Afrihost Uncapped ADSL Feedback

[Sinbad]

What exactly is excessive ?

Is it watching legit 720p streams ?
Is it downloading a mmo client of 25 gb ?
Is it using steam ?
Is it getting digital msdn discs ?

I'm curious because apart from the linux isos there is other rather good usage of a fast line.

Well, under the IS infrastructure there were thresholds based on the account speed/size... And when you exceeded said threshold, your overall throughput was throttled to say 60% of your account speed... and exceed another one and it drops further... And they were pretty high - over 400GB on a 10mb account...?

 

[TheBossMan]

LOL I wonder how many pages this thread would have been with all the deleted posts

 

[AfriMan]

Afriman IMHO you should go back to thresholds. Throttle people who use excessive bandwidth. Free reign to those who don't.

Granted you couldn't do this straight after the move because you reset all the counters... but surely you now have enough data to implement the rolling windows again?

After all, the reason I went for the 10mb account, despite having a 6mb line, is to gain the higher thresholds allowed to that account...

Bandwidth usage must come into account, and also how that bandwidth is used. Ideally, we want to still give good service to the heavy downloaders so they can still browse and stream - but once they are classified as heavy users, torrents and NZB's need to be managed. At the moment we are still trying to look at a fair balance so that ADSL doesn't become unusable. IS Uncapped users might remember that once you hit a one star rating, it as pretty much dead.

 

[Necuno]

Well, under the IS infrastructure there were thresholds based on the account speed/size... And when you exceeded said threshold, your overall throughput was throttled to say 60% of your account speed... and exceed another one and it drops further... And they were pretty high - over 400GB on a 10mb account...?

Well my usage patterns normally is anything from 50 up to 300gb a month depending on the mix of normal, linux isos and lighting. All I really want is to download what I want when I want, I don't need to stream 24.7 but sometimes I might need 5 hrs or little more...

Bandwidth usage must come into account, and also how that bandwidth is used. Ideally, we want to still give good service to the heavy downloaders so they can still browse and stream - but once they are classified as heavy users, torrents and NZB's need to be managed. At the moment we are still trying to look at a fair balance so that ADSL doesn't become unusable. IS Uncapped users might remember that once you hit a one star rating, it as pretty much dead.

So if steam has a sale in month A and I go crazy, Month B would be bad ? (hehe or there is a sudden surge of Linus ISOs)

 

[Sinbad]

Bandwidth usage must come into account, and also how that bandwidth is used. Ideally, we want to still give good service to the heavy downloaders so they can still browse and stream - but once they are classified as heavy users, torrents and NZB's need to be managed. At the moment we are still trying to look at a fair balance so that ADSL doesn't become unusable. IS Uncapped users might remember that once you hit a one star rating, it as pretty much dead.

I hear you. However, I knew that if I used too much, I would suffer for 30 days, and so I managed my consumption to avoid that issue. If I abuse the network, then for sure, I would EXPECT my realtime services to suffer. However, if I haven't downloaded 3 internets in the last month, I also expect my downloads to rock line speed.... I felt that the past regime was fair.
The new one sounds like a perfect world, but IMHO you need to combine QoS with usage profile. Don't throttle someone who's only downloaded 10GB in the last 30 days, regardless of protocol... That's not fair.

 

[AfriMan]

What exactly is excessive ?

Is it watching legit 720p streams ?
Is it downloading a mmo client of 25 gb ?
Is it using steam ?
Is it getting digital msdn discs ?

I'm curious because apart from the linux isos there is other rather good usage of a fast line.

I think we're mainly concerned with the amount of bandwidth being accessed from month to month. Obviously downloads are the concern, you simply can't kill the network with YouTube, Skype or RDP. Even guys using FTP are not moving that amount of data. Problem has always been torrents and P2P. You also need to decide which is the right product for you, Capped, Uncapped or Unshaped Uncapped (Business DSL). With our current pricing, they're all pretty reasonable depending on your needs.

 

[The_Unbeliever]

At the moment we are still trying to look at a fair balance so that ADSL doesn't become unusable. IS Uncapped users might remember that once you hit a one star rating, it as pretty much dead.

Would love it should a certain user get a one-star rating on Plugg

 

[AfriMan]

I hear you. However, I knew that if I used too much, I would suffer for 30 days, and so I managed my consumption to avoid that issue. If I abuse the network, then for sure, I would EXPECT my realtime services to suffer. However, if I haven't downloaded 3 internets in the last month, I also expect my downloads to rock line speed.... I felt that the past regime was fair.
The new one sounds like a perfect world, but IMHO you need to combine QoS with usage profile. Don't throttle someone who's only downloaded 10GB in the last 30 days, regardless of protocol... That's not fair.

Totally hear you, and am personally in agreement. I know this is exactly where the focus is now, and we'll hopefully get that right today or in the nest few days.

 

[Sinbad]

Totally hear you, and am personally in agreement. I know this is exactly where the focus is now, and we'll hopefully get that right today or in the nest few days.

That would be absolutely awesome! Good luck!

 

[HapticSimian]

Just to give everyone an update, we know that for quite a few downloads are not as great as we would all like. We have our team focussed on this, and we're looking at every angle to give more bandwidth to downloads without crashing the network. The problem from the start has been that when downloads go out control and latencies start spiking with increased packet loss. That's when gaming and skyping, even browsing go bananas. We just can't risk that!!

We are trying to find the best way of really tightening the screws on the heavy downloaders and torrent users, and to be more forgiving to the guys only moving small amounts of bandwidth but on the same services. Just remember that it's not about thresholds any more, it's about how we are implementing QoS across the network.

I have to echo Sinbad's sentiments below:

Afriman IMHO you should go back to thresholds. Throttle people who use excessive bandwidth. Free reign to those who don't.

Granted you couldn't do this straight after the move because you reset all the counters... but surely you now have enough data to implement the rolling windows again?

After all, the reason I went for the 10mb account, despite having a 6mb line, is to gain the higher thresholds allowed to that account...

Unless your QoS can distinguish users on an individual level - and I don't see how they can - how are we ever not going to have a degraded experience?

You'll be able to see from my usage history that I hardly try to download the internet, but I do expect to have speeds of roughly 4mb/s available to me regardless of what I happen to be doing. Within reason of course, but I don't think I appreciate the nett effect of what you're currently attempting to do. If I want to download a gigabyte Linux distro, I want to do it as quickly as possible.

Looking back, say, 6 months there was only 1 serious criticism that could be levelled against your IS uncapped offering: slightly sucky latency. Now, if the cure for that implies poor speeds 70% of the time on anything other than VOIP and gaming I'd personally rather sacrifice a couple of milliseconds on ping.

*edit*

I see the conversation's moved on a bit...

 

[AfriMan]

Well my usage patterns normally is anything from 50 up to 300gb a month depending on the mix of normal, linux isos and lighting. All I really want is to download what I want when I want, I don't need to stream 24.7 but sometimes I might need 5 hrs or little more...



So if steam has a sale in month A and I go crazy, Month B would be bad ? (hehe or there is a sudden surge of Linus ISOs)

We just want it to be fair. If you go nuts and download 400GB in a week (if that's even possible) - we don't want your internet to be so dead you have to go and buy a capped account or sign up elsewhere. We still want your internet to be awesome, and just downloads will be less than. If you've pulled the ring out of it this month, I think we all agree it sounds fair and most would not complain, but wouldn't it be great if you still had a sweet connection for those 30 days of punishment, instead of trying to squeeze a marshmallow through a coin slot.

 

[Sinbad]

I have to echo Sinbad's sentiments below:



Unless your QoS can distinguish users on an individual level - and I don't see how they can - how are we ever not going to have a degraded experience?

Should be fairly do-able - QoS should be applicable per IP address as well as per port/service - so you can place users into different tiers based on usage...?

 

[Necuno]

We just want it to be fair. If you go nuts and download 400GB in a week (if that's even possible) - we don't want your internet to be so dead you have to go and buy a capped account or sign up elsewhere. We still want your internet to be awesome, and just downloads will be less than. If you've pulled the ring out of it this month, I think we all agree it sounds fair and most would not complain, but wouldn't it be great if you still had a sweet connection for those 30 days of punishment, instead of trying to squeeze a marshmallow through a coin slot.

I hear you and agree, I'm actually just really curious about all of this.

LOOOL. I think a bundled deal with 10MBS would be *erm* funny:

2x 2 TB HDD + 10MBS now for cheap !!!

:edit
On mweb I've done about 2TB over period of 12 months....

 

[ClintonExsteen]

Below is my usage so fart for November but my speeds still suck, actually this was quite good today

Total Bandwidth Used for November:12.014 GB

Test conducted on 20 November 2012 13:50
Download Speed: 795 kbps (99.4 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 406 kbps (50.8 KB/sec transfer rate)
Latency: 231 ms

Tracing route to eu.battle.net [80.239.186.40]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.168.0.1
2 9 ms 8 ms 9 ms 105-236-8-65-esr-lo.mtnbusiness.co.za [105.236.8.65]
3 32 ms 33 ms 32 ms ipc-recieve-rb-2a.za.mtnbusiness.net [41.181.178.65]
4 33 ms 33 ms 33 ms rb-dca-2.za--rb-cr-1.za-a.mtnns.net [196.44.31.120]
5 34 ms 35 ms 37 ms jh-cr-1.za--rb-cr-2.za.mtnns.net [196.44.0.42]
6 80 ms 79 ms 60 ms qux-jh-dca-2.za-b.za.mtnbusiness.net [41.181.165.115]
7 206 ms 209 ms 279 ms xe-4-1-0.edge5.Amsterdam1.Level3.net [212.72.41.89]
8 214 ms 219 ms 204 ms 4.69.162.137
9 216 ms 215 ms 215 ms ae-1-51.edge4.Amsterdam1.Level3.net [4.69.139.138]
10 205 ms 208 ms 219 ms Telia-level3-10g.Amsterdam1.level3.net [4.68.62.98]
11 207 ms 208 ms 207 ms adm-bb3-link.telia.net [80.91.253.212]
12 227 ms 227 ms 228 ms prs-bb2-link.telia.net [80.91.245.221]
13 215 ms 212 ms 212 ms prs-b8-link.telia.net [213.155.131.19]

so why are the speeds so low, no exchange congestion, so now what?
yes it says fart, cos that how it is blowing now

 

[bradlesliect]

Should be fairly do-able - QoS should be applicable per IP address as well as per port/service - so you can place users into different tiers based on usage...?

I don't this is possible. Remember your ADSL internet access does not give you static IP addresses so the access-list for QoS cannot be applied to that level. However having said that, any ISP can apply it on the gateway routers(entry points) where a pool if IP addresses may have been assigned. Why can they do this? The "culprits" can only access the network via those routers based on their geographical area. With ADSL you cannot choose which route your ADSL interface will connect unless its a static config. Also, you cannot and will not know which port you connect to.

The downside aof applying QoS is that its a global access-list applied to an a router interface and affects EVERYONE (good or bad) that may connect to that interface when connecting.

So...in a nutshell...although the intention may be good it may do more harm than good unfortunately.

There is NO ISP out there that guarantee your connection speed. The T&C ALWAYS states "guarantee a connection speed of UP TO X"...this doesn't mean you'll get it all the time. Therefore it makes good business sense, business rules and best practice to rather try and do right by the masses and ensure you are able to serve the entire customer base than just a few of us, me included, that there is connection at ALL times. When we get timeouts, even when going to websites, it means the network is overloaded and this is when the network guys start applying those access-lists based on the amount of complaints received.

Another thing to bear in mind is that when Telkom backbone links go down, the ISP has to introduce a VERY QUICK backup / alternate to minimise the downtime to all their customers. This also involves an access-list applied giving higher priority to traffic protocols such as HTTP, POP, FTP, SMTP and the rest then fall lower on the priority list.

...just saying...

 

[Sinbad]

Can the servcer that allocates the IP address not also apply a QoS to said address at the same time?

 

[bradlesliect]

As I am typing this I am unable to properly open websites and failing to download even a 400kb file. When I download, my nzb's and torrents are shaped to 1mb even though I am paying for a 4mb account.

We are sitting here with a situation which resembles a supplier promising a service and a consumer paying for that service while the supplier is not delivering said service.

I have now come to the conclusion that Afrihost/Axxess are violating the requirements for a service by a supplier as set out in the Consumer Protection Act, even if they try to cover their shaping under fair use policy.

We are paying for something we are not receiving.

This is cause for an action before the Consumer tribunal and then later court if it continues to that point.

I am employed at a law firm and will most likely have the resources to start this action, I am currently doing my research on exactly what it is that we need to request from the tribunal to rectify this ridiculous situation.

Afrihost/Axxess are essentially taking, without repercussion, consumer's money at the moment and getting away with it because not everyone has left the sinking ship. This is not right.

I will post again once I have finished researching.

Not to be a stick in the mud or anything but me thoughts on this is that you may need to slow your roll here a bit before legal action is considered. Why? There is NO ISP and/or Network Provider out there, including Telscum that GUARANTEES you connection speed. The T&C is clear in that it states "that you are guaranteed a speed of up to X". This does not mean it can be expected 24/7. For this there is a HIGHER premium and its normally applied to "A-Grade" customers like Corporates who have static routes and IP addies to the Provider(s) network.

What the Provider does guarantee is that you will have connection all the time? Why? They have contigency plans in place which caters for backup routes in the event of Telkom network failures, routers die, routing not work and all traffic has to be re-routed.

The ISP's primary focuse is to ensure that you have access to the internet and when that doesn't happen their network guys need to investigate and ensure that connectivity is restored as soon as it is possible. Downtime affects all businesses.

Having said that, I do however think that the concept of "oversell ratio" should seriously be looked at because it has a HUGE effect on all consumers. When I was still a 2nd level network engineer for an ISP, we had to ensure that traffic such as HTTP, POP, SMTP, FTP are given higher priority and there traffic then follow. We also applied access lists on gateway(entry points) routers to ensure that this traffic is allowed through first. When the bottleneck and congestion subsides, these access-lists are then removed allowing all traffic through, irrespective of what it is.

I doubt whether the consumer tribunal would really take a look at this unless we(consumers) can prove price-fixing but we need to have HARD evidence to prove this which might be a better route to take.

...just my thoughts.

 

[bradlesliect]

Can the servcer that allocates the IP address not also apply a QoS to said address at the same time?

Not sure I understand your question?

 

[Sinbad]

Not sure I understand your question?

Well, given the ability for whatever handles the authentication/IP allocation etc (radius?) to also say "this is a 4mb account" to something that then manages the bandwidth, surely as part of that process, QoS tiers/levels/whatever can ALSO be applied at individual account level?

 

[roadcat]

The new one sounds like a perfect world, but IMHO you need to combine QoS with usage profile. Don't throttle someone who's only downloaded 10GB in the last 30 days, regardless of protocol... That's not fair.

Agreed 110% with this, you can't discriminate against a user who does 10Gb a month on 10mb line, but is severely constrained on downloads, P2P and torrents. That is the issue with general QoS implementations.

Surely the QoS can use the line credentials to do this? i.e. [email protected]. This does not change like the IP addresses would.