Afrihost Uncapped ADSL Feedback (Pt3)

[AthenianOwl]

Well I'm sitting here at 12am, and I'm still shaped at 18.8% Download/ 6.25% P2P. I remember Afriman saying that it dynamic, but I see a few people on this forum have been become unshaped.

I definitely think the more you try to download, the longer you will be shaped at 18.8% Download/ 6.25% P2P.

Worst part, we have Afrihost business accounts at work, and even they aren't performing like they use to. We try to contact support to sort it out, but we get told 'its the exchange' and 'its your lines', but we got WebAfrica to give us a trial business account, and it works flawlessly.

Time to move on from Afrihost personally and in business. They've given me 3 years of great service (even with the initial MTN problems), but this last month has been awful.

Best of luck Afriguy. I hope I didn't give you too much grief

This is exactly what I've been suspecting since last weekend.

 

[AfriMan]

Hello im currently at a friends house been staying their for 2 weeks now

he has 4mb uncapped not business

from the 2 weeks i have not once seen a youtube video that buffers not even at 720p

Twitch.Tv was perfect once lagged for about 5 sec then was fine after that

The strange thing is when i go into his line any time of day past 7 am and before 5 pm it shows no shaping applied

None of the 12 % and 6.25 % things im seeing in this forum

I myself have Webafrica account and can't really see the difference exepct that afrihost allows downloading more than webafrica

That's pretty odd. Definitely shouldn't be the case, as all Uncapped clients should be shaped regardless of data usage.

Would you PM me so I can investigate this?

 

[shreez]

AfriMan, I'd just like to give thanks to Donovan P on this public forum for helping me with my line issues.
He has been fantastic throughout (I believe we worked together for around 6-8 weeks on this) and I could not have progressed as far as Telkom moving my line without his persistence and tenacity.

He has gone way further than the average support engineer and extended his assistance to me even when he was not in the office.
I really hope that Donovan is being well taken care of, as he is one of the support engineers that you will want to retain in order to provide high quality service to your customers.

Thanks Donovan, and keep up the great work!

 

[AfriMan]

I am currently on an AH 4meg Business package, if I switch to capped, will I experience anything better?

Business and Capped should perform very similarly, if you are using a Business Account matched to your line sync. Remember that there is no rate limit on Capped. So if you have a 6Mbps line, a 4Mbps Business account won't perform as well as capped, for example.

Both are unshaped and you should get similar throughput and latency under the same conditions.

 

[AfriMan]

Web browsing's slow as hell. It took around 5 minutes to download a 2mb widescreen wallpaper on my 2Mbps line tonight (Source: wallbase.net) I'm very sad, Afriman

Browsing should definitely not be affected at the moment. That's very strange indeed. Definitely feeling the sadness if that is the case.

What sort of results are you seeing when you troubleshoot with pings and traceroutes?

 

[AfriMan]

You probably find that the account hasn't been used so is being classed as "very light not necessary to shape" user, but I'm sure things will change now that you're there. Try download something for a few hours and see

The current shaping tests include all Uncapped usernames. So it's possible that it's been excluded somehow, perhaps due to an upgrade/downgrade or some other bug somewhere.

Otherwise, generally all Uncapped users are shaped regardless of their usage or what type of services they use.

 

[AfriMan]

I don't get why you put a smiley in your post - suppose to make us feel better for a paid up service that is going down the toilet fast.

All the corporate yada yada that the reps are spewing forth on this thread is getting too much for me
I am so over Afrihost - moving my 2 accounts in the morning

I don't think AfriGuy's smiley face was intended to give offense. I can understand that some clients feel that the changes were are possibly looking at are not what they would ideally like, I totally understand that. From our side, we have to find a balance between offering a consistent service that offers a good experience and value for what you pay, that is also viable for us financially. So far, if we can get this right, I believe we can find the right balance for Uncapped with the right combination of shaping, great realtime services guaranteed and enough unshaped time on the network to give a great internet experience.

 

[AfriMan]

11 PM and im still shaped, y.... shaped at 50%/50%

After 10pm, shaping basically goes to being dynamic, and then it depends on overall demand.

We are still testing and looking at whether we can unshape faster to offer a better overall experience. Our intention is to maximise usage on the network, just limited where we need to ensure realtime throughput and latency. So we'd definitely like clients to use as much bandwidth as possible throughout the day and especially after hours.

 

[AfriMan]

@afriman, @afriguy
I am on the 10meg business uncapped, my speed has dropped to about half, called the call center and they said no shaping is applied as it is a business account, they dropped line speed to 8mb and still the same results...speed test shows full speed...i am only getting 500kbps on international downloads, yet youtube downloads at full speed...i have a paid subscription for international news servers, being able to download at the half speed is not on...please sort this out, thanks

We'll need to run some more troubleshooting to figure this out. Is the NNTP server EU or US based?

 

[AthenianOwl]

Browsing should definitely not be affected at the moment. That's very strange indeed. Definitely feeling the sadness if that is the case.

What sort of results are you seeing when you troubleshoot with pings and traceroutes?

My backup account (WA Capped) is 101% fine

 

[AfriMan]

Well I'm sitting here at 12am, and I'm still shaped at 18.8% Download/ 6.25% P2P. I remember Afriman saying that it dynamic, but I see a few people on this forum have been become unshaped.

I definitely think the more you try to download, the longer you will be shaped at 18.8% Download/ 6.25% P2P.

Worst part, we have Afrihost business accounts at work, and even they aren't performing like they use to. We try to contact support to sort it out, but we get told 'its the exchange' and 'its your lines', but we got WebAfrica to give us a trial business account, and it works flawlessly.

Time to move on from Afrihost personally and in business. They've given me 3 years of great service (even with the initial MTN problems), but this last month has been awful.

Best of luck Afriguy. I hope I didn't give you too much grief

If another account works perfectly, then it can't be your exchange. We need to continue to troubleshoot so we can isolate exactly which areas are not working correctly. Is it international latency or throughput, or is it specific services under performing?

In terms of Uncapped, our aim is to unshape everyone as quickly as possible. We want clients to max out the network as long as possible. After all, we already pay for the capacity, so it doesn't save us anything to hold back capacity. So we're working on making sure that the period after 10pm and before 7:30am includes as much unshaped time as possible so that our clients can pull through a good measure of bandwidth.

 

[AfriMan]

My backup account (WA Capped) is 101% fine

Please drop me a PM so that we can try to find out what is happening here

 

[AthenianOwl]

Please drop me a PM so that we can try to find out what is happening here

Hey, it's weird After switching back from the WA account to this one, everything seems to be back to normal now. Web browsing is pretty fast now

 

[JesseG]

We'll need to run some more troubleshooting to figure this out. Is the NNTP server EU or US based?

@Afriman
It is both EU and US

 

[AfriMan]

Hey, it's weird After switching back from the WA account to this one, everything seems to be back to normal now. Web browsing is pretty fast now

Sounds like you just needed to refresh your IP address

 

[Sinbad]

Sounds like you just needed to refresh your IP address

What's the logic behind this?

 

[AfriMan]

What's the logic behind this?

I don't know the full explanation, to be honest. It's a little over my head, technically. But sometimes IP's start to behave strangely, and when we refresh the IP address to the router, service seems to radically improve. When another client receives the IP, it seems to be fine. I don't know if it's a function of routers or network based, but it seems to be the case in a small handful of incidents.

 

[AthenianOwl]

This is insane!!!! Please explain why I'm downloading a 10mb freeware program from majorgeek.com at 6kB/s I thought that only P2P and NNTP are shaped during business hours It seems that EVERYTHING ELSE EXCEPT WEB BROWSING AND STREAMING IS BEING SHAPED TO DEATH RIGHT NOW.

Totally unreasonable, imho. I'm fine with P2P/NNTP being shaped during business hours. That's totally reasonable... but HTTP downloads (Excluding filesharing sites) and Windows Updates???

That's it. I can't take it anymore I'm going to cancel my AH account now. Hope the debit order gets sorted out asap so I can fully settle my AH account before moving out.

 

[AfriMan]

This is insane!!!! Please explain why I'm downloading a 10mb freeware program from majorgeek.com at 6kB/s I thought that only P2P and NNTP are shaped during business hours It seems that EVERYTHING ELSE EXCEPT WEB BROWSING AND STREAMING IS BEING SHAPED TO DEATH RIGHT NOW.

Totally unreasonable, imho. I'm fine with P2P/NNTP being shaped during business hours. That's totally reasonable... but HTTP downloads (Excluding filesharing sites) and Windows Updates???

That's it. I can't take it anymore I'm going to cancel my AH account now. Hope the debit order gets sorted out asap so I can fully settle my AH account before moving out.

HTTP downloads are also shaped, but to a lesser extent than P2P. The reason behind this is that many users will use HTTP to disguise P2P traffic and bypass shaping. We've found that we have to shape there as well to manage demand.

 

[AthenianOwl]

HTTP downloads are also shaped, but to a lesser extent than P2P. The reason behind this is that many users will use HTTP to disguise P2P traffic and bypass shaping. We've found that we have to shape there as well to manage demand.

OW and MWEB always shape P2P/NNTP/Filesharing sites between 7am and 7pm. I never had any issues when using realtime services during business hours. So they must have already figured out how to deal with this Torrent HTTP(S) Downloading trick.