Afrihost Uncapped ADSL Feedback (Pt3)

Status
Not open for further replies.
Wow, I've been shaped to $#it the last month or two. I am on a 20mbps VDSL account but can barely stream. I recently requested a downgrade for next month and the clientzone said it will only take effect from next month, but I am currently on a 4mbps account and I've already paid for 20mbps this month. Their support department told me they will bill me pro-rata to upgrade my account back to what I've already paid for this month - USELESS! I have in the meantime decided I am cancelling no matter what, but I either want a pro-rata refund or the account back to 20mbps by tomorrow.
 
Alright well I've signed up for 10mbps Uncapped and it's working like a charm so far. Not sure if the DSL line has been tansfered as it is still at 8mbps. Streaming Twitch Source quality and YouTube 720p with no buffering to test it. Will update with my experience. If it turns out to be bad, I'll change to 4mbps business or change ISP and get a refund. Happy to be here so far though :)

Edit: 6PM Twitch streaming is terrible. Jumpy, buffering constantly etc. If this doesn't improve this would have been a terrible mistake.

Trying to stream Inception (most watched) via XBMC. It's downloading 240KB/s but tends to throttle itself down to 100KB/s. Was getting better speeds on Telkom.
 
Last edited:
giggity said:
Alright well I've signed up for 10mbps Uncapped and it's working like a charm so far. Not sure if the DSL line has been tansfered as it is still at 8mbps. Streaming Twitch Source quality and YouTube 720p with no buffering to test it. Will update with my experience. If it turns out to be bad, I'll change to 4mbps business or change ISP and get a refund. Happy to be here so far though :)

Edit: 6PM Twitch streaming is terrible. Jumpy, buffering constantly etc. If this doesn't improve this would have been a terrible mistake.

Trying to stream Inception (most watched) via XBMC. It's downloading 240KB/s but tends to throttle itself down to 100KB/s. Was getting better speeds on Telkom.
Click to expand...

Not to long ago, or at least a week or two back i defended Afrihost against the downloaders, but even I must admit now that my realtime services has degraded a lot. I am now on a different ISP to test them out, and let me tell you they have a international fault currently, but I am able to still stream YouTube and Netflix in HD from them, something that rarely happened on Afrihost.
 
saa044 said:
Not to long ago, or at least a week or two back i defended Afrihost against the downloaders, but even I must admit now that my realtime services has degraded a lot. I am now on a different ISP to test them out, and let me tell you they have a international fault currently, but I am able to still stream YouTube and Netflix in HD from them, something that rarely happened on Afrihost.
Click to expand...

I have to agree I've been with Afrihost for quite a few months now and mostly it has been a really positive experience. Lately the experience has not been so good though, downloads I can handle being affected but when I can't even stream from twitch on low quality on a 4mb line, it's time to make a change.
 
Macabre25 said:
I have to agree I've been with Afrihost for quite a few months now and mostly it has been a really positive experience. Lately the experience has not been so good though, downloads I can handle being affected but when I can't even stream from twitch on low quality on a 4mb line, it's time to make a change.
Click to expand...

This, but in my case it was with my 20mbps line and account, which Afrihost has no decided to downgrade to 4mbps since I've already paid them for the 20mbps. I've had it with them, I phoned them, emailed them, they are truly useless. I'm going to try out another ISP.
 
WTF is wrong with the international link ?

can't stream... team speak ping is 300... ****ing international sites load crap slow... ::asfo-JSDGUIOBNAFHSDPIGJHASdf;l'gdfgs;lkadfshjopigf sdgjkds

ffs why am I paying near 1k a month for absolute **** internet

720p youtube is buffering ... on a 10mb line like WTF ?

look at this crap twitch on medium... every 7 secs it buffers shown in red...
buffer.JPG
 
Last edited:
My YouTube is fine, it's only twitch.tv that's lagging. Maybe because it's using YouTube's local CDN.

Speed test: (note my line is still syncing at 8mbps as I presume will be fixed tomorrow.
http://www.speedtest.net/result/3624722981.png

nvm xbmc is barely hitting 1mbps on most sources. This is truly a terrible experience for my first day.
 
Last edited:
giggity said:
My YouTube is fine, it's only twitch.tv that's lagging. Maybe because it's using YouTube's local CDN.

Speed test: (note my line is still syncing at 8mbps as I presume will be fixed tomorrow.
http://www.speedtest.net/result/3624722981.png

nvm xbmc is barely hitting 1mbps on most sources. This is truly a terrible experience for my first day.
Click to expand...


Dont hold your breathe
 
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...

NNTP traffic should be shaped during 7:30am and 10pm. After that, depending on demand, we should see lesser shaping. Remember that shaping works on certain shaped services, regardless of local or international caching.
 
giggity said:
So... Business Uncapped is fine? Just Home Uncapped is in the drain?
Click to expand...

I don't believe that is the case at all. Business is an unshaped product, so it performs completely differently, so to compare the two is problematic. For the use and purpose we envision for Uncapped, we believe it's delivering a good experience, except for improvements we'd like to make on US based content. Uncapped is really designed to offer excellent priority realtime services 24 hours a day, and to allow reasonable download time, with a mix of shaped and unshaped time, to offer the best overall internet experience and value for the price point.
 
dasco144 said:
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?
Click to expand...

We haven't made any changes of late to shaping, except to institute fixed shaping between 7:30am to 10pm. This is a temporary testing phase to determine if we should make changes to our AUP to improve our Uncapped clients overall experience.

The shaping policies themselves have not been adjusted for several months now.
 
Bluefinllama said:
Wow, I've been shaped to $#it the last month or two. I am on a 20mbps VDSL account but can barely stream. I recently requested a downgrade for next month and the clientzone said it will only take effect from next month, but I am currently on a 4mbps account and I've already paid for 20mbps this month. Their support department told me they will bill me pro-rata to upgrade my account back to what I've already paid for this month - USELESS! I have in the meantime decided I am cancelling no matter what, but I either want a pro-rata refund or the account back to 20mbps by tomorrow.
Click to expand...

Sounds like things have gone completely wrong here. Please drop me a PM so I can get this fixed for you :(
 
saa044 said:
Not to long ago, or at least a week or two back i defended Afrihost against the downloaders, but even I must admit now that my realtime services has degraded a lot. I am now on a different ISP to test them out, and let me tell you they have a international fault currently, but I am able to still stream YouTube and Netflix in HD from them, something that rarely happened on Afrihost.
Click to expand...

I'm sorry you feel that way, and I really do appreciate the positive support we receive here in the forums.

We are seeing that performance on US based streaming services could be better, and we're taking a hard look at throughput and the 3rd party networks we route via, to ensure that we make every possible improvement to our performance.

I know that we occasionally experience problems, and I promise we work our hardest to close these gaps in our our service. I truly believe we'll always come out in favour of our clients in the end, so I hope that we'll do that in time to keep you with us in the end.
 
giggity said:
And now twitch is fine... Why only between ~5 and ~12?
Click to expand...

There could be a few reasons but my best guess would be that you could be accessing US based content, and that's something we're investigating in terms of streaming quality. We want to make sure that realtime services are absolutely consistent and excellent on Uncapped at all times, so this is a top priority for us.
 
AfriMan said:
I'm sorry you feel that way, and I really do appreciate the positive support we receive here in the forums.

We are seeing that performance on US based streaming services could be better, and we're taking a hard look at throughput and the 3rd party networks we route via, to ensure that we make every possible improvement to our performance.

I know that we occasionally experience problems, and I promise we work our hardest to close these gaps in our our service. I truly believe we'll always come out in favour of our clients in the end, so I hope that we'll do that in time to keep you with us in the end.
Click to expand...

Completely understand, nothing against you or the company itself, I must just keep the wife and daughter happy. I will return once all the tests are done and streaming works flawlessly once again.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X