled

View attachment 130073

as i sit here i am getting 10kbs dl max!
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You are not being throttled.. Everyone is shaped into oblivion for the next couple of days because of testing, does not matter how much you used this past month still being shaped.
 
Still shaped on a weekend, very nice Afrihost.

It's not enough that you're dictating not only how I use MY bandwidth on a weekday for 15 hours (at the least) a day, but now on weekends.
Have you guys lost your marbles?
I PAY FOR THIS CONNECTION - IT'S NOT FREE.

Think it's back to Web Africa for me.
 
GreenArrow said:
You are not being throttled.. Everyone is shaped into oblivion for the next couple of days because of testing, does not matter how much you used this past month still being shaped.
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they said "the next couple of days" a week ago.
 
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