Afrihost Uncapped ADSL Feedback (Pt3)

Status
Not open for further replies.
This reminds me of a shortcut I find to work, low traffic. Eventually other people also discover this road and it gets congested. Ah was my shortcut to work before mweb throttled, everyone jumped ship and look now. So now I have found another great shortcut and hope it does not get congested by traffic ( downloaders) again.
 
dotVIBE said:
Shaping Policy: 12.5% Download/ 6.25% P2P

Are you guys joking? This used to be the ISP I recommend to my friends and colleagues, but getting 12.5% of of the speed on a 10Mbps "uncapped" line is ridiculous. My average use is sitting on 1.5GB per day, does that get me bundled with the download hogs?
Click to expand...

We're shaping the entire Uncapped client base from 7:30am to 10pm to improve the overall internet experience of all our Uncapped users. If we can minimise contention, we can guarantee excellent realtime services, and also allow clients to turbocharge easily when they need to be unshaped during that time with sufficient headroom on the network to do this. After 10pm, we're allowing the network to unshape dynamically based on realtime demand.

This is currently a testing phase to see if we can use a different approach to provide a better Uncapped experience and maximise our available resources to our clients benefit. We have not implemented any permanent changes to our AUP as yet.
 
Bufamotis said:
So what do I do? Click cancel on the uncapped sommer today, and wait till the first to say sign up a new product then select capped?
Click to expand...

Click on Edit Package (for the bundle component you want to change) and then just select the one you want. To minimise any pro-rata (assuming you don't need the service immediately) would be to time it as close to the 25th as possible.
 
ainsin said:
I'm disappointed to know that even on weekends, the "7:30 until 10pm (more like 1am)" is peak IPC time. The uncapped is slowly become the worst uncapped account in market. I know that this account is no longer meant for downloading anymore, but even streaming was bad last night. I used a friend's Telkom uncapped account, and it outperformed the uncapped account, by streaming easily in 720p and 1080p. Afrihost's uncapped, it struggled to not buffer 360p. A new low :(

Hopefully the higher ups see that trying to aggressively control our downloading schedule is not working. You are just driving people off the uncapped accounts and onto cheaper capped accounts, where they download whenever they want (including the peak IPC time). A great way to make less money off clients.
Click to expand...

We've run some tests on YouTube and I believe that our bandwidth is definitely working as it should. However, some services (looks like US based) are not performing as well as they could in tests so we're investigating this. If you're watching YouTube content not cached locally or in the EU, then you may have a similar experience until we shed some light on this.

The new shaping testing is to determine whether we could provide a better experience. From my tests, throughput is a lot better and steadier on Uncapped, while realtime services seem to be working great, and I've been able to stream YouTUbe at 720p while shaped at maximum on a 4Mbps account. If anyone is not experiencing this, please PM me so I can do more extensive testing and report back on this.

Just remember that we have not necessarily changed our AUP at this stage, we're testing to see if we could make changes to offer the best possible experience with the resources we have.
 
Bufamotis said:
My uncapped account buffers all videos, my brother and I make a habit of clicking the link, pause, set resolution below 360, play, it even buffers on my phone connected to the router by WiFi, I always need to step down quality to view YouTube
Click to expand...

This shouldn't be the case. Drop me a PM so I can test the links you're having problems with.

Remember that if your content is cached in the US, then we might see it under peform while we investigate how to improve US based streaming services.
 
Vorastra said:
Afrihost and Youtube. You guys need to get a new route to Youtube.

AfriMan. My original account has issues with Youtube (as you know), so I got a test account in the meantime from your critical care guys.

As of me writing this, Youtube is slow on:
Main account
Test account (critical care)
Free 1GB

Just changed to WebAfrica Free 1GB. Full speed.

You guys having an issue with Youtube? :erm:

EDIT: 11:50AM 13/07 - Youtube seems to be fine on the test account.
EDIT2: 8:00PM 13/07 - Youtube is back in the crapper.
Click to expand...

Seems like performance is intermittent here. It could be problems with your line that re-syncs whenever you change accounts or performs better intermittently. You can send me the links to test as well to see if there is a problem with where the content could be cached.
 
DarkSpectre said:
Home Uncapped is a big joke :mad: The naming is totally misleading :mad: I'm leaving AH at the end of this month. Bye!
Click to expand...

Sorry to hear that you've already decided to leave. We are doing our best to try to provide a great experience. If you are open to chatting to me about how we can improve your experience, please PM me :(
 
lilggg said:
Shaping Policy: 18.8% Download/ 6.25% P2P

Does this mean i get 18.8% of my line speed or 71.2%?

Edit: nm getting 70kbps on 4mb line, ridiculous.
Click to expand...

It means that you are getting in the region on 18.8% of your lines speed potential on those shaped services. Remember that you still get 100% of your line on unshaped services. Is the 70kbps from a shaped or unshaped service?
 
Vorastra said:
On Monday I want to see what AfriMan says about this "testing" that's taken, what, 2 weeks now?

Whoever he consults with at the office about this simply being "testing" is lying to him.
Click to expand...

I did initially mention that the testing was only going to last a few days. However management then extended this for the next few weeks a few days later, which I also passed on when I was made aware of this. The initial tests showing performance on Uncapped accounts, especially on priority realtime services was very positive. We are still testing and accumulating feedback. Obviously the feedback on this thread and in these forums is very important to us and will factor in their final decision.
 
dasco144 said:
Yeah Youtube has been horrible since about Wednesday or something. It seems like it is connecting to some international address to stream the video instead of the local mirror that I'm sure it has always used.
Click to expand...

Where content is cached is dependant on how many requests are received for that content from those geographic locations. Something that is not requested often will possibly not be cached at a local CDN.
 
I would have expected MTN to have better transit to EU as US CDNs. It's always been a problem since the MTN move and the best solution is simply to proxy between two VPSs or to make use of a VPN service.
 
Last edited:
AfriMan said:
Where content is cached is dependant on how many requests are received for that content from those geographic locations. Something that is not requested often will possibly not be cached at a local CDN.
Click to expand...

Understandable, but when I change to my Vox account it is pulling from a local address with the same video. I did a ping to the IP while on Afrihost and on Vox and the Vox was averaging 30ms and the Afri was averaging 200ms.

I won't say I know everything when it comes to this kinda stuff but it does seem strange that I had no problem at all watching Youtube content before (basically any video at all) on Afrihost but this last week the performance has dived horribly. I used to be able to watch Youtube streams at 720p no problem but now it's stuggling on 480p.
 
Last edited:
dasco144 said:
Understandable, but when I change to my Vox account it is pulling from a local address with the same video. I did a ping to the IP while on Afrihost and on Vox and the Vox was averaging 30ms and the Afri was averaging 200ms.

I won't say I know everything when it comes to this kinda stuff but it does seem strange that I had no problem at all watching Youtube content before (basically any video at all) on Afrihost but this last week the performance has dived horribly. I used to be able to watch Youtube streams at 720p no problem but now it's stuggling on 480p.
Click to expand...

If you can ping the content, you should be able to run a traceroute. If we use different CDN services or settings to VOX, we might be accessing different cached data.
 
Afriman, should the afrihost news server also be shaped during the day? Guess most of us will pull the same content, so it should be locally cached.
 
ABCpt said:
Afriman, should the afrihost news server also be shaped during the day? Guess most of us will pull the same content, so it should be locally cached.
Click to expand...

Shaping is about managing IPC, not managing international bandwidth...
 
AfriMan said:
If you can ping the content, you should be able to run a traceroute. If we use different CDN services or settings to VOX, we might be accessing different cached data.
Click to expand...

I'll have a look when I get home. Like I said though, it was perfectly fine before, and then last week it just became horrible, so what exactly changed on your side?
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X