Afrihost Uncapped ADSL Feedback

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Paul Hjul said:
surely part of the reason why the nightowl problem is still running is because the norm is to benchmark uncapped accounts to line speed - so everybody on a 1 meg account is running on a 1 meg account so your maths is built around that - whereas if Telkom benched the 4 meg line as the norm and ISPs had clients in the 1,2,4 uncapped products you could simply bring out afterhours bolt-on products to escalate on the ratchet to the higher line speed.
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Not sure if I fully understand what you mean here, but we do want to incentivise clients to make use of the later hours. Not so much to make more money in terms of charging additional fees, but just to get better use out of the capacity. We pay for it anyway, so obviously we'd love to see clients getting as much bandwidth as they can. IF we can achieve that, we'll be happy to upgrade for more capacity.
 
basically what I am getting at is that currently Telkom effectively offers the following line options:
1,2,4,10,20,40
and charging for line rental is pegged to that; if Telkom however only offered 4,20,40 at a particular line rental it would make sense to have customers with 1 service climbing up to 4 during low demand times. Because of the structure of the market shaping is really the only tool available.
 
Paul Hjul said:
basically what I am getting at is that currently Telkom effectively offers the following line options:
1,2,4,10,20,40
and charging for line rental is pegged to that; if Telkom however only offered 4,20,40 at a particular line rental it would make sense to have customers with 1 service climbing up to 4 during low demand times. Because of the structure of the market shaping is really the only tool available.
Click to expand...

OK, I kinda get it now. That's more like throttled uncapped, which we really don't want to get into. If you've got a 4Mbps line, why should you be 1Mbps during the day? It might make sense if we were squeezing our capacity in certain ways to save bandwidth, but we're not looking at going that route.

Telkom are getting more sophisticated on their side though. In many cases now they've automated line regarded, so that there is no need for technicians to make physical changes on exchanges in a lot of cases. But still not sure it can be done fast enough, if that's what you were thinking.

But what would be a good way to incentivise people to download after hours? I'm pretty open to ideas that I can take to management (and take credit for) :)
 
Well my point is that throttling in SA is evil because it is a way of bulldusting about actual speeds in reality I have throttled my own speed by having a line speed that is higher than the uncapped package I am using. I do this because I sometimes do actually need a damn fast line and I use my 20gigs capped from Telkom and know if I need more I can always buy well priced capped data from Afrihost - the point is I seldom go to full speed after hours. So while I will gladly chow as much as I can after hours I am locked down to 1 meg and the math just doesn't support paying an extra R200 to go to 4 meg uncapped.

I don't know how many customers you have who have a distinction between their line speed and uncapped account speed - and I suspect it to be pretty damn low - but with VDSL coming in I imagine you will have a lot more customers who will have 20 meg line and an 8 or 10 meg uncapped account and therefore having a cheap monthly +Night product would be awesome so basically for R50 a person with a 1 meg uncapped account would get 4 megs after hours (a quarter of the current price difference on the home side). It is an even bigger saving when you look at somebody running with 10 meg package on a 40 meg VDSL line. Essentially you can try to get customers into a system of pushing the limits of available internet and gradually upgrading their products.
 
AfriMan said:
OK, I kinda get it now. That's more like throttled uncapped, which we really don't want to get into. If you've got a 4Mbps line, why should you be 1Mbps during the day? It might make sense if we were squeezing our capacity in certain ways to save bandwidth, but we're not looking at going that route.

Telkom are getting more sophisticated on their side though. In many cases now they've automated line regarded, so that there is no need for technicians to make physical changes on exchanges in a lot of cases. But still not sure it can be done fast enough, if that's what you were thinking.

But what would be a good way to incentivise people to download after hours? I'm pretty open to ideas that I can take to management (and take credit for) :)
Click to expand...

I have a brilliant (or possibly catastrophic) idea. Why doesn't Afrihost switch off its shaping tool for just two days. Constant, unshaping, for the entire country. Then you will be able to see what the actual usage and performance hits the clients get if you unshape all traffic.

I mean, it is said that shaping is only applied once the bandwidth being put through is near to hitting the available capacity... Well, what were to happen if we reached that capacity? I would just like to see the performance hit that would take place if everyone was unshaped.

Please please please (Yes, i repeated it) try see if management will listen to this. How much can it hurt if you give all customers a week warning saying for two nights you will be unshaping bandwidth and testing how well the IPC's and fibre system handles the situation. I, for one, would be perfectly happy for this to happen.

I don't know about the rest of you, just a thought ;)
 
AfriMan said:
But what would be a good way to incentivise people to download after hours? I'm pretty open to ideas that I can take to management (and take credit for) :)
Click to expand...

Give people a time when the shaping tool will be switched off - and say Between (for e.g.) 20:30 and 6:00, the shaping tool will be in standby mode, meaning you will get your full line speed blah blah blah.

I schedule my downloads to only download after 10:00pm, as I know between 12ish and morning, everyone is usually unshaped, and I will likely get my full line speed.

Just (another) thought
 
Zertop said:
I have a brilliant (or possibly catastrophic) idea. Why doesn't Afrihost switch off its shaping tool for just two days. Constant, unshaping, for the entire country. Then you will be able to see what the actual usage and performance hits the clients get if you unshape all traffic.
Click to expand...

This was already done some months ago, after there was some major cable issue, they went un-shaped for about 2 weeks, and then adjusted the shaping policies they use now.
 
jannier said:
This was already done some months ago, after there was some major cable issue, they went un-shaped for about 2 weeks, and then adjusted the shaping policies they use now.
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Good point, I do remember that, even though I wasn't on afrihost at the time. During this time, did you notice any connection deterioration?
 
Anyone else getting particularly low transfer speeds the last couple of days. I'm getting between 50-60KBps with torrents on my 2mb uncapped account, where I would usually get well over 190KBps consistently. Anything broken somewhere? HTTP downloads are just as horrible.
 
srothman said:
Anyone else getting particularly low transfer speeds the last couple of days. I'm getting between 50-60KBps with torrents on my 2mb uncapped account, where I would usually get well over 190KBps consistently. Anything broken somewhere? HTTP downloads are just as horrible.
Click to expand...

Look in your clientzone the new 2.0 version and see what shaping is applied to your account.
If you search around this post it is discussed on a daily basis.
 
Ah, ok. Very cool. I've only ever used the "old "CZ, but this is pretty cool. No shaping is applied... guess it's just ones of those weekends. Will check it out in the week and escalate it if need be.

Thanks
 
srothman said:
Anyone else getting particularly low transfer speeds the last couple of days. I'm getting between 50-60KBps with torrents on my 2mb uncapped account, where I would usually get well over 190KBps consistently. Anything broken somewhere? HTTP downloads are just as horrible.
Click to expand...

I'm on 2mb uncapped, been unshaped since friday. Torrents at 200kbps and streaming perfect
 
Paul Hjul said:
Well my point is that throttling in SA is evil because it is a way of bulldusting about actual speeds in reality I have throttled my own speed by having a line speed that is higher than the uncapped package I am using. I do this because I sometimes do actually need a damn fast line and I use my 20gigs capped from Telkom and know if I need more I can always buy well priced capped data from Afrihost - the point is I seldom go to full speed after hours. So while I will gladly chow as much as I can after hours I am locked down to 1 meg and the math just doesn't support paying an extra R200 to go to 4 meg uncapped.

I don't know how many customers you have who have a distinction between their line speed and uncapped account speed - and I suspect it to be pretty damn low - but with VDSL coming in I imagine you will have a lot more customers who will have 20 meg line and an 8 or 10 meg uncapped account and therefore having a cheap monthly +Night product would be awesome so basically for R50 a person with a 1 meg uncapped account would get 4 megs after hours (a quarter of the current price difference on the home side). It is an even bigger saving when you look at somebody running with 10 meg package on a 40 meg VDSL line. Essentially you can try to get customers into a system of pushing the limits of available internet and gradually upgrading their products.
Click to expand...

Yeah, the number of clients with mismatched bundles is fairly low. But I see the idea here now, and I think it makes a lot of sense. Save people money during the day for the bandwidth they actually need and then give them some free reign after hours to max out their line.

Definitely a good idea I can take credit for ;)
 
jannier said:
Look in your clientzone the new 2.0 version and see what shaping is applied to your account.
If you search around this post it is discussed on a daily basis.
Click to expand...

Thanks for explaining that. Love that guys here are helping each other out with info.

Does this mean that I can go fishing now? ;)
 
Zertop said:
I have a brilliant (or possibly catastrophic) idea. Why doesn't Afrihost switch off its shaping tool for just two days. Constant, unshaping, for the entire country. Then you will be able to see what the actual usage and performance hits the clients get if you unshape all traffic.

I mean, it is said that shaping is only applied once the bandwidth being put through is near to hitting the available capacity... Well, what were to happen if we reached that capacity? I would just like to see the performance hit that would take place if everyone was unshaped.

Please please please (Yes, i repeated it) try see if management will listen to this. How much can it hurt if you give all customers a week warning saying for two nights you will be unshaping bandwidth and testing how well the IPC's and fibre system handles the situation. I, for one, would be perfectly happy for this to happen.

I don't know about the rest of you, just a thought ;)
Click to expand...

We have a hard and soft ceiling on each IPC when it reaches capacity. Shaping starts to apply when we approach the soft ceiling, so even if we burst through, we're still okay in terms of overall performance.

If we ever hit the hard ceiling, we're basically at internet armageddon. Latencies go through the roof and throughput is abysmal for everyone.

Our old account manager used to say there will never be enough bandwidth! I'm not so sure that is true though. North and East have been unshaped for ages, with only occasional adjustments here and there that hardly register. The South on the other, well ... but it's definitely not a question of not enough capacity, it's usage patterns. If we spread out the max usage over a longer period, there'd be capacity to spare.
 
srothman said:
Anyone else getting particularly low transfer speeds the last couple of days. I'm getting between 50-60KBps with torrents on my 2mb uncapped account, where I would usually get well over 190KBps consistently. Anything broken somewhere? HTTP downloads are just as horrible.
Click to expand...

Have you checked your shaping settings in the new ClientZone?

Drop me a PM so I can check for you :(
 
So I'm looking for a new Broadband provider and Afrihost caught my eye - friend of mine has a 2Mbps account and couldn't be happier, however one thing I'm hung up about is latency for online game - specifically WoW, can anybody give any feedback on that?

On Mweb I get around 160-180ms.
 
IANAGamer

Afrihost has\had a gamer orientated product called Afrigamer (I can't seek to find the product sheet so checking to see if it has been discontinued and rolled into their ordinary capped product) and have Turbocharge which you get a certain length of time of unshaped at your election and may buy more (on a 2Mbps account you are looking at R29 for 4 hours) which would be usable for some of the games which are iffy on connections.
 
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