Afrihost Uncapped ADSL Feedback (Pt3)

[paulosouthafrica]

Very strange!

Are you able to run a traceroute to the sites that aren't opening?

Not able to run one now im at the office, but I did last night.
I saw high pings 120ms when hitting the mweb server side. But trace route is not really going to give you any idea of any throttling that might occur on the connection.
If I have a 365kbps connection I can still get a 20ms ping

It all feels like throttling, why would the connection become 100% at 12:00am?

I always feel like the connection is much slower between 3pm - 11pm . But im not keeping an accurate record of the times.
There is a definite speed reduction in the connection during certain periods though.

 

[JordanOwen]

It would seem Afrihost simply cannot handle the amount of users they currently have.

 

[JordanOwen]

Not able to run one now im at the office, but I did last night.
I saw high pings 120ms when hitting the mweb server side. But trace route is not really going to give you any idea of any throttling that might occur on the connection.
If I have a 365kbps connection I can still get a 20ms ping

It all feels like throttling, why would the connection become 100% at 12:00am?

I always feel like the connection is much slower between 3pm - 11pm . But im not keeping an accurate record of the times.
There is a definite speed reduction in the connection during certain periods though.

Can't watch a Youtube vid in 240p a lot of the time during the day.

 

[AfriGenie]

Not able to run one now im at the office, but I did last night.
I saw high pings 120ms when hitting the mweb server side. But trace route is not really going to give you any idea of any throttling that might occur on the connection.
If I have a 365kbps connection I can still get a 20ms ping

It all feels like throttling, why would the connection become 100% at 12:00am?

I always feel like the connection is much slower between 3pm - 11pm . But im not keeping an accurate record of the times.
There is a definite speed reduction in the connection during certain periods though.

Our shaping will ONLY ever affect your P2P and HTTP downloads, if you are seeing a general reduction in performance, then something else is effecting your account.

One of the quickest and easiest ways of seeing this is through a traceroute - granted as you pointed out this isn't the be all and end all - but it can narrow down the issue significantly.

 

[AfriGenie]

Can't watch a Youtube vid in 240p a lot of the time during the day.

Streaming from YouTube should not be an issue at any point in time, since YouTube should be coming from the local cache.

Ideally I will need you to test with one of our test accounts, I have sent you any access details yet?

 

[paulosouthafrica]

Streaming from YouTube should not be an issue at any point in time, since YouTube should be coming from the local cache.

Ideally I will need you to test with one of our test accounts, I have sent you any access details yet?

I couldn't load the youtube page. Youtube videos would only stream without interruption at 144p


AfriGenie,
How do you want to proceed here? What can we do next, Doubtful its the equipment as I took this modem from my office where we use another provider and never had any issues.
I can test with one of your test accounts, please send me access details as I have not yet received any.

Plus I was seeing the same issues with our old modem that was damaged after a power surge.

I know you say you only throttle p2p & HTTP Downloads but its not out of the realm of possibility that the throttling is getting a false trigger and implementing throttling?

 

[AfriGenie]

I couldn't load the youtube page. Youtube videos would only stream without interruption at 144p


AfriGenie,
How do you want to proceed here? What can we do next, Doubtful its the equipment as I took this modem from my office where we use another provider and never had any issues.
I can test with one of your test accounts, please send me access details as I have not yet received any.

Plus I was seeing the same issues with our old modem that was damaged after a power surge.

I know you say you only throttle p2p & HTTP Downloads but its not out of the realm of possibility that the throttling is getting a false trigger and implementing throttling?

I've sent you a PM with my Test Account Details.

It has happened in the past where there were instances of miss-classification of traffic, but this was affecting specific gaming services and one or two other services that use non-standard ports.

In my experience YouTube issues are generally caused by defective routing or DNS-related issues.

 

[paulosouthafrica]

I've sent you a PM with my Test Account Details.

It has happened in the past where there were instances of miss-classification of traffic, but this was affecting specific gaming services and one or two other services that use non-standard ports.

In my experience YouTube issues are generally caused by defective routing or DNS-related issues.

Will try when I get home from work, may I ask what is diffrent from this test account vs my regular uncapped account?

In regards to youtube the page it self struggles to load, couldn't even get to load a video at some points. I can understand if it were only video, but certain pages couldn't load effectively.

I also tried VPN into my local office VPN and international office and both experiences were the same on different machines. Does VPN traffic get shaped?

 

[ainsin]

I'm really sorry for the experience particularly with CS:GO and TS, with the help of Qrox, we've definitely made progress towards resolving the latency and packet loss issue, and I am sure you will see a significant improvement over the coming days.

You should - however - definitely not be having any issues with Youtube and WoW. If you enable TurboCharge, do you see any improvement with those two?

Hey AfriGenie

I have tried a TurboCharge, and it hasn't made any difference. I still get a lot of packet losses, and bad rubberbanding in CS on local servers. I even tried to download a file over http, and the speed was horrible (5kbps). I tried the same file on my backup account (WebAfrica) and it maxed out my line (4 megs).

I am also getting a lot of timeouts on pages loading. Take www.topcd.co.za . It took me about 3 minutes to load the page (and it was instant on WebAfrica). Weird thing is that it doesn't happen to all the pages, just a few here and there. Its bizarre.

 

[AfriGenie]

Will try when I get home from work, may I ask what is diffrent from this test account vs my regular uncapped account?

In regards to youtube the page it self struggles to load, couldn't even get to load a video at some points. I can understand if it were only video, but certain pages couldn't load effectively.

I also tried VPN into my local office VPN and international office and both experiences were the same on different machines. Does VPN traffic get shaped?

The account I sent you is a fully unshaped account, so in that respect it will help to figure out if it is shaping.

If there is any shaping applied to VPNs it will be significantly less than on P2P and HTTP downloads.

 

[JordanOwen]

Streaming from YouTube should not be an issue at any point in time, since YouTube should be coming from the local cache.

Ideally I will need you to test with one of our test accounts, I have sent you any access details yet?

Haven't gotten any details yet no.

 

[Stochos]

It depends on which region you are in. Shaping is determined by overall demand. Remember that P2P is only shaped, not blocked, so you can still leave downloads to run overnight (which is actually preferable in terms of network demand) or to run in the background.

Most networks start to become unshaped just after 10pm/11pm with most users unshaped within an hour or so, but sometimes the heavier users are only unshaped several hours afterwards depending on their usage patterns.

Please define what Afrihost means by 'heavy user'.

 

[paulosouthafrica]

The account I sent you is a fully unshaped account, so in that respect it will help to figure out if it is shaping.

If there is any shaping applied to VPNs it will be significantly less than on P2P and HTTP downloads.

Do we not know if there is shaping applied to VPN traffic?

Also, when would you like feedback regarding the test? I might not be able to tackle it this evening.

 

[AfriGuy]

Please define what Afrihost means by 'heavy user'.

The usage will differ, it's all run dynamically. So what AfriMan is saying here is that things run from top down. If the highest usage a client has clocked is 1GB then that'll be your "heavy user".
Obviously this changes throughout the month.

 

[AfriGuy]

Do we not know if there is shaping applied to VPN traffic?

Also, when would you like feedback regarding the test? I might not be able to tackle it this evening.

Unless a VPN is being specifically abused, it should fall into realtime services and not see any shaping.

 

[JordanOwen]

Do I need to give a months notice on cancellation of my line?

This is the worst internet gaming experience I have ever had, and I have been with Telkom, Axxess, Mweb and FNB Connect.

 

[g.c]

This is getting beyond ridiculous, been having on and off issues for the last few months. The supposed speed on my 4 meg line is not at all what I am getting. Once again, another example, currently downloading an ubuntu linux distribution of uct's ftp site, it is a 1gb download and currently taking me more than 6 hours. My speedtest results are laughable.

Afriman/AfriGuy, you guys can say what you want, but ever since the MTN move, your network is SH^T. I've been an afrihost supporter for the last 6 years. All I can say is, I've had enough.

 

[JordanOwen]

This is getting beyond ridiculous, been having on and off issues for the last few months. My speed on my 4 meg line is not at all what I am getting. Once again, another example, currently download an ubuntu linux distribution of the uct's ftp site, it is a 1gb download and currently taking me more than 6 hours. My speedtest results are laughable.

Afriman/AfriGuy, you guys can say what you want, but ever since the MTN move, your network is SH^T. I've been an afrihost supported for the last 6 years. All I can say is, I've had enough.

Trying everything I can to get my family to switch ISP's . I've heard a lot of good stuff about Crystal Web and Web Africa from my mates.

 

[paulosouthafrica]

I've sent you a PM with my Test Account Details.

It has happened in the past where there were instances of miss-classification of traffic, but this was affecting specific gaming services and one or two other services that use non-standard ports.

In my experience YouTube issues are generally caused by defective routing or DNS-related issues.

The account I sent you is a fully unshaped account, so in that respect it will help to figure out if it is shaping.

If there is any shaping applied to VPNs it will be significantly less than on P2P and HTTP downloads.

Afrigenie, the experience is like night and day.
Im not doing any p2p have not changed hardware or even done a reboot on the router, just changed credentials for ADSL and reconnected using your test account.
Nothing on my side has changed at all, I went from my account to struggling to load a youtube video at 240p, to 720p streaming flawlessly.
Gmail loads like a bomb, browsing general web pages come up quickly and no hang ups
Can connect to my VPN in California and pages load quickly and dont hang.

Granted my normal connection is running a little better than yesterday evening, but it is 1:00am - 2:00am right now. But compared to your test connection my account is clearly different. Again this is just regular web traffic, no downloads, no p2p.

DNS has not changed either.

 

[Vorastra]

Sigh. Another issue Afriman. So I wake up on Sunday, put on Youtube. 200kbps on a 4meg line...Restart router, nothing. Change DNS to Google, no difference. Restarted router with Google DNS, nothing.

Load up a clip on Vimeo. Full 3.6mbps. Afriman. Fix please.

EDIT: Seriously? From 6AM to 10:40AM, 200kbps. As soon as I send this post, Youtube is using full speed again? I don't even.