Afrihost Uncapped ADSL Feedback (Pt3)

[JordanOwen]

Okay so 200 ping on CS:GO on my Capped and Uncapped Afrihost accounts. Switch to Web Africa and it's 30ms. Unfortunately I have run out of Web Africa free data and I had just bought 10 gigs of Afrihost cap to game on.
Someone else on the same server as me now who is also with Afrihost on an uncapped account has perfect ping.. Explain that..

 

[whatwhat]

Okay so 200 ping on CS:GO on my Capped and Uncapped Afrihost accounts. Switch to Web Africa and it's 30ms. Unfortunately I have run out of Web Africa free data and I had just bought 10 gigs of Afrihost cap to game on.
Someone else on the same server as me now who is also with Afrihost on an uncapped account has perfect ping.. Explain that..

Exchange congestion ofcourse.
~Said only the AH representatives every time

 

[JordanOwen]

Exchange congestion ofcourse.
~Said only the AH representatives every time

Well. I don't know why they even pay their staff other than those that run this thread lol

 

[g.c]

Monday night 11 o'clock, speed is down to a crawl, still shaped. Uncapped 4meg line.

Tracing route to www.google.co.za [216.58.223.35]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms 11.0.0.1
2 13 ms 15 ms 20 ms 105-236-8-193-esr-lo.mtnbusiness.co.za [105.236.8.193]
3 78 ms 12 ms 12 ms 41.181.201.94
4 1033 ms 1248 ms 1467 ms tb-dca-2.za--qux-c.za.mtnbusiness.net [41.181.198.188]
5 1456 ms 1355 ms 1366 ms compj-cpt-1.mtnns.net [196.44.18.2]
6 1426 ms 1064 ms 1375 ms ct-cr-2.za--tb-cr-1.za.mtnns.net [196.44.31.134]
7 1128 ms 717 ms 260 ms rb-cr-1.za--ct-cr-2.za.mtnns.net [196.44.31.69]
8 31 ms 95 ms 37 ms 41.181.139.109
9 43 ms 39 ms 38 ms 72.14.194.74
10 32 ms 32 ms 32 ms 72.14.239.129
11 32 ms 32 ms 32 ms jnb01s08-in-f3.1e100.net [216.58.223.35]

Trace complete.

Cheers afrihost, cancelling tomorrow. Another client lost due to your **** merge with mtn.

 

[KillerB]

weekend are gone and the browsing speed are super fast again whole weekend ****...

 

[AfriMan]

First time using the net in 3 weeks and its the same as usual ...... shaped throughout the night, still shaped.

Weekend = enable shaping and don't give a toss until back to work huh

Remember that shaping is automated and works by demand, not that we manually switch it on and off.

You should have been unshaped later in the evening, depending on the realtime demand, but this is usually after 10pm at night.

 

[AfriMan]

I'm glad people have finally started to complain about poor Google service performance. Why does all Google stuff run slow except Youtube? (for once) Gmail takes long, Google searches are sometimes slow and now the Play Store loads up at 200kbps.

You guy's really need to do something about how you handle the Google cache server. With these IPC price cuts coming along, for the love of tosh, do not lower prices just up your QoS. You really need it.

We have logged a few issues with the team regarding Google services. I also had some problems getting onto Google Drive last night, which was bad because I had to do the house budget (or suffer my wife's wrath). I did get on eventually but it wasn't great. We'll definitely look into that. YouTube seemed to work when I tested it, but didn't use it much.

 

[AfriMan]

So again on Afrihost with no shaping allied I get between 10 and 15% packet loss on teamspeak.
Switch to capped WA account and the packet loss is gone.

Switch back to Afrihost after 6 minutes and the packet loss is back...

We've tested Teamspeak extensively and we've found that it works best on private servers, vs public servers. Also, services that don't use the standard port 9987 (I think) seem to perform poorly while the official TS port works like a bomb.

 

[AfriMan]

So AfriGenie, im not sure if you read this article http://mybroadband.co.za/news/adsl/125024-adsl-price-cuts-expected.html

Question, what is Afrihost going to do with this reduction? Are you planning to reduce the ADSL prices and if so please include the 10mb uncapped accounts or to better your infrastructure? It has been a very long time since we saw a price reduction on the ADSL uncapped packages

I can't give you a definitive answer. If you read into the article, the discounts were heavily weighted towards small IPC clients, while bigger clients received a much smaller discount. There is also a possibility to increase capacity by paying a hefty increase in fees, which may not be feasible, if you read Laurie Falkov's comment, it kinda makes sense. A 15% increase in overheads without any additional revenue coming in is a massive risk for any business, so I think it will also have to be closely considered very carefully before we make any announcements. It would be great to have upgraded our network and also dropped some pricing, but we'll only know once we've negotiated with Telkom.

 

[Mephisto_Helix]

Remember that shaping is automated and works by demand, not that we manually switch it on and off.

You should have been unshaped later in the evening, depending on the realtime demand, but this is usually after 10pm at night.

Nope, a day and a half and no shaping was relaxed. Poor service like that has me cancelling now. You've successfully managed to get me as irate as Mweb did, grats.

 

[AfriMan]

It seems there is a problem with Afrihost, I also logged the same type scenario via the clientzone and helpdesk, get a ticket for it and nothings happening... When Im log into Axxess, WA, CW then there is no problem but the minute I login to Afrihost uncapped all hell breaks lose. I have contacted the helpdesk several time requesting an update and everytime they just send me back to do more tests... as if there cant be something wrong with the AFRIHOST network because its the home of PURE INTERNET JOY!!!

I'm sorry that you're having this poor experience. Could you please be more specific about exactly what you mean when the account is not working and if you ran any kind of tests, please post the results here

 

[AfriMan]

Nope, a day and a half and no shaping was relaxed. Poor service like that has me cancelling now. You've successfully managed to get me as irate as Mweb did, grats.

That's definitely not the intention, so I do apologise.

Can you PM me so I can check your shaping profile logs to see if you were not unshaped at all overnight?

 

[AfriMan]

7am on a Sunday and still throttled to 50% of what I am paying for. Nice.

As far as I can see shaping was active over the weekend, but noone would have been shaped that early according to the reports I have.

Did you confirm that you were shaped in Clientzone, or did your connection feel shaped?

 

[AfriMan]

Is YouTube being shaped?

I'm currently loading some videos in the background and my speed is capping at 30kbps.

If I run a speed test it instantly jumps to 450kbs. Pause speed test and back to 30kbps.

I can't even watch a newly loaded video for 10 seconds after the page has 'loaded'.

Definitely seems very fishy for a 4Mb line...

YouTube definitely isn't shaped but there seem to be a few reports of poor performance, and I also struggled a bit with Google Drive last night. From here in the office it seems perfect (probably becuase of our fibre connection).

YouTube seemed fine for me when I used it briefly though

 

[Quarkiee]

Just an update:

I have been experiencing slow speeds and packet loss for a couple of months now (Especially on google services like youtube, drive, etc.).

I PM'd the reps on this site and received no feedback. Subsequent to my PM, I logged a couple of faults through the Afrihost Clientzone - I tried to explained the problem and provided pingplotter data indicating the extreme amounts of packet loss I was experiencing. The data shows that the packet loss starts on/after the third hop on the MTN network. Here and there I experience some loss on the second hop, but 99% is from hop 3 onwards.

Naturally, Afrihost fed me the usual drivel about its not the Afrihost network (I think it is), please remove the adsl filter (I don't use one), you are currently 18% shaped - try using turbocharge (I have done this - still no change), my account has been checked and is fine (It is not fine), etc. I pointed out that all these solutions were already tried and tested without any luck, the issue still remains. I further requested that this be escalated to the "network specialists".

On 15 April 2015 I was told the issue had been escalated to the specialists - I have had no feedback on the problem since then.
I was further asked to run speed tests with different accounts - The issue as I described it was not about latency or speed, it was packet loss to specific websites. If the issue is a shaping issue on the Afrihost network (As it seems to be), these tests would be frivolous. To do these tests are utterly a waste of my time, and quite frankly pisses me off as Afrihost are not looking at the issue in front of them.

I have been running some tests with my VPN service recently and it is interesting to note that as soon as I connect with my VPN service all the previously experienced packet loss disappears. This leads me to believe that there is indeed an issue with the Afrihost shaping protocol/service and that my VPN in bypassing this.

I have subsequently cancelled my account with Afrihost as their support is too useless to sort out the issue.
I cannot afford to waste any more time sorting out an issue which I have no control over.

Good luck to the rest of you on this forum.

 

[AfriGuy]

Just an update:

I have been experiencing slow speeds and packet loss for a couple of months now (Especially on google services like youtube, drive, etc.).

I PM'd the reps on this site and received no feedback. Subsequent to my PM, I logged a couple of faults through the Afrihost Clientzone - I tried to explained the problem and provided pingplotter data indicating the extreme amounts of packet loss I was experiencing. The data shows that the packet loss starts on/after the third hop on the MTN network. Here and there I experience some loss on the second hop, but 99% is from hop 3 onwards.

Naturally, Afrihost fed me the usual drivel about its not the Afrihost network (I think it is), please remove the adsl filter (I don't use one), you are currently 18% shaped - try using turbocharge (I have done this - still no change), my account has been checked and is fine (It is not fine), etc. I pointed out that all these solutions were already tried and tested without any luck, the issue still remains. I further requested that this be escalated to the "network specialists".

On 15 April 2015 I was told the issue had been escalated to the specialists - I have had no feedback on the problem since then.
I was further asked to run speed tests with different accounts - The issue as I described it was not about latency or speed, it was packet loss to specific websites. If the issue is a shaping issue on the Afrihost network (As it seems to be), these tests would be frivolous. To do these tests are utterly a waste of my time, and quite frankly pisses me off as Afrihost are not looking at the issue in front of them.

I have been running some tests with my VPN service recently and it is interesting to note that as soon as I connect with my VPN service all the previously experienced packet loss disappears. This leads me to believe that there is indeed an issue with the Afrihost shaping protocol/service and that my VPN in bypassing this.

I have subsequently cancelled my account with Afrihost as their support is too useless to sort out the issue.
I cannot afford to waste any more time sorting out an issue which I have no control over.

Good luck to the rest of you on this forum.

Really sorry to hear this Which one of us did you PM? Not sure if the long weekend got in the way here.
In any case, if you don't have a reply could you FW me the info so I can have this followed up on for you?

 

[whatwhat]

Just an update:

I have been experiencing slow speeds and packet loss for a couple of months now (Especially on google services like youtube, drive, etc.).

I PM'd the reps on this site and received no feedback. Subsequent to my PM, I logged a couple of faults through the Afrihost Clientzone - I tried to explained the problem and provided pingplotter data indicating the extreme amounts of packet loss I was experiencing. The data shows that the packet loss starts on/after the third hop on the MTN network. Here and there I experience some loss on the second hop, but 99% is from hop 3 onwards.

Naturally, Afrihost fed me the usual drivel about its not the Afrihost network (I think it is), please remove the adsl filter (I don't use one), you are currently 18% shaped - try using turbocharge (I have done this - still no change), my account has been checked and is fine (It is not fine), etc. I pointed out that all these solutions were already tried and tested without any luck, the issue still remains. I further requested that this be escalated to the "network specialists".

On 15 April 2015 I was told the issue had been escalated to the specialists - I have had no feedback on the problem since then.
I was further asked to run speed tests with different accounts - The issue as I described it was not about latency or speed, it was packet loss to specific websites. If the issue is a shaping issue on the Afrihost network (As it seems to be), these tests would be frivolous. To do these tests are utterly a waste of my time, and quite frankly pisses me off as Afrihost are not looking at the issue in front of them.

I have been running some tests with my VPN service recently and it is interesting to note that as soon as I connect with my VPN service all the previously experienced packet loss disappears. This leads me to believe that there is indeed an issue with the Afrihost shaping protocol/service and that my VPN in bypassing this.

I have subsequently cancelled my account with Afrihost as their support is too useless to sort out the issue.
I cannot afford to waste any more time sorting out an issue which I have no control over.

Good luck to the rest of you on this forum.

That is most people are experiencing, they palm you off until you get tired and stop emailing them.

As much as Afri* will tell us how they are improving their support, it's been the same old excuses that's been going on even longer than their network issues.

They are South Africa's Bait and Switch ISP.

 

[Quarkiee]

Really sorry to hear this Which one of us did you PM? Not sure if the long weekend got in the way here.
In any case, if you don't have a reply could you FW me the info so I can have this followed up on for you?

Be my guest...
I made posts in this thread on the 14, 15 and 22 April 2015.
PM was sent to Afrigenie on 15 April 2015. Support tickets also opened on 15 April 2015.
No long weekends were involved over that period... Yet no feedback was received.

I would also suggest that you do not put the onus on your customers to investigate your potential network problems.
This is quite frankly embarrassing behaviour from a business perspective and a slap in the face to your customers who already pay you to do this... Just make support do their jobs!!

Anyway, I sincerely hope that you are able to sort out your internal issues.

 

[AfriGuy]

Be my guest...
I made posts in this thread on the 14, 15 and 22 April 2015.
PM was sent to Afrigenie on 15 April 2015. Support tickets also opened on 15 April 2015.
No long weekends were involved over that period... Yet no feedback was received.

I would also suggest that you do not put the onus on your customers to investigate your potential network problems.
This is quite frankly embarrassing behaviour from a business perspective and a slap in the face to your customers who already pay you to do this... Just make support do their jobs!!

Anyway, I sincerely hope that you are able to sort out your internal issues.

Sincerely sorry about the lack of feedback here
Would you mind FW'ing me any info you have in your inbox? I'll gladly take this further.

 

[Quarkiee]

Sincerely sorry about the lack of feedback here
Would you mind FW'ing me any info you have in your inbox? I'll gladly take this further.

Will send you everything when I am home this evening.