Gah! So, I've been giving Afrihost support the benefit of the doubt after much bashing I've heard on here. It really is... pointless, if your problem isn't completely rudimentary. It also really doesn't help that someone new takes over each time; there's no continuity, and it seems like the new guys don't really read what's been said previously, or at least, don't address it. Here's a summary of my interaction since 4th Nov:
Me: Hi, I have Afrihost 2 Mbps uncapped package, getting appalling speeds in evenings and weekends since 1st/2nd Nov.
AH: I see you have port errors. Please phone Telkom to recreate your ports.
Me: OK, I've done that; restarted router, but no difference.
AH: We still can't rule out Telkom. Use the Telkom guest account and do a speedtest on saix.net.
Me: Hm, interesting; it appears that I'm getting the same sort of behaviour with the Telkom account. Oh, by the way, here's a few traceroutes, if it's useful at all at this stage. Is there anything I can do before phoning Telkom? Look at specific router settings, anything?
<Silence for more than a day and a half. I ask AfriMan to nudge the support guys to get back to dealing with this.>
AH: We made some changes to the network. Please restart your router. Also, please do some traceroutes and send them to us.
Me: OK, restarted; same deal. Here are the traceroutes. Help?
AH: We're fiddling with some settings. Look here:
http://www.afrihost.com/site/network_status.
Ticket closed.
Which has sorted out
absolutely nothing. I haven't had any feedback on the speedtest and traceroute results I've sent them. There's been no explanation of why the Telkom guest account performs similarly (which also indicates that it may not be the standard network issue they're dealing with at the mo), or what could be done to address the it. No further diagnostics; nothing.
In the meantime, I phoned Telkom and explained my situation to them; the only idea they could come up with was that they were working on upgrades until the end of November. This doesn't make sense to me, because my exchange was upgraded very early on (hence my 2 Mbps). I have no idea what the problem is, and Afrihost doesn't seem too keen on helping me find out... :/