Afrihost Uncapped ADSL Feedback

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Fail yet again.....

Pinging news24.com [41.86.110.143] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 41.86.110.143: bytes=32 time=279ms TTL=113
Reply from 41.86.110.143: bytes=32 time=276ms TTL=113
Reply from 41.86.110.143: bytes=32 time=279ms TTL=113
Reply from 41.86.110.143: bytes=32 time=287ms TTL=113

Ping statistics for 41.86.110.143:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 276ms, Maximum = 287ms, Average = 280ms

What is going on? Seriously?

1 1 ms 1 ms 3 ms login.router [10.0.0.2]
2 17 ms 17 ms 17 ms 105-236-9-129-esr-lo.mtnbusiness.co.za [105.236.9.129]
3 234 ms 235 ms 233 ms ipc-recieve-jh-2a.za.mtnbusiness.net [41.181.178.17]

Why is the 3rd thing so high??? I'm a web designer, and all my sites are hosted at the MWEB datacentre, and now everything is slow as slow can be.... Seriously, Afrihost, catch a wake up.
All local sites I ping are around 280ms - 300ms
 
Last edited:
timmie23 said:
Why is the 3rd thing so high??? I'm a web designer, and all my sites are hosted at the MWEB datacentre, and now everything is slow as slow can be.... Seriously, Afrihost, catch a wake up.
All local sites I ping are around 280ms - 300ms
Click to expand...

Why are you not with MWeb then?
 
timmie23 said:
I already cancelled to go back to MWEB.
AfriHost was awesome before, now it is more a pain than anything else.
Click to expand...

Snap. I think they see this type of thing often as the account etc isn't closed after you cancel, they just re-enable it.
 
AfriMan said:
We know things have been up and down this morning. So without going into the merits, we know about the problem and we are working on this.

Let me rather give you an idea of what is being done. We have MTN's network people working in our offices now, as well as some guys from a 3rd party company who are helping QA the shaping and QoS - they have experience in implementing this for other ISP's. We have a think tank set up in our boardroom, and this is being overseen by our directors, who are demanding a better result. We are also getting input from our Dev team, and our General manager who manages the support channels and has a good grasp of what the current complaints relate to. We have also engaged an external company, based in JHB and CT, who are now running intensive diagnostics on the network. they are running capped and uncapped accounts alongside our major competitors and analyzing the differences in performance, including latencies and QoS, and this is being fed back into the team.

As I've said before, no expense is being spared to address this problem, and to get things to where they should be. We have the full backing of MTN to make the changes we need to the network, and policies are being implemented and adjusted in real time.

Guys, Gian and the other directors are not going to stick us with a lemon network! They have confidence that this will be resolved, and as I said the message is clear from them that this needs to be resolved as top priority - no matter what the cost! Having said that, it's an ongoing process. I expect there will be ups and downs over the next few days of trial and error, but remember we were on a completely unshaped network since the 16th, as we didn't want to go straight into this process.
Click to expand...

I really appreciate the response.
What I would like to know however, is what was changed since this time last week?
Before then everything was working as it should, and since then everything has gone pear-shaped.

I don't know much about the technical jargon, so I have no idea what a 3rd party company is doing to help QA with QoS, nor do I know what it means to have IPC in Cape Town, or not have it anywhere else.

What I do know is that since this time last week the service that I am paying for, is not what I am receiving.
It also seems that I am being severely throttled after hours. Where I am on a 2Mbps line, I am on something less than a 1Mbps line.
Where I have decent latency during the day for the most part, I suddenly have extremely high latency issues.
I reside in Centurion, yet I suddenly find that Speedtest thinks I am in London.
Lastly, I have mailed support@afrihost and accounts@afrihost, but have as yet not received a reply.
 
Cancelled our 50 GB capped account. Tired of ADSL ISP's. Going for a synchronise service ...
 
I spoke to the Help Desk during lunchtime. The agent's feedback was that things should improve considerably by the end of the (business) day today ...

Speed Test today at 12h32:
Download: 1.36Mb/s
Upload: 0.44Mb/s
Ping: 260ms
Server: Sandton

Line syncs at 6143/635.

My Afrihost packge: 10Mb/s Business Uncapped.
 
new_in_za2 said:
If no expense is being spared, you could, you know, add enough capacity to your network to handle the amount of traffic you have. Novel concept, I know.
Click to expand...

Adding capacity is not a simple act of buying a server or adding cables here and there. It requires sending extensive case studies and statistics and projections, which need to be approved. We have already done this by the way, to add capacity to CT & DBN, and more in JHB. MTN already have IPC in in all those areas, which is being used for their business service, so this being upgraded - it's not even a new IPC request, but we're told we'll be waiting at least until January for that ball to get rolling :(
 
Well in the mean while the users must beta test ur network. I cancelled my uncapped allready this morning. Since your network has been so unstable since more than a week, a pro rata refund for the rest of the month should be in order as I am not using your account anymore and also not going to. I feel I have been done in by this whole beta test you guys are running.


AfriMan said:
Adding capacity is not a simple act of buying a server or adding cables here and there. It requires sending extensive case studies and statistics and projections, which need to be approved. We have already done this by the way, to add capacity to CT & DBN, and more in JHB. MTN already have IPC in in all those areas, which is being used for their business service, so this being upgraded - it's not even a new IPC request, but we're told we'll be waiting at least until January for that ball to get rolling :(
Click to expand...
 
AfriMan said:
Adding capacity is not a simple act of buying a server or adding cables here and there. It requires sending extensive case studies and statistics and projections, which need to be approved. We have already done this by the way, to add capacity to CT & DBN, and more in JHB. MTN already have IPC in in all those areas, which is being used for their business service, so this being upgraded - it's not even a new IPC request, but we're told we'll be waiting at least until January for that ball to get rolling :(
Click to expand...

What engineering genius decided not to get IPC's in the major POP in SA? :D
 
AfriMan said:
Adding capacity is not a simple act of buying a server or adding cables here and there. It requires sending extensive case studies and statistics and projections, which need to be approved. We have already done this by the way, to add capacity to CT & DBN, and more in JHB. MTN already have IPC in in all those areas, which is being used for their business service, so this being upgraded - it's not even a new IPC request, but we're told we'll be waiting at least until January for that ball to get rolling :(
Click to expand...

I understand that getting more IPC capacity will depend on Telkom, who as we all know are the scum of the earth, but for almost all other areas where you guys could have bottlenecks, there's a possibility of throwing money at the problem and having it fixed within days at worst, assuming you guys know what you're doing.

From my limited tests, it looks like you are having problems in two areas: The poor ping times to uplink really suggest that you're having IPC problems. Again, I understand that fixing that depends on Telkom and thus is somewhat out of your control. But even when you don't seem to be having IPC problems, there are still problems of packet loss and poor transfer rates to international servers at least.

You guys really need to hurry up and get your shit fixed. Excuses and promises on a forum will only get you so far. It seems that a lot of people have already gotten tired of paying full price for half the service at best and have jumped ship, and to be honest I've started looking for alternatives today, comparing prices and so on. Probably the only reason I haven't jumped ship so far is that my Telkom/ADSL connectivity is with you guys and I fear the hassle it will be to change to a different ISP.

Once you're done fixing your network, the next thing you need to do is fire your support staff and then try again from the beginning. Your support is ridiculously poor. Your support employees not only don't know what they're doing, they don't even know what Afrihost are doing. You can call them up about an issue Afrihost have already made a public statement about it being their fault, and they're working to fix it, and the Afrihost support guy will resync your line and recreate your ADSL account for you, which obviously will do nothing at all seeing as it is a generic Afrihost issue. When your support staff gets tired of trying to figure out what is wrong, they will tell you they will call you back, hang up and wait for the customer to get annoyed and call Afrihost support again, and then hopefully, from the supporter's point of view, you'll get to talk to someone else who now has to deal with your problem.

You also need to seriously consider compensation your customers for the ****ty service they've received. I wouldn't be half as annoyed about these problems if I didn't month after month get a reminder that you've now taken another R400 of my money for this poor excuse for an internet connection.
 
officially throttled to 512k now :/ hopefully their testing will fix this
 
I find it mad that they went live without even a basic QOS implementation! As they say the best QOS is to simply have enough capacity, unrealistic I know but I think that is exactly what happened to Afrihost...They were under the impression they had ample bandwidth only to find out it was quickly saturated by the hungry internet addicts :-) Saturated bandwidth + no QOS = BAD ! Quick fix, throttle everyone to 1Mbps for the interim...

Anyway that is my take on what is happening hence the hurry to implement Shaping/QOS yesterday, QOS is a tricky bugger, especially when you dealing with L7 rules, getting it right can take plenty hours. But I do agree with forumnites that a phased approach to the move would have been better for all parties involved!

So in a nut shell they once again underestimated their bandwidth demands...seems like all IPS's in south africa do this at some point...so the question is why does it take Telkom so long to supply ISP's with additional IPC capacity? That is assuming they have run out of IPC capacity :-) so many unknowns :-( but it's fun to speculate!
 
pezulu said:
I really appreciate the response.
What I would like to know however, is what was changed since this time last week?
Before then everything was working as it should, and since then everything has gone pear-shaped.

I don't know much about the technical jargon, so I have no idea what a 3rd party company is doing to help QA with QoS, nor do I know what it means to have IPC in Cape Town, or not have it anywhere else.

What I do know is that since this time last week the service that I am paying for, is not what I am receiving.
It also seems that I am being severely throttled after hours. Where I am on a 2Mbps line, I am on something less than a 1Mbps line.
Where I have decent latency during the day for the most part, I suddenly have extremely high latency issues.
I reside in Centurion, yet I suddenly find that Speedtest thinks I am in London.
Lastly, I have mailed support@afrihost and accounts@afrihost, but have as yet not received a reply.
Click to expand...

Forgive me if the analogy is overly simple, but hope it explains what we're talking about.

Last week there was no shaping whatsoever, and capped and uncapped accounts were contending for the same IPC without restrictions. When capped contention for throughput became an issue, we separated them IPC access, so that Uncapped activity would not affect capped users. Think of it as splitting the highway into two lanes, rather than having anyone drive anywhere that want to, capped users get to drive on their dedicated lane, with less traffic, and uncapped users are trying to get the fastest speed while contending with the amount of traffic in the lane dedicated to them. Now there are some users who are taking the lions share of the bandwidth, by running torrents 24/7 and P2P downloads. So they're basically driving like taxis! We need to get to the stage where we put the brakes on the irresponsible drivers so everyone gets a good speed, so think of shaping policies like traffic cops.

IPC basically means that we hop off Telkom's backhaul earlier, so that dedicated Afrihost traffic reaches our network much faster, rather than having to contend with all traffic with other ISP's. So one would expect that latency would be reduced by this.
 
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