Afrihost Uncapped ADSL Feedback

[FapCop]

From what I can tell there is no problem on the network so its not like MTN has crappy infrastructure. Afrihost just implemented some VERY effective shaping. There is no problem to fix.

The purpose of shaping is to stop downloading. Based on all the posts it obviously does what it is supposed to do. Whoever did it should get a raise for a job well done.

The good news is if you cancel today the account will be shut down by the end of the month.

I partially agree with you there. I played COD4 last night while on a Skype call throughout the whole game for about 3 hours and experienced no lag, no latency spikes and no packet-loss at all. Not only that, youtube streamed at high quality without pausing for buffering, which has NEVER happened before.

 

[AfriMan]

I see a few people saying their torrents and nzb's are slow. As I said, this will be the case for a bit as we bring usage in line. But it's not a question of throttling, it's priority and best Quality of Service. We want to make sure that all real time services are running at full speeds (or best possible) and that flying torrents don't cost decent pings and low latency on gaming, which gets higher priority and it seems to be working in general now.

Rolling limits and thresholds apply to throttling, when we take your full throughput down due to usage. Applying quality of service across the network which prioritises protocols and torrents get slow as a result is a completely different thing.

The other thing to remember is that this is only applicable to Uncapped. If you really need that Linux distro right now at max line speed, capped accounts will give you any priority you want as it's not shaped.

 

[BANG_Mutha]

Afriman, plz dont forget to the answer the 2 questions I asked you in teh PM I sent you, thanks!

 

[BaronZA]

I see a few people saying their torrents and nzb's are slow. As I said, this will be the case for a bit as we bring usage in line. But it's not a question of throttling, it's priority and best Quality of Service. We want to make sure that all real time services are running at full speeds (or best possible) and that flying torrents don't cost decent pings and low latency on gaming, which gets higher priority and it seems to be working in general now.

Rolling limits and thresholds apply to throttling, when we take your full throughput down due to usage. Applying quality of service across the network which prioritises protocols and torrents get slow as a result is a completely different thing.

The other thing to remember is that this is only applicable to Uncapped. If you really need that Linux distro right now at max line speed, capped accounts will give you any priority you want as it's not shaped.

Ok shaping sure, but 24/7? Because my downloads go at 50kb/s when I get home and fire up my pc, and it stays at that till I go to bed at 1am? Is this normal, I thought it'd get better after business hours a little. I'm cool with torrents/p2p being shaped to near nothing during the day, but at night I'd like a little more than 25% of my possible speeds :/

 

[lucifir]

while I understand prioritisng "real time" services, it does not make sense that the line runs at a constant speed for hours on end. In a situation where things are being prioritised, there will be ups and downs, we are not getting that. So it seems a lot more like throttling than prioritisation.
that being said, I just want my account back to the pre-mtn days. Can you tell me how long that will take to achieve if ever??
I am tired of paying for a line that runs at 30% what I pay for.

 

[lupedelupe]

I dunno how you got that from what I said

Let's put it this way: based on the torrent of feedback here and what have been told on the phone we can safely say that your Cape Town-based customers are lacking in performance.

Concur?

Secondly, it is widely reported that "things will improve" when Cape Town (region) gets an IPC.

Correct?

 

[AfriMan]

Ok shaping sure, but 24/7? Because my downloads go at 50kb/s when I get home and fire up my pc, and it stays at that when I go to bed at 1am? Is this normal, I thought it'd get better after business hours a little. I'm cool with torrents/p2p being shaped to near nothing during the day, but at night I'd like a little more than 25% of my possible speeds :/

The idea is that we don't want torrents to push up contention with real time services. So we allow them to contend with a set amount of traffic capacity, and that capacity in increases as and when we can add additional capacity not used.

When we add additional capacity in CT and DBN, there will be a lot more possibility of allowing more traffic. For now we are looking for every possible way of allowing better bandwidth, and we'll slowly get there as we identify usage trends and patterns so that other services are not negatively affected.

 

[lucifir]

so what I am hearing is that there is not enough capacity, yet mtn was meant to provide more capacity!!
I'm sure the truth is there somewhere but I am confusing myself with the simple logic of more capacity = not as much capacity as we had working for everyone before

 

[Arthur]

The idea is that we don't want torrents to push up contention with real time services. So we allow them to contend with a set amount of traffic capacity, and that capacity in increases as and when we can add additional capacity not used.

When we add additional capacity in CT and DBN, there will be a lot more possibility of allowing more traffic. For now we are looking for every possible way of allowing better bandwidth, and we'll slowly get there as we identify usage trends and patterns so that other services are not negatively affected.

Please don't use my usage stats to set my pipe size.

I activated a new 10 meg uncapped business service on 1 Nov, but performance has been so poor it's hardly been used. We don't do torrents or gaming or movies. We're a responsible business with business-only use, but with GB size software downloads from time to time.

What I want is a steady reliable service at the data rates we signed up for. On the uncapped service we don't expect to do more than 40 to 50 gigs a month. But it needs to be fast and clean.

 

[ThEoFuLeS]

The Only thing now I can do is cry day and night, seems like we can't download at night or day. Coz 130kb/s(24/7) is not worth it at all.....
Its funny in a way too but sad :wtf:

 

[ainsin]

so what I am hearing is that there is not enough capacity, yet mtn was meant to provide more capacity!!
I'm sure the truth is there somewhere but I am confusing myself with the simple logic of more capacity = not as much capacity as we had working for everyone before

I think that is the general consensus. But apparently everyone is using more bandwidth than they ever did on IS (even with the shaping). I'm sure with a lot of people cancelling their accounts, there will be more bandwidth available to everyone in December. Hopefully.

 

[lucifir]

I think that is the general consensus. But apparently everyone is using more bandwidth than they ever did on IS (even with the shaping). I'm sure with a lot of people cancelling their accounts, there will be more bandwidth available to everyone in December. Hopefully.

find it hard to believe that suddenly after months, their user base decided to start using more bandwidth just as they moved to mtn!! and more than the supposed extra capacity that mtn provided!!
just does not seem like we being told the whole truth here!!

 

[AfriMan]

so what I am hearing is that there is not enough capacity, yet mtn was meant to provide more capacity!!
I'm sure the truth is there somewhere but I am confusing myself with the simple logic of more capacity = not as much capacity as we had working for everyone before

Yes we do have more capacity, but all that extra capacity was being eaten by downloads. We are still moving significantly more bandwidth per day than we did with IS, so it's not a question of capacity. It's a question of high contention from torrents, where other services are just drowned out by torrents requesting multiple thread priority. So we put torrents and nntp at the very bottom of the list, and clearly other services are also demanding more bandwidth than before, more people are on faster connections after Telkom's upgrades, that want to stream and make skype calls.

 

[AfriMan]

Please don't use my usage stats to set my pipe size.

I activated a new 10 meg uncapped business service on 1 Nov, but performance has been so poor it's hardly been used. We don't do torrents or gaming or movies. We're a responsible business with business-only use, but with GB size software downloads from time to time.

What I want is a steady reliable service at the data rates we signed up for. On the uncapped service we don't expect to do more than 40 to 50 gigs a month. But it needs to be fast and clean.

Business DSL has completely separate policies and should operate as a capped account (unshaped). If there performance is poor please PM me so I can have our team look into this immediately.

 

[bauer]

There's far to many vague answers concerned with downloading. I'm fine with the day time throttling but could you please give us a time table which states from which hours we can download at normal speeds. All you've told us is that after business hours line speeds will open up, so far all I've experienced in the last few days is normal dl speeds at 2 am-7am which in my opinion is far to late and way past business hours by anyone's definition, seeing as all html dls time out during the day its vital we know what time to stay up to in order to dl what we need.

 

[Davedes]

Getting solid speeds 4Mbps uncapped. This is more like it Afrihost.

 

[cheese_za]

Hey AfriMan,

I am really unhappy with what I am experiencing right now. Speed tests are brilliant, but actual through-put is beyond terrible. From just after midnight Tuesday morning till around 8pm Tuesday night (around 20hrs), I was only able to download 12gbs of data off the PS network before eventually deciding to put the ps3 off and give it a rest. Last night, I could not even watch youtube videos. Lets not even talk about the downloads from news servers. I have a 4mb uncapped line. (just in case you were wondering, none of these were running concurrently)

I signed up 2 family members to your network before this whole debacle and a third was waiting for their account to be cancelled with MWEB. Now I have daily calls about when is this going to get better, why did I sign them up with Afrihost and so on. Highly upsetting to have to go through this everyday.

Right now, it just seems that you guys moved to MTN to get better pricing and not actually a better network. It would seem that you guys either could not sustain your new ADSL pricing and decided to move or that the pricing came about because of the move to a cheaper network. This is the feeling I am getting of this whole situation.

How do ISPs work? Is the throttling/prioritization/contention and all those things mentioned to be at fault on the MTN network handled by the ISP or the network owner? If it is handled by the ISP, how could this not just be copied from the old IS network setup and then tweaked for the "better MTN network?" If it it handled by the network owner, why not have it in place before the move?

I haven't been following this thread for a few days so don't know what has been said in the last week or so, but how long do you think this is going to take? Once it is up and running, are we going to have equal to or better experience than when we were on the IS network? Don't you think it would be fair to rebate all the affected clients a certain percentage, lets say 50%, on their monthly accounts until this is resolved. This is really not fair. I am sure if people wanted to take this legally you guys would just fall back on the fact that it is an up to whatever speed you signed up for and you cannot guarantee a certain through-put. But that is not the right way to treat customers.

I will PM you my details as I know you will ask, but when will this be finalized? Right now I am sure everyone else is tired of we are doing our best to get it sorted. I am sure NASA could get a space shuttle built, launched to the moon and have it back on the ground in less time if they were in the crunch situation you guys currently find yourselves in.

So please, just give us an honest I don't know or 10 days or 3 months, whatever the case may be, so that we can decide whether to stick around or abandon ship. Also let us know whether you guys will rebate/discount or accounts until this is fixed.

Thanks

 

[cheese_za]

so what I am hearing is that there is not enough capacity, yet mtn was meant to provide more capacity!!
I'm sure the truth is there somewhere but I am confusing myself with the simple logic of more capacity = not as much capacity as we had working for everyone before

Amen brother!

Is there a satanistic version/translation/equal of Amen, lucifir?

 

[lupedelupe]

Let's put it this way: based on the torrent of feedback here and what have been told on the phone we can safely say that your Cape Town-based customers are lacking in performance.

Concur?

Secondly, it is widely reported that "things will improve" when Cape Town (region) gets an IPC.

Correct?

AfriMan, can we get straight answers to these simple questions please?

 

[ClintonExsteen]

Let's put it this way: based on the torrent of feedback here and what have been told on the phone we can safely say that your Cape Town-based customers are lacking in performance.

Concur?

Secondly, it is widely reported that "things will improve" when Cape Town (region) gets an IPC.

Correct?

We only lack performance on the D\L and pings, otherwise our performance is legendary... ;-)