Afrihost Uncapped ADSL Feedback

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Here's some facts about what is happening. Someone posted in one of the threads that it's unfair to blame heavy users. I can understand that, we should have penalised them more brutally, but we tried to give them a good quality experience by de-prioritising traffic but still allowing them to torrent at reasonable speeds. At the moment torrents and downloads account for 2/3 of bandwidth usage. Majority of this has been between 5pm and midnight. On average our clients moved only 70% of the bandwidth on IS than is being used currently on MTN, while our projected average shows a 43% increase in total bandwidth used over a one month period. That's a lot more bandwidth being supplied to clients than ever before, and nearly 70% of that is being used up in torrents.

While I would personally love to ask the top percentage of users (who alone account for nearly 200TB of the bandwidth used) exactly what they need all these linux distro's for, we are going to target them specifically by limiting their torrent and download capacity during busy hours, but preserve their real time usage at all times.

I know negativity builds momentum faster than positivity. And obviously there are a lot of negative feelings out there at the moment. I do find it interesting that some guys who are posting here have cancelled, been refunded, and yet still are posting complaints about a service they are no longer using. That boggles my mind :)
 
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AfriMan said:
While I would personally love to ask the top 1000 users (who alone account for nearly 200TB of the bandwidth used) exactly what they need all these linux distro's for, we are going to target them specifically by severely limiting their torrent and download capacity.
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Excellent news, good to hear.

200TB? :eek:
 
This is SA. The prohibitive cost of extra capacity almost always means new networks suffer a ton of teething problems, with users spitting venom at every turn. It's not easy trying to offer more gigs than competitors while balancing performance and keeping costs down. It's just one of those things, and something which we have seen a few times over the years. Afrihost have their hearts in the right place, and they'll get there, but it'll take time.

I'm just glad they are putting pressure on the market and driving down prices for everyone. 4meg and 10meg is now far more affordable.
 
Gian, a long overdue post.

I think collectively all affected users (which I believe is all uncapped users or as high as 95% asked in a recent poll here) have been frustrated by the lack of communication on official support channels. Support wasn't playing ball almost a week into this and referring to telkom or similar, causing some customers not only poor service but in some cases also additional costs for telkom call-outs.

The levels of service and communication have been a real let-down and I suggest a review of your internal communications, seeing that this has not been a once-off occurance. Afriman has been in the hot-seat and at least given some measure of insight into the state of affairs.

The high level statistics of inbound/outbound traffic unfortunately don't account for user experience, often throttled to as low as 1/10th the expected levels even during times of lower expected contention. Perhaps the relevant technical staff could trade places with Afriman for a while.
 
AfriMan said:
Here's some facts about what is happening. Someone posted in one of the threads that it's unfair to blame heavy users. I can understand that, we should have penalised them more brutally, but we tried to give them a good quality experience by de-prioritising traffic but still allowing them to torrent at reasonable speeds. At the moment torrents and downloads account for 2/3 of bandwidth usage. Majority of this has been between 5pm and midnight. On average our clients moved only 70% of the bandwidth being used currently, while our projected average shows a 43% increase in total bandwidth used over a one month period. That's a lot more bandwidth being supplied to clients than ever before, and nearly 70% of that is being used up in torrents.

While I would personally love to ask the top 1000 users (who alone account for nearly 200TB of the bandwidth used) exactly what they need all these linux distro's for, we are going to target them specifically by severely limiting their torrent and download capacity.

I know negativity builds momentum faster than positivity. And obviously there are a lot of negative feelings out there at the moment. I do find it interesting that some guys who are posting here have cancelled, been refunded, and yet still are posting complaints about a service they are no longer using. That boggles my mind :)
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Heavy users are like fat kids at parties, they want to eat all the cake and sweets and what they can't eat they stuff in their pockets.

Nail them hard, it's unfair to everyone else on the network.
 
Most definitely not back to normal here. Ping times to uplink fluctuate between 27 and 57ms where it is normally (when Afrihost isn't broken) 11-12ms.

$ ping -c 10 105.236.3.129
PING 105.236.3.129 (105.236.3.129) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 105.236.3.129: icmp_req=1 ttl=253 time=30.3 ms
64 bytes from 105.236.3.129: icmp_req=2 ttl=253 time=27.6 ms
64 bytes from 105.236.3.129: icmp_req=3 ttl=253 time=33.1 ms
64 bytes from 105.236.3.129: icmp_req=4 ttl=253 time=38.8 ms
64 bytes from 105.236.3.129: icmp_req=5 ttl=253 time=48.3 ms
64 bytes from 105.236.3.129: icmp_req=6 ttl=253 time=42.0 ms
64 bytes from 105.236.3.129: icmp_req=7 ttl=253 time=50.3 ms
64 bytes from 105.236.3.129: icmp_req=8 ttl=253 time=57.3 ms
64 bytes from 105.236.3.129: icmp_req=9 ttl=253 time=43.3 ms
64 bytes from 105.236.3.129: icmp_req=10 ttl=253 time=49.3 ms

--- 105.236.3.129 ping statistics ---
10 packets transmitted, 10 received, 0% packet loss, time 9012ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 27.619/42.075/57.384/9.146 ms
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AfriMan said:
... I do find it interesting that some guys who are posting here have cancelled, been refunded, and yet still are posting complaints about a service they are no longer using. That boggles my mind :)
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I cancelled but i'm waiting for news on my refund. I sent four emails since Sunday & phoned Afrihost 5/6 times today but got cut off every time. So i don't know what's happening with the refunds. I'm basically stuck with this "service" until the end of November when i can move my line back to Telkom & then on to the new ISP.
 
AfriMan said:
While I would personally love to ask the top 1000 users (who alone account for nearly 200TB of the bandwidth used) exactly what they need all these linux distro's for, we are going to target them specifically by limiting their torrent and download capacity during busy hours, but preserve their real time usage at all times.
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Wow, over what time period? That would mean they would each have to have downloaded over 200GB each.
 
AfriMan said:
While I would personally love to ask the top 1000 users (who alone account for nearly 200TB of the bandwidth used) exactly what they need all these linux distro's for, we are going to target them specifically by severely limiting their torrent and download capacity.
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Luckily I know I'm not in the top 1000 because my speed is so bad that I've only been able to do 18GB on my 10mbps account this month.

I see the whole issue this way. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

There is a huge rugby game on today. There is place for 60,000 spectators who can sit comfortable to watch the game. The organizers think they can make more money by allowing more people to attend the game. So what they do is they cramp in 80,000 spectators to watch the game. Now it's getting a bit cramped and lots of them are complaining because they can't watch the game as there are lots of people standing in front of them. Then all of a sudden more people comes through the gate. Now there's 100,000 spectators who all paid to watch the game but not all of them can.

The organizers are happy because they sold lots of tickets but the spectators are very angry because they don't get what they paid for.

So I'll say, don't have 10,000 customers if you only have enough bandwidth for 5,000 customers.

My business is the same. I would love to have more clients but if I do have more I won't be able to give the same service as I currently do.
 
Ok the letter is now fixed up. :D :D :D


Afrihost-Gian said:
Hi there

First of all let me say that if our ADSL network move has in anyway affected the performance of your ADSL account with us negatively please accept my sincere apologies - It is our top priority to sort out any issues ASAP only if your are not using uncapped. We sh*t scared so we throttle you out of fear that u might abuse the system even though u have not even done 3gb - 5gb on a 4MB Uncapped.

As you know all of our ADSL clients have been on the new network built for us by MTN since the 1st of November. Yeah we know that since our connections went to cr@p since then onwards

It was obviously a massive undertaking and there have been teething problems. << Lol if you can call a massive flop that then go ahead enjoy :D

Unfortunately there are still some issues that are affecting a big azz percentage of our clients and I promise you that it is our top priority to resolve these. Well we will sort out
Capped users first then maybe see if we can help all u fools with uncapped later on.

Afrihost, Axxess and MTN's tech teams are working (literally) night and day to get all the kinks sorted out 100%.

Before we get onto the problems here are some interesting stats since the move:

The overall capacity of IPC we have available to us now as compared to when we were on the IS network is significantly higher.

While we didn't know exactly how many Gbps of IPC our (Afrihost and Axxess) clients were using on the IS network (since they managed the network), we do know this:

We are currently delivering 38.27% MORE GBs on average zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz!!!!! :confused: head bangs keyboard yeah as if we care about these stats and random made up figures. We only needs our interwebs to work. Stop sucking numbers out the air and fix the damn network allready.

Here are the problems we are having and how we are sorting them out:

1. Network is crap (No solution as of yet)

2. Noo uncapped users downloading too much.. Let's just block everyone into oblivion.

However, the protocol prioritisation has never worked and was a total flop which has led to a total over congested network and masive latency.

However, I am confident that within the next day we will have solved this challenge and our user experience should be excellent again. << LOL we all getting tired of all these promises and no action. Hell I allready left and cancelled as most others have done. Also I will personally suggest all my family, friends and customers to look elsewhere.

The Bottom Line is:

OUR NETWORK CURRENTLY SUCKS A**
We desperately want to make your experience amazing - If you have not been happy with your ADSL connection's performance I encourage you to PM Afriman or email him at [email protected] with feedback and we'll do our best to help!

Hope this clears things up. << Clearing things up won't make gaming or downloading any easier. :D :D

Thanks and keep well

Gian
CEO, Afrihost
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Fudzy said:
Wow, over what time period? That would mean they would each have to have downloaded over 200GB each.
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Agreed ... time period is key.

As mentioned much earlier in the post, I did over 200GB last month (of which about 60GB or so was due to an error with my NZB software redownloading encrypted files ... again ... stay away from Mysterbin!!!).

However, I do not think 200GB over 30 days is unreasonable (I limit my download speed to 400kb/s during the day and open up between 12 and 6am). But if it's 200GB since the 1st ... then yoh yoh yoh!!!
 
Piesang said:
Luckily I know I'm not in the top 1000 because my speed is so bad that I've only been able to do 18GB on my 10mbps account this month.

I see the whole issue this way. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

There is a huge rugby game on today. There is place for 60,000 spectators who can sit comfortable to watch the game. The organizers think they can make more money by allowing more people to attend the game. So what they do is they cramp in 80,000 spectators to watch the game. Now it's getting a bit cramped and lots of them are complaining because they can't watch the game as there are lots of people standing in front of them. Then all of a sudden more people comes through the gate. Now there's 100,000 spectators who all paid to watch the game but not all of them can.

The organizers are happy because they sold lots of tickets but the spectators are very angry because they don't get what they paid for.

So I'll say, don't have 10,000 customers if you only have enough bandwidth for 5,000 customers.

My business is the same. I would love to have more clients but if I do have more I won't be able to give the same service as I currently do.
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I don't think the analogy is really accurate, becuase it's about capacity at any given point in time, and usage patterns that overlap. Think about it more like a highway. When it's peak traffic, all of the lanes are full, so we try to keep traffic flowing as quickly as possible. But then once morning traffic is over, the lanes are basically empty. What we did wrong was say, he guys, there's no traffic drive as fast as you want, and take up as many lanes as you'd like becuase there's no traffic during these times. But we didn't put enough rules in place to ensure that they couldn't do this while peak traffic came up again later in the day, and then the next day. Perhaps a little too trusting that people take other's needs into consideration, but also maybe too much to expect from an individual who wants to get the most out of what they're paying for. We don't see it as trying to oversell, but more like not putting enough traffic rules and cops in place to ensure that road hogs don't ruin everyone else's experience.
 
10 meg users were told that 400 GB a month is to be expected before shaping takes place on the old network.

Given the current constraints (also not knowing to what extent the stats arise from capped/uncapped accounts) why don't you implement a 7 days rolling window and extend that to 14 days in a weeks time and 30 days in three weeks time?
 
Yeah Afriman it feels soooo good to be plugging another ISP, and they enjoy being plugged as well. Afrihost is built for comfort and not for speed..... Afrihost can't handle me man!!!


AfriMan said:
When did you become an editor? Last I check you were plugging another ISP?

Did you see what I did there ;)
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