Afrihost Uncapped ADSL Feedback

[Sinbad]

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.

Not all students exclusively use campus-supplied internet.

 

[Roelie]

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.

I work for an Engineering company and we have our own worldwide corporate network bur we are using AH uncapped with great success for our wireless network for our local office.

I am still very happy with the service that I am getting from AH and would freely reccomend them for home use.

 

[AfriMan]

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.

We have many small to medium to large colleges and schools running with us, I'm not sure how the major universities run their networks tho.

 

[AfriMan]

I'm curious. What is the contention ratio for uncapped accounts?

I (we) don't put a lot of stock in contention ratios, which is why we don't use them to market as other ISP's do. It's like asking how many people share a road. There is no simple answer. What time of the day? What are the different speeds they are travelling at? This is constantly changing, when there are major updates released for PC's and Mobile devices, if everyone is logging on to buy Justin Bieber tickets online (why???). Our system also constantly adjusts the bandwidth allocated to capped and uncapped accounts to give maximum spread of capacity, while ensuring that unshaped accounts work the way they're supposed to.

 

[pgs]

I (we) don't put a lot of stock in contention ratios, which is why we don't use them to market as other ISP's do. It's like asking how many people share a road. There is no simple answer. What time of the day? What are the different speeds they are travelling at? This is constantly changing, when there are major updates released for PC's and Mobile devices, if everyone is logging on to buy Justin Bieber tickets online (why???). Our system also constantly adjusts the bandwidth allocated to capped and uncapped accounts to give maximum spread of capacity, while ensuring that unshaped accounts work the way they're supposed to.

AFAIR TENET is the university network pioneered by Grahamstown, (Anyone remember FidoNet ) IE they use their own.

 

[pgs]

I forgot the name of the university network so I went to SourceForge and downloaded a file. Ah! Tenet! They mirror Sourceforge in SA and I downloaded the file at 15KB/s says Firefox, Which normally says 200KB/s on my 2GB capped 2MB line account or something like that.

 

[Bufamotis]

Quick question, does 1 concurrent connection mean only one location/tel number allowed, or only one connection on that tel line.

E.g. is it possible to have the two furtherst points in a house connect via two different adsl modem/routers simultaneously on the same line (for lack of wiring up the house to get a good connection at both ends)

Further explanation, the one connection point is a study at the front of the house, the other is in the master bedroom back of the house, a Netgear DGN2200 loses all signal when standing in the last bedroom down the hall (round a corner), which is furthest away from the adsl connection point. but its only two rooms away from another tel connection point in the master bedroom

Its possible to lay cat5 through the roof/ceiling from room with the current router connection point to the 2 different ends of the house where the 2 main PC's to use the network are located, but its also a schlep...

 

[Sinbad]

You can't run two adsl modems on one line.

 

[Bufamotis]

Then roof exploration it is, thank you Sinbad

 

[Sinbad]

I have a similar situation to you. I just set up an AP at each end of the house, joined by a cat5 cable.

 

[Bufamotis]

funding for another ap she is a-gone... blame impulse buy december and incredible corruptions for charging 1700 when the same thing costs 700 from AH.

needed the ap for media server at beach-house during December.

Now I'm wiser and broke-er

 

[kripstoe]

funding for another ap she is a-gone... blame impulse buy december and incredible corruptions for charging 1700 when the same thing costs 700 from AH.

needed the ap for media server at beach-house during December.

Now I'm wiser and broke-er

Sell beach house. Problem solved.

 

[bradlesliect]

I was with AH before about 1-2yrs and left cos they were expensive. Came back at the towards the end of Nov-12. Everything was AWESOME...then...out of nowhere, my speed drop to like 20k/sec on...wait for it...exactly 01-Jan-13. Amazing or coincidence?

So anyways, I didn't have the time or engery to check and when I eventually did over the week cos then speed dropped to equivalent of 33.3 modem, I called AH.

Spoke to a dude and he said that yes, shaping is applied. Its automagic and its done with "high usage" clients. Asked him to explain how its classified and he said that users who DL between 60-100GB pm have shaping applied. Are you joking me? :twisted:

Yes...the AUP legal jargon stipulates and by signing up you automagically accept it. I'm cool with that. However, how long is this shaping applied for cos now I am within a user group set as "high usage users" So...with me bring throttled, my downloads being less, how long am I left in the naughty corner? :erm:

60GB = 6mths
70 = 7 ...etc?

This is a long time? The dude on the end couldn't answer my FAQ?

It does make business sense to throttle / shape during the day - it keeps the network "fit & healthy" but at night?! Come on.

The AUP is very cleverly structured in a sense that AH guarantees UP TIME and REASONABLE connectivity. The account is UNCAPPED but all it means is that your browsing, HTTP downloads and email is a all-you-can-eat buffet.

AfriMan - Your comments please.

Anyone else - What say you?

 

[Bufamotis]

Not too OT I hope, but I believe it will definitely need to be a priority for the legal team to revise that AUP if the practice has changed to reflect present practice, else, whatever reflects in the present AUP terms is and remains effectively "the rule" by which to measure service.

 

[Abe]

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).

I am not sure when you implemented this QoS approach but I cancelled at the end of last month. I was using a 35GB capped account which should not have been impacted by any shaping because it was capped and not uncapped yet there were a number of times when it was close to unusable and switching to another provider solved the problem. It was so bad that I just couldn't use it with any sort of trust so I spent the majority of my by the time on my WA account praying that I didn't have any problems with that. By the time it got to the end of December, I still more than a third of the GB's for that month still available. I probably had the same the previous month. I think my last attempt to use it was on the 18th or 19th of December. At that time, if you had the QoS approach, it wasn't working.

While I understand your reasons for switching to MTN, the switch did a lot of harm to your customers. I persisted with AH for as long as I could. I had minimal problems before the switch to MTN but that changed afterwards. The switch over could definitely have been handled much better. It will, unfortunately, be quite a while before I try out AH again.

 

[Jacquesb01]

Hi there AfriMan - I just want to give my feedback about what I experienced, where I live in Cape Town. Unfortunately, I am no longer an ADSL user, and went over to 3G - very expensive per GB, but at least reliable (until my cap runs out - then extra $$$$$)....

So - I live in Parklands, Cape Town. For the years of 2011, and 2012, I had the MOST frustrating ADSL experience ever. And this is NOT due to AfriHost's fault at all.

BUT - perhaps this could shed some light on what's happening with some users' accounts? I had a 384kbps Uncapped account with yourselves.

So - what happened that made me so p'ed off:
- for a period of +-18 months, until I cancelled everything, I was experiencing what seems to be a "reset of my ADSL router". What happened, every time that I downloaded ANYTHING for longer than a 10 minute period, whether this was MS Windows updates, Youtube video's, free MP3's, evaluation software, patches for legal software that I owned........ then my ADSL router would reboot.
- I had Telkom test my line, probably 20 times (via telephone) - same response - no problems with my line
- I had the AfriHost support engineers test my line (when I moved my line to Afrihost) - same response - nothing wrong with my line
- I had a Telkom site engineer come to my house, and test my line and ADSL router physically - no problems found
- I replaced my router 4 times - twice with Cisco routers, and twice with different model Telkom ADSL routers - same issue existed
- I changed ISPs (and ended up with AfriHost) and kept on experiencing exactly the same issue
- I discussed this with a lot of friends who are in the tele-coms arena, and I received the same (unproven) response - (and this is hearsay, and I cannot prove this) that Telkom "oversubscribes" on the "ports" within certain EXCHANGES - and then does "something" to "kick you off" your port when you are hogging the port for too long.
- Now - this "something" that Telkom does - this theory - sounds quite amicable (as I am a techie myself - and I have been in IT now for more than 20 years - growing up in the "internet age"), so I started "testing" the theory. I only browsed web-sites without heavy downloads, and I was able to browse for hours on end, without issues. I was able to download emails that took up to 5 minutes to download (with attachments) - AS SOON AS my emails took more than 10 minutes to download, my router REBOOTED AGAIN!
- did test downloads and "ping" tests as well as "traceroute" tests during this time, while downloading a big'ish Youtube video - and there it was - my router rebooted!
- the logs of my routers always just showed a "reboot" session - as if I manually sent the reboot command.
- I upgraded all the firmwares of all the routers that I owned to the latest versions - still same problems....

I just got fed-up with this issue around October last year, and cancelled all my accounts (with Afrihost, with Telkom, etc) - and now only have a pre-pay phone account at home, and only a 3G account with Vodacom.

No more download problems - except for the BLOODY expensive per GB cost!

 

[CorneN]

Oh joy. Dial-up again.

 

[Unhappy1]

Download speeds are crawling this evening , not to be rude but i find these two "contradictory" posts particularly amusing.

Morning People

I know a lot of people are predicting (fearing) that once all our business and heavy day users come back from the coast/mountains/outer mongolia , that ADSL service is going to degrade beyond acceptable limits. We are confident this is not going to happen, and we have good reason to believe so.

I promised I would be giving you all the details of the upgrades of the network that are underway (and some already completed) and what is planned for the next month or so. I'll be able to give all the info at around 12h30 today, when the info goes live on our website. We'll make this info public, and we'll have a page on our site explaining, in specific detail to show how much we appreciate your patience (and continued trust).

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.

 

[Grubscrew]

*sigh* why did I do this again to myself. Thought to myself, give them one more chance, so I got myself a 1mb uncapped account from Afrihost. *sigh*

 

[wez1007]

no problems here :/