Afrihost Uncapped ADSL Feedback

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Well, after a few lovely days of full line speed and an ironic tweet from AH today about how great the partnership with MTN is, I'm back to December joke levels. HTTP downloads currently under 1K. Any thoughts AH admin?
 
chronkiller said:
Yeah, cant get higher than 15kbps on my 2meg line :<
and my streams are also really slow....cant stream at 360P even
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Yeah same here, that is why I don't beleve Afrimans "story" as far as saying the throttling changes. As soon as you or I go over a certain threshold whatever that may be boom! 15kbs ............. solid .............. on a 200kbs line.
Boot up my capped and boom 200 kbs!
 
Muggins14 said:
Well, after a few lovely days of full line speed and an ironic tweet from AH today about how great the partnership with MTN is, I'm back to December joke levels. HTTP downloads currently under 1K. Any thoughts AH admin?
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Didn't you know that the holidays are over!
 
Demand for bandwidth has been exceptionally high over the last day or so, so we've haven't been able to give as much bandwidth to downloads as we have been over the holidays. Remember that businesses, schools, universities and the like are all coming from holidays, running overnight updates for software, anti-virus and all sorts of things.

Guys, there are no "stories". It boils down to available capacity. Over the holidays we proved that the network can deliver great speeds, and even now with slower downloads real time services should be running nicely. When we increase our network capacity, national backhaul on the network, and introduce the caching and CDN upgrades, the QoS management system will have that much more to work with and we should start seeing much better download speeds during the day, and we're hoping that off-peak is going to perform almost like capped unshaped.

I'm trying to get a firm commitment from Telkom via MTN on when the IPC upgrades are taking place, cos I am truly confident that once this happens, we'll all feel the difference immediately.
 
Yoh thanks for the update AfriMan :), heres hoping it is a mostly smooth process :p.

Had great speeds about 2 days ago but as long as i can watch some live cricket, i won't be here to complain :D.
 
AfriMan said:
Demand for bandwidth has been exceptionally high over the last day or so, so we've haven't been able to give as much bandwidth to downloads as we have been over the holidays. Remember that businesses, schools, universities and the like are all coming from holidays, running overnight updates for software, anti-virus and all sorts of things.
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So, what you saying is that because less people used your network over December, you had more bandwidth available to give to downloads.

AfriMan said:
Over the holidays we proved that the network can deliver great speeds,
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I am not sure you proved anything since you just said, you had less b/w demand over the festive season, and now that
"businesses, schools, universities and the like are all coming from holidays" your network is doing all sort of QoS stuff because of the higher demand to keep real time services running as a priority.

Or am I interpreting your latest message incorrectly, because you can't have it both ways as an answer.

Dec - less users (demand), more b/w available for downloads
Jan - more users (demand), less b/w available for downloads

Michael
 
@mikeygza, that's basically how Qos works! the lower the amount of users the higher the bandwidth available.

Thanks Afriman for keeping us all updated! its good to hear whats going on.
 
wez1007 said:
@mikeygza, that's basically how Qos works! the lower the amount of users the higher the bandwidth available.
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Fine, that bit I understand. So, if you have enough bandwidth available to care for all the users, you should not need to do any QoS stuff.

Oh well, seems to be all higher grade :)


Michael
 
mikeygza said:
Fine, that bit I understand. So, if you have enough bandwidth available to care for all the users, you should not need to do any QoS stuff.

Oh well, seems to be all higher grade :)


Michael
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Do some basic maths... ;)
AH currently has 8Gb/s of IPC.

Imagine 1000 10mb uncapped users, all downloading at once. And I'm sure that 1000 is a very low estimate.
Multiply, and you have 10Gb/s of demand ... :D
 
Sinbad said:
Multiply, and you have 10Gb/s of demand ... :D
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So the question really is, can they cater for the demand since it would be pretty pointless in taking on additional users if your network can't handle the demand. It is really great that they showed us how their network can perform where there are a lesser demand for bandwidth. Great speeds, but what is the point when it is only available during holidays.

Thanks for the explanation though :)

Michael
 
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sand_man said:
Over subscribed. Period.
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We had less IPC capacity before we moved to MTN, so this leads us to believe that shaping and throttling was a lot more severe previously than it is now. At least now with our QoS approach, all users have a premium real time experience. And when our full network is rolled out in the coming weeks, it just makes sense that pretty much everyone is going to have an excellent real time and downloading experience, as well as not being effected by demand outside of your local area (IPC).
 
mikeygza said:
So the question really is, can they cater for the demand since it would be pretty pointless in taking on additional users if your network can't handle the demand. It is really great that they showed us how their network can perform where there are a lesser demand for bandwidth. Great speeds, but what is the point when it is only available during holidays.

Thanks for the explanation though :)

Michael
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I totally agree!
 
mikeygza said:
So the question really is, can they cater for the demand since it would be pretty pointless in taking on additional users if your network can't handle the demand. It is really great that they showed us how their network can perform where there are a lesser demand for bandwidth. Great speeds, but what is the point when it is only available during holidays.

Thanks for the explanation though :)

Michael
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Well, no, it's not that simple.

Usage profiles differ wildly per user. For instance, my peak usage is around 1am. A business user's peak usage may be at 1pm. The two of us can "share" 10mb of IPC without impacting each other at all.
Some months I pull 300GB. Some months I pull 30... So how much data will I pull next month?

At the end of the day you kinda have to average everything out to plan your capacity properly. You only have historical data to judge demand peaks and levels from, and that history is not necessarily an indicator of tomorrow's demand. Then you get exceptional circumstances, like the first day back at school, when a lot of people come back from holiday and return to work - usage WILL skyrocket because of backlogs of emails that need to be downloaded... adobe/microsoft patches... "linux distros" that haven't been downloaded yet. You can't plan your capacity to handle that load at full speed, because the rest of the year you'll have unused capacity that you are paying for...
 
AfriMan said:
Demand for bandwidth has been exceptionally high over the last day or so, so we've haven't been able to give as much bandwidth to downloads as we have been over the holidays. Remember that businesses, schools, universities and the like are all coming from holidays, running overnight updates for software, anti-virus and all sorts of things.
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I'm not entirely sure universities will be using Afrihost Uncapped, no offence. Larger businesses probably won't either. If someone on either a university or business network needs a file for work/study, they can't afford to take the chance that they're going to wait forever for it to download on the AH network.

Besides, most universities run on their own custom networks (Stellenbosch runs on a 100mb network). The typical usage for a university network in a month goes far above and beyond anything Afrihost can ever hope to supply.
 
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