Afrihost Uncapped ADSL Feedback (Pt3)

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Mephisto_Helix said:
11:38pm on a Friday and the network is still completely shaped. I have a feeling it's going to be like last week where I was shaped at 3am still. Best part is that Turbocharge has been activated yet my YouTube and downloads are at a standstill. Wow.
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We can't give a guaranteed time when everyone will be unshaped but I can definitely see that we're usually unshaping the lightest network users around 10pm as always. If demand is high, then some of the heavier users may have to wait a little longer. If demand is light then it may not be such a long wait. But remember that you always have your free Turbocharge minutes to bypass shaping whenever you would like.
 
Fishzn said:
Think AH has reached that threshold point they did the last time round a few months ago when things were seriously bad shaping wise. It's a matter of balancing out usage until it's worth it for them to upgrade capacity. Neverending story with all uncapped products IMO. I just stick it out for better days. Right now P2P is almost barely usable but hey for me at least it seems real time services are still working fine.
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We're not close to capacity right now, but it's fair to say that we do have to manage increase in demand until we can justify further upgrades. It's financial as much as technical, because we have to ensure that we can make the extra overhead costs viable, because demand will increase once we add additional capacity. I can't say that we're close to an additional upgrade at the moment, because we're still seeing that there is a lot more potential to utilise the full resources of the network.
 
AfriMan said:
We're not close to capacity right now, but it's fair to say that we do have to manage increase in demand until we can justify further upgrades. It's financial as much as technical, because we have to ensure that we can make the extra overhead costs viable, because demand will increase once we add additional capacity. I can't say that we're close to an additional upgrade at the moment, because we're still seeing that there is a lot more potential to utilise the full resources of the network.
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bs

last night you guys were at 98% on all regions.
 
slvr said:
If not, kindly post a screenshot.
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As I explained in the Business Uncapped thread, simply because we are using the IPC capacity doesn't mean it is under load and suffering.

If we aren't using that capacity, we are wasting the funds spent on that IPC capacity, so any available capacity that we do have will be used towards Uncapped users by unshaping them.
 
AfriMan said:
We can't give a guaranteed time when everyone will be unshaped but I can definitely see that we're usually unshaping the lightest network users around 10pm as always. If demand is high, then some of the heavier users may have to wait a little longer. If demand is light then it may not be such a long wait. But remember that you always have your free Turbocharge minutes to bypass shaping whenever you would like.
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AfriMan said:
Remember that you also have free Turbcharge minutes to be unshaped. I think I said this already (old age :( )
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Mephisto_Helix said:
it's now 1am .......

View attachment 197160

View attachment 197162

YouTube stuttering like a madman. Why YT has to be shaped at 1am is beyond me.
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Check out the big image (2nd image) ...... Turbocharge on and still my downloads and YouTube were non existant. And all that at 1am ;) I can work around the downloading patterns, said it before, it's understandable and necessary but when one cannot even do some streaming at 1am while using Turbocharge then I'm sorry, but something is amiss on the network.
 
Mephisto_Helix said:
Check out the big image (2nd image) ...... Turbocharge on and still my downloads and YouTube were non existant. And all that at 1am ;) I can work around the downloading patterns, said it before, it's understandable and necessary but when one cannot even do some streaming at 1am while using Turbocharge then I'm sorry, but something is amiss on the network.
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The shaping will only ever affect your P2P and HTTP downloads, so you should definitely not being seeing any reductions in performance with regards to streaming.

Have you been able to test your streaming since this morning?
 
Is the entire Afrihost network being throttled or strangled or what because I can't game at all, latency is extremely high and after doing a speed test to london I see that even though I am on a 4meg uncapped account my speeds are at 0.50mbps meaning I cannot game whatsoever and downloads are a pipedream as well as youtube, what the hell is going on?
 
Right. For the last 4 weeks I've been diagnosing packet loss on Afrihost uncapped while playing BF4 on local servers.

Anytime between 19:00 and 20:00 it will start to lag, spike or give packet loss -tested on 15 servers with 4 being in CT and the rest across the country.

When running tracerts to these servers the results are fine - no spikes along the way. However when doing a ping plotter or just using the built in test of BF4 itself, it shows bad signal strength, packet loss and latency. Upon switching to my WA account and doing these same checks the signal strength is perfect, 0% packet loss and the best pings possible.

I've confirmed the same scenario with 4 mates also in the southern region on Afrihost uncapped. One thing to note - when this happens shaping is always on the harshest level. My control environment has no other services running in the background.

This seems to in lock step with others reporting bad gaming experiences as well.
 
Zanshin said:
Is the entire Afrihost network being throttled or strangled or what because I can't game at all, latency is extremely high and after doing a speed test to london I see that even though I am on a 4meg uncapped account my speeds are at 0.50mbps meaning I cannot game whatsoever and downloads are a pipedream as well as youtube, what the hell is going on?
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That would definitely be poor, even for gaming. Can I see the full result that you got from your speedtest and also maybe a traceroute to the server you're gaming on (if you have the IP)?

Are your local speeds and latency fine?
 
Orihalcon said:
Right. For the last 4 weeks I've been diagnosing packet loss on Afrihost uncapped while playing BF4 on local servers.

Anytime between 19:00 and 20:00 it will start to lag, spike or give packet loss -tested on 15 servers with 4 being in CT and the rest across the country.

When running tracerts to these servers the results are fine - no spikes along the way. However when doing a ping plotter or just using the built in test of BF4 itself, it shows bad signal strength, packet loss and latency. Upon switching to my WA account and doing these same checks the signal strength is perfect, 0% packet loss and the best pings possible.

I've confirmed the same scenario with 4 mates also in the southern region on Afrihost uncapped. One thing to note - when this happens shaping is always on the harshest level. My control environment has no other services running in the background.

This seems to in lock step with others reporting bad gaming experiences as well.
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When we test our network for gaming, we always test on the harshest shaping setting to ensure that we are able to replicate what a client would experience. We've actually just run some tests specifically for gaming on Xbox/PS/PC to ensure that our gaming classifications are working correctly.

We do have some users who try to torrent or use other shaped services at the same time, and this seems to throw QoS off a little, but when I've tested a single realtime service on Uncapped while shaped to the max, I've seen good throughput.
 
AfriMan said:
When we test our network for gaming, we always test on the harshest shaping setting to ensure that we are able to replicate what a client would experience. We've actually just run some tests specifically for gaming on Xbox/PS/PC to ensure that our gaming classifications are working correctly.

We do have some users who try to torrent or use other shaped services at the same time, and this seems to throw QoS off a little, but when I've tested a single realtime service on Uncapped while shaped to the max, I've seen good throughput.
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Your in house tests and those done by your clients are yielding different results. Your "good" throughput simply is not good enough for many gamers that hate dyeing to lag or packetloss. The only variables in my tests were the ISP and the shaping condition at the time.

The length of time I've done this over, the number of servers I've tested this on and the varying proves that the common denominator is Afrihost as the ISP and shaping at the harshest level. It is just that simple. It seems you are unable to replicate this in house. I'll move accounts then. No big deal.
 
Orihalcon said:
Your in house tests and those done by your clients are yielding different results. Your "good" throughput simply is not good enough for many gamers that hate dyeing to lag or packetloss. The only variables in my tests were the ISP and the shaping condition at the time.

The length of time I've done this over, the number of servers I've tested this on and the varying proves that the common denominator is Afrihost as the ISP and shaping at the harshest level. It is just that simple. It seems you are unable to replicate this in house. I'll move accounts then. No big deal.
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We'll definitely continue to test. Remember that when we test we do so with a normal ADSL line (not over network or fibre) and with a regular shaped Uncapped account. In order to find a problem, we have to replicate it.
 
Gaming performance got a little better a while back (after the massive fiasco), but I have noticed performance declining over the last couple of weeks. For the last two nights, I've had to switch to a Web Africa account to be able to play SMITE.

Mumble was also spotty during these times.

Also, be advised that not posting about performance problems didn't mean they were gone, it just meant I'd found ways around it and have pretty much accepted the poor'ish performance I've been getting.
 
Sazelza said:
Gaming performance got a little better a while back (after the massive fiasco), but I have noticed performance declining over the last couple of weeks. For the last two nights, I've had to switch to a Web Africa account to be able to play SMITE.

Mumble was also spotty during these times.

Also, be advised that not posting about performance problems didn't mean they were gone, it just meant I'd found ways around it and have pretty much accepted the poor'ish performance I've been getting.
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:(

That's not cool.

What issues are you having with SMITE and Mumble? Have you been able to test your gaming performance with TurboCharge enabled?
 
High latency with both SMITE and mumble. Changed to WA account and no problem.

2 days ago, while I was having high latency, I checked the throttling state and is said, "No Shaping"... Changed to WA and it was fine...

I don't know, dude...
 
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