Afrihost Uncapped ADSL Feedback

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Afriman, thank you for that insight. The level of preparedness for an ISP moving partners is truly shocking. At least your management team owned up to the internal network operators and capacity shortcomings and is getting in the requisite expertise. That should have happened a long time back and if Gian and his team have any integrity they should apologise to all affected users.

It is not fair to apportion blame to Telkom's IPC provisioning as delays in that must be a known factor in the ISP industry and points to planning issues. I would guess that the move to MTN's network may have been too early?

I haven't tested much as I don't have the time to monitor an ISP's service for them, but at the moment they are seemingly using straight throttling. Whether it's usage based or otherwise is not yet sure, perhaps Afriman could elaborate on the technical measured currently in place and how they are being transitioned to a shaped QoS service?

@new_in_za2 : agreed on the L7 routing complexity. I shape my internal traffic (Mikrotik PCQ trees) so I am familiar with the concepts but L7 is a different beast. I have disabled all port based shaping on my internal network due to the havoc that the wildly varying throughput on the network causes. It's awesome though to prioritize traffic with L7 and shape down low priority traffic in favour of my Wife's YouTube.

It's awesome to see how user's activities are split evenly. When my wife and I stream YouTube I can see other traffic split the demand 2,3,4 ways fairly.
 
AfriMan said:
Forgive me if the analogy is overly simple, but hope it explains what we're talking about.

Last week there was no shaping whatsoever, and capped and uncapped accounts were contending for the same IPC without restrictions. When capped contention for throughput became an issue, we separated them IPC access, so that Uncapped activity would not affect capped users. Think of it as splitting the highway into two lanes, rather than having anyone drive anywhere that want to, capped users get to drive on their dedicated lane, with less traffic, and uncapped users are trying to get the fastest speed while contending with the amount of traffic in the lane dedicated to them. Now there are some users who are taking the lions share of the bandwidth, by running torrents 24/7 and P2P downloads. So they're basically driving like taxis! We need to get to the stage where we put the brakes on the irresponsible drivers so everyone gets a good speed, so think of shaping policies like traffic cops.

IPC basically means that we hop off Telkom's backhaul earlier, so that dedicated Afrihost traffic reaches our network much faster, rather than having to contend with all traffic with other ISP's. So one would expect that latency would be reduced by this.
Click to expand...

This might sound ignorant on my side with regards to the challenges ISP's in this county are facing in terms of infrastructure and geographical location, but I have had it with all these "excuses"...!

I have lived in many countries and never (except for Belgium) did I have to hear so much talk about shaping, throttling, national and international speeds, capped/uncapped and all that bull... I have never had so many issues with internet connectivity anywhere else except here in SA. As for many other countries ADSL is uncapped (at a fraction of the price) and it simply works!!

@Afrihost when my area in JNB was finally connected with ADSL lines, many users on MyBB recommended you as the preferred service provider with an "Uncapped" service offer. As someone using internet professionally 24/7, all I wanted was a stable connection and no more monitoring of gigs and all that crap.
Since I signed up with Afrihost my requirements were fulfilled. Yes uplaod speeds are slow (due to telkom), international pings not the greatest - and here and there there was some shaping going on during business hours. BUT most importantly (!!) the connection on IS network was stable!! Did I have problems at the beginning with Telkom networks, etc? Sure! But they were resolved and the overall support from AfriHost seemed great!

++++ for me AfriHost had a winning system here!

So why change? Partner with a service provider (MTN) that promises free calls which aren't, uncapped internet which is only "uncapped" at pre ISDN speeds and all the bull? Seriously? For me this sounds like those people that absolutely have to have Win8, even though Win7 or XP works just fine for them...

SA'n ISP's and AfriHost please man up!!!!!! You sell a product that says "uncapped at 4Mbps" - well then do it!! Away with all that bull of shaping, throttling, national and international speeds, capped/uncapped and fair use policies! I don't care if you did or did not shape connections since the 16th and now - conveniently after you have taken in all debit orders - change your whatever policies.. ! I'm not prepared to become a guinea pig in all your praised changes. And I'm not prepared to be patient until January when your services from MTN will "improve"...! Worst of all, you apply policy changes and network test, without prior informing your customers. Not that any of this should actually be my problem anyway, but if you tell in advance, at least we know to take our business elswere or make temp. provisions!

Neotel had gone a similar route with their customers and see where they are!

**** this is so sad to see...!! :(

EDIT
I would like to support my post with the latest speed test:
Download Speed: 512 kbps (64 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 405 kbps (50.6 KB/sec transfer rate)
Latency: 46 ms
Tue Nov 06 2012 15:50:10 GMT+0200

Horrific!
 
Last edited:
Timber_MG said:
Afriman, thank you for that insight. The level of preparedness for an ISP moving partners is truly shocking. At least your management team owned up to the internal network operators and capacity shortcomings and is getting in the requisite expertise. That should have happened a long time back and if Gian and his team have any integrity they should apologise to all affected users.

It is not fair to apportion blame to Telkom's IPC provisioning as delays in that must be a known factor in the ISP industry and points to planning issues. I would guess that the move to MTN's network may have been too early?

I haven't tested much as I don't have the time to monitor an ISP's service for them, but at the moment they are seemingly using straight throttling. Whether it's usage based or otherwise is not yet sure, perhaps Afriman could elaborate on the technical measured currently in place and how they are being transitioned to a shaped QoS service?

@new_in_za2 : agreed on the L7 routing complexity. I shape my internal traffic (Mikrotik PCQ trees) so I am familiar with the concepts but L7 is a different beast. I have disabled all port based shaping on my internal network due to the havoc that the wildly varying throughput on the network causes. It's awesome though to prioritize traffic with L7 and shape down low priority traffic in favour of my Wife's YouTube.

It's awesome to see how user's activities are split evenly. When my wife and I stream YouTube I can see other traffic split the demand 2,3,4 ways fairly.
Click to expand...

I don't think it's fair to attack Gian's personal integrity. It was his personal vision that created the ideal against which you are measuring Afrihost's performance. I'm personally not cool with that :(

I think it's easy to criticise, and more difficult to do. Unless anyone has been personally involved in an implementation of this size and magnitude, it's really just heresay, and more importantly not productive. If you really have constructive suggestions of how we can move forward, we're all ears and I'm happy to make sure that these suggestions fall on the right ears. But saying we should have done this or that differently, I'm not seeing how that helps where any of us are right now. We're certainly not going to be moving networks again in the foreseeable future, so I don't how it's useful.

Use / Don't Use - Just my opinion :)
 
So the pricks with the Ferrari's (10MB can now drive 120km/h instead of driving 160km/h) while the guy with his Ford Fiesta (4MB can now only drive 40km/h instead of 120km/h) Where is the logic in that. 10MB is still downloading +- 6mbps while 4mb goes about 1mbps...
 
Timber_MG said:
@new_in_za2 : agreed on the L7 routing complexity. I shape my internal traffic (Mikrotik PCQ trees) so I am familiar with the concepts but L7 is a different beast. I have disabled all port based shaping on my internal network due to the havoc that the wildly varying throughput on the network causes. It's awesome though to prioritize traffic with L7 and shape down low priority traffic in favour of my Wife's YouTube.

It's awesome to see how user's activities are split evenly. When my wife and I stream YouTube I can see other traffic split the demand 2,3,4 ways fairly.
Click to expand...

Networking is always interesting, imagine the complexity when you dealing with thousands of users...Are the problems IPC related, maybe backhaul or a faulty router, so many things have to work in unison and now throw Telkom into the mix and it will drive me to drink :-)


hilrap said:
SA'n ISP's and AfriHost please man up!!!!!! You sell a product that says "uncapped at 4Mbps" - well then do it!! Away with all that bull of shaping, throttling, national and international speeds, capped/uncapped and fair use policies! I don't care if you did or did not shape connections since the 16th and now - conveniently after you have taken in all debit orders - change your whatever policies.. ! I'm not prepared to become a guinea pig in all your praised changes. And I'm not prepared to be patient until January when your services from MTN will "improve"...! Worst of all, you apply policy changes and network test, without prior informing your customers. Not that any of this should actually be my problem anyway, but if you tell in advance, at least we know to take our business elswere or make temp. provisions!
Click to expand...

"uncapped at 4Mbps" no no it's "uncapped UP TO 4Mbps" big difference, but I do agree Afrihost has dropped the ball here...at lease make sure browsing is stable !
 
Use / Don't use. Well easy to say take our money and then the day after throttle you into Oblivion.
Well most people don't have to money to waste to pay for 2 uncapped accounts in 1 month as their budget don't allow for that.
I can't deal with this crap for an unspecified period and was forced to get another uncapped account at another ISP allthough my budget don't actually allow it. Now everyone paid for a crap service which they can't actually use.

Use / Don't use --- > Should actually read >> Try and use / To crap to use rather go read books or watch movie.

O yeah the other user did not attack Gian.

If I say Gian is a money hunger money stealing prick.. Then that would count as an attack on him. Not that I am saying he is one. :D
 
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TheBossMan said:
Use / Don't use. Well easy to say take our money and then the day after throttle you into Oblivion.
Well most people don't have to money to waste to pay for 2 uncapped accounts in 1 month as their budget don't allow for that.
I can't deal with this crap for an unspecified period and was forced to get another uncapped account at another ISP allthough my budget don't actually allow it. Now everyone paid for a crap service which they can't actually use.

Use / Don't use --- > Should actually read >> Try and use / To crap to use rather go read books or watch movie.
Click to expand...

Relax dude, they're working on it! :erm:
 
TheBossMan said:
Use / Don't use. Well easy to say take our money and then the day after throttle you into Oblivion.
Well most people don't have to money to waste to pay for 2 uncapped accounts in 1 month as their budget don't allow for that.
I can't deal with this crap for an unspecified period and was forced to get another uncapped account at another ISP allthough my budget don't actually allow it. Now everyone paid for a crap service which they can't actually use.

Use / Don't use --- > Should actually read >> Try and use / To crap to use rather go read books or watch movie.

O yeah the other user did not attack Gian.

If I say Gian is a money hunger money stealing prick.. Then that would count as an attack on him. Not that I am saying he is one. :D
Click to expand...

Gian is a leader and a visionary, just a quick google search will tell you the high esteem he holds in this industry. Glad you're not saying that, cos it would make you seem pretty stupid if you were. But luckily you're not saying that. :D
 
How do I know if my bundle cancellation application has gone through? It doesn't seem to have a response page, just takes me back the bundle page.
 
AfriMan said:
Gian is a leader and a visionary, just a quick google search will tell you the high esteem he holds in this industry. Glad you're not saying that, cos it would make you seem pretty stupid if you were. But luckily you're not saying that. :D
Click to expand...

Really? Since this mess started, I lost all faith in your CEO!
 
How can it be acceptable though just to throttle everyone to such low speeds on everything? I can understand shaping on news servers and stuff during peak hours, but you guys just throttle everything. How is anybody suppose to be happy when paying for 4Mb uncapped and getting this kind of speed

 
Today is the worst internet day ever
Here's my local results
Server: Durban
Download: 0,34 Mbps
Upload: 0,56 Mbps
Ping: 470 ms
And that's on a 10meg uncapped account
 
AfriMan said:
I don't think it's fair to attack Gian's personal integrity. It was his personal vision that created the ideal against which you are measuring Afrihost's performance. I'm personally not cool with that :(

I think it's easy to criticise, and more difficult to do. Unless anyone has been personally involved in an implementation of this size and magnitude, it's really just heresay, and more importantly not productive. If you really have constructive suggestions of how we can move forward, we're all ears and I'm happy to make sure that these suggestions fall on the right ears. But saying we should have done this or that differently, I'm not seeing how that helps where any of us are right now. We're certainly not going to be moving networks again in the foreseeable future, so I don't how it's useful.

Use / Don't Use - Just my opinion :)
Click to expand...

Afriman, I would expect an apology to all affected users from the figurehead or responsible management, nothing more and nothing less. If that were not the case it would indeed call into question the remaining integrity of your organization. Stop it with the spin already. It sounds like white noise political speech. You screwed up as an organization, deal with it with some measure of honour.

Tbh, even though I have seen two WISP setups in detail (both mikrotik router setups with only a couple of hundred users) and shape internet going to my internal network I shouldn't care as a consumer. The short of it is that service has been terrible again.

I am dead sure competing network teams are having a solid laugh at the expense of "SA's top rated ISP for two years running".
 
And so it begins... 4Mbps. Local Traffic Speed Test

Test conducted on Tue Nov 06 2012 17:30:36 GMT+0200 (South Africa Standard Time)

Download Speed: 1220 kbps (152.5 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 410 kbps (51.3 KB/sec transfer rate)
Latency: 48 ms

International

Test conducted on Tue Nov 06 2012 17:32:00 GMT+0200 (South Africa Standard Time)

Download Speed: 905 kbps (113.1 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 398 kbps (49.8 KB/sec transfer rate)
Latency: 265 ms
 
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