Afrihost Uncapped ADSL Feedback

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new_in_za2 said:
If I with no other traffic on the line can only download at 1/16th of my line speed, then it's throttling. That it sometimes goes all the way up to 1/4th of the line speed does not change the fact that it's throttling.
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Semantics

You're throttled when your line speed is deliberately reduced by the ISP for ALL traffic - test by running a MyBB speed test with no downloads of any type running.

Pretty sure you're being shaped, at least that's what they're doing over at axxess - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_shaping
 
so when you are being "managed" and cut to half your line speed, how long do you remain in the dog box?
 
AfriMan said:
Exactly. If you it can go from 1/16 to 1/4 in the same day shows that it's not throttle. When we throttled clients, they could not achieve a different speed, on any protocol, and even if there was capacity on the network they would not be allowed to go above the rate limit / throttle.
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No, again, just because the amount of throttling is dynamic does not mean that it is not throttling. When you're preventing me from using the full speed of my internet connection, then I'm being throttled. You are preventing me from using the full speed of my internet connection, thus I'm being throttled, and often to 1/16th of my line speed.
 
I've been with Afrihost for the past 2 weeks. I've had a mixed experience. It started out great and I loaded all those torrents up at first.
I got about half my line speed during office hours at first. I was also able to grab anything http at full speed (adobe downloads, YouTube etc.) My line was then down for a couple of days and when it started working on the 26th it was crawling. I got 10kb/s during office hours (office hours also changed to 8am-9pm) and http wasn't has fast as I expected. Http downloads have also been given the same priority as p2p, which is slightly concerning in terms of user experience.

I've been sitting in front of my computer for a solid 10 hours each day, and I've noticed that Afrihost's 'dynamic QoS' isn't so dynamic. Things like pictures are considered as downloads, torrents seem to be limited to 1/5th, 1/10th, and sometimes 1/16th of your line's speed (will check up on those when I get home on my logs)

I think it's time that Afrihost customers compile a post of all the characteristics of the QoS system in order to better understand how it works as it seems it's too 'dynamic' for Afrihost to explain.
 
booya30 said:
Things like pictures are considered as downloads
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Yes, that's one of the things that have been bothering me. Afriman often claims that the 'browsing experience' on Afrihost is great, yet whenever I go to a website with a lot of images, I can see the images load and decode line by line. I sit there and stare at the screen for 30-60 seconds and then close the tab again when the images are only half loaded. That's really not a great 'browsing experience' in my opinion.
 
new_in_za2 said:
Good question... Afriman is still refusing to confirm or deny that they're even doing such a thing.
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i have an email from support that says

I can see that your download speeds have been managed down at the moment. This is not a constant managing of the account.. This is not a constant managing of the account.

The throttling being experienced is protocol specific. In other words it applies specifically to large downloads from servers that are being connected to on specific ports (563 SSL etc.)

The throttling should NOT be affecting normal browsing, video streaming from YouTube, etc.
Our aim is to provide the best user experience and this means P2P services will get less priority depending on user and network usage.

Consumer uncapped accounts will be managed and shaped during periods where realtime services are in more demand.

Also will be applied to make sure we offer our users a better experience rather than limiting all services to a certain speed.

Thank you :)

Please do not hesitate to contact us if we may be of further assistance.

Warm Regards
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1) You said that your QoS is perhaps not realtime? Does this mean that whatever the QoS is doing gets manually applied from hour to hour?

2) While youtube, gaming and such gets full speed, download protocols reaches set limits, and those limits depends on what is going on in the network and what your line speed is. Is this correct?

I know I may sound like a difficult noob, but I'm just trying to make sense of all the conflicting information. As far as I can tell, this QoS you speak of is in fact throttling, but only on certain protocols and the severity of said throttling varies from hour to hour depending on network load.
 
new_in_za2 said:
No, again, just because the amount of throttling is dynamic does not mean that it is not throttling. When you're preventing me from using the full speed of my internet connection, then I'm being throttled. You are preventing me from using the full speed of my internet connection, thus I'm being throttled, and often to 1/16th of my line speed.
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I guess we can debate this endlessly, but to my mind a system that changes constantly is not throttled. It's also capacity driven, not usage driven, so that's entirely different. But if we all better understand how the system is working, that's at least half the battle won :)

How exactly the system decides how much download speed you get, is a bit above my pay grade. What I'm told is that it is completely capacity based, and in no way a punitive measure as throttling is.
 
Arksun said:
1) You said that your QoS is perhaps not realtime? Does this mean that whatever the QoS is doing gets manually applied from hour to hour?

2) While youtube, gaming and such gets full speed, download protocols reaches set limits, and those limits depends on what is going on in the network and what your line speed is. Is this correct?

I know I may sound like a difficult noob, but I'm just trying to make sense of all the conflicting information. As far as I can tell, this QoS you speak of is in fact throttling, but only on certain protocols and the severity of said throttling varies from hour to hour depending on network load.
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Not manually, as far as I know, but I think there is a degree to which it is not as dynamic as we eventually envision it to be. We do also monitor from our side and override if the system is not allocating additional bandwidth where we feel it can.

I don't think it sets limits as such, as far as I am aware it groups users together based on calculations and then allows them to contend for download bandwidth. That's why I say we don't see it as throttling, because that confuses people based on our previous policies. Throttling was a punitive measure, and clearly many still feel they are being punished when they hear this. It was a set rate limit, applied to everything, and could not be changed (even by us) unless the throttler was satisfied the usage was back within threshold. With the new system, any user can achieve line speed, at any time (or as their line is capable) at any time. And where capacity allows, they can still max their downloads. I've run tests with torrents running, YouTube streaming at 720p and SSH jobs running in the background at full line speed on an uncapped account, with BitMeter showing basically full line usage.
 
milomak said:
i have an email from support that says
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The person responding mentioned throttle, shaping, QoS and priority - all of which can be very different. We are only employing QoS. I've sent it on to the Support Manager to look into so that the support agent concerned responds more clearly in the future :(
 
AfriMan when http downloads are at a fraction of line speed, is that a capacity constraint on the network? Cos qos should not do that. Or is qos applied to port 80 connections once each one exceeds a certain number of bytes?
 
AfriMan said:
Not manually, as far as I know, but I think there is a degree to which it is not as dynamic as we eventually envision it to be. We do also monitor from our side and override if the system is not allocating additional bandwidth where we feel it can.

I don't think it sets limits as such, as far as I am aware it groups users together based on calculations and then allows them to contend for download bandwidth. That's why I say we don't see it as throttling, because that confuses people based on our previous policies. Throttling was a punitive measure, and clearly many still feel they are being punished when they hear this. It was a set rate limit, applied to everything, and could not be changed (even by us) unless the throttler was satisfied the usage was back within threshold. With the new system, any user can achieve line speed, at any time (or as their line is capable) at any time. And where capacity allows, they can still max their downloads. I've run tests with torrents running, YouTube streaming at 720p and SSH jobs running in the background at full line speed on an uncapped account, with BitMeter showing basically full line usage.
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Capacity driven performance sounds like the most balanced approach for all.

I've seen fluctuation in performance with the 10mb uncapped but overall I feel its been more than acceptable.
 
milomak said:
AfriMan where can i see on my profile if I am being managed?
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We don't have a label like that. We had started developing something like this when we used to throttle, but since everything is capacity driven at the moment, we haven't figured out how we would display meaningful information.
 
Sinbad said:
AfriMan when http downloads are at a fraction of line speed, is that a capacity constraint on the network? Cos qos should not do that. Or is qos applied to port 80 connections once each one exceeds a certain number of bytes?
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It's difficult to prioritise by port. The problem is the serious abusers know how to torrent over port 80. So we use a signature identifier, that tried to analyse the packets being sent. Once it has identified a service, downloads from that location or file are treated accordingly. Updates and drivers should have terminal signatures, but this is not always the case - for some reason some of them seem to have P2P signatures. We're still working on building more exception lists, and when we have additional capacity next year, we can weigh up the risk of abusers vs priority downloads.
 
I see. Sounds like its fraught with hidden dangers and false positives. A zip file is a zip file. Warez and drivers are both packaged with install shield etc.

Maybe you should consider implementing a layer 7 caching proxy that people can use for browsing, which can deny torrent type traffic...?
 
Sinbad said:
I see. Sounds like its fraught with hidden dangers and false positives. A zip file is a zip file. Warez and drivers are both packaged with install shield etc.

Maybe you should consider implementing a layer 7 caching proxy that people can use for browsing, which can deny torrent type traffic...?
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It sounds like a great idea, but maybe a little more complex for me :)

Will pass this onto the Dev team and see what they say. I do know that there a big improvements on the way to the whole system, but right now we have to keep things tight until the full capacity is rolled out by Telkom. Wish I could give you the details, but suffice to say that we'll have incredible national capacity, and latencies (particularly in cape town) are going to be the best :)
 
AfriMan said:
It sounds like a great idea, but maybe a little more complex for me :)

Will pass this onto the Dev team and see what they say. I do know that there a big improvements on the way to the whole system, but right now we have to keep things tight until the full capacity is rolled out by Telkom. Wish I could give you the details, but suffice to say that we'll have incredible national capacity, and latencies (particularly in cape town) are going to be the best :)
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If cape town is better than joburg I'm gonna sulk at you, be warned.
 
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