Okay, so Durban has to wait some more - I really hoped 24 Feb was going to be honoured
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Afrihost Uncapped ADSL Feedback
- Thread starter AfriMan
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Okay, so Durban has to wait some more - I really hoped 24 Feb was going to be honoured
htpc
Well-Known Member
Not working here either.
MrGray
Honorary Master
Come now, I know how offended you get when people here suggest you're being a bit lose with the truth, but this is really quite dishonest. Only some of the complaints from Cape Town have been about latency, mostly from gamers, and I think the vast majority of complaints have been about abysmal download speeds and throughput.
Now, suddenly, the IPC is only about latency? Technically, that may or may not be the case, but this is not what you have been leading everyone on with:
This was an email response to a ticket I logged at the beginning of February about very slow throughput in Cape Town:
This was merely one of many communications directly between myself and your call centre, some telephonic, as well as several complaints in this forum thread made by other users as well, where reference was made to the Cape Town IPC as being the solution to poor speed, etc.
I thought your IPC infrastructure supposedly provided more capacity as well? If this is wrong then I will cancel, and I will be demanding the last months subs back as well since I stayed on due to blatant misleading advertising.
MrGray
Honorary Master
Don't hold your breath, apparently the new IPC is now only going to improve latency, and nothing else.
new_in_za2
Senior Member
Garp, besides having a persecution complex, you also seem rather misinformed. Maybe by Afrihost, maybe not. But the mail you pasted in no way proves your claim(s) that only people in Cape Town were suffering from poor performance or that having IPC in Cape Town is (primarily) about providing better throughput to the poor, persecuted people of Cape Town.
I'll try to explain to you how all of this stuff works, mainly because I'm bored and I am waiting for other things to finish. For you to get online, there are several steps involved. Roughly speaking, you have your ADSL connection which terminates inside Telkom's network. From there, Afrihost (and every other ADSL ISP that is not Telkom) pays Telkom a hefty chunk of money to get that traffic forwarded to the ISP itself. Then finally from there, your ISP routes your data onto the internet. With me so far? Good.
Before the Cape Town IPC node came online, the only place Telkom and Afrihost could change data to/from ADSL customers was in Johannesburg. This meant that all traffic, no matter where the ADSL line was, had to travel all the way to Johannesburg before it could begin its journey onto the internet. Johannesburg is fairly far away from the big coastal cities such as Cape Town and Johannesburg (and a couple of other cities nobody apparently care about), which meant that the latency for traffic to get onto the internet and back was unnecessarily high in some cases.
Afrihost's IPC capacity in Johannesburg is (according to them) 8Gbps. This 8Gbps was shared amongst all Afrihost customers no matter if they were located next door to the IPC, in Durban or even in Cape Town. It is this capacity, as well as Afrihost's peering and transit connections, and not the IPC location, that largely dictates your download performance on the internet. I say largely because there are some other factors in play, but none that play a significant role, so for the purpose of this explanation, I'm ignoring them.
Now, again according to Afrihost, their new IPC capacity in Cape Town is 3Gbps. Assuming that Afrihost now make all ADSL customers in and near Cape Town use this IPC, it means that the 8Gbps that was previously shared with the whole country is now only shared with the whole country minus poor, persecuted Cape Town. Assuming an unlikely perfect distribution of ADSL customers, this means that in total, they now have 37.5% more IPC capacity. If what was previously making Afrihost slow for all Afrihost uncapped users was their lack of Telkom IPC capacity, then things will now be somewhat faster for everyone, not just people in Cape Town. If, on the other hand, their peering and transit links are running at or near capacity, then this new IPC won't do anything at all to improve download speeds. It will, however, no matter what improve latencies for some people, in particular people in the Cape Town area.
Phew. Hope I didn't lose you along the way.
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back up! just got 14% meh..... guess it's better than nothing.
I wonder how random it is tho?
MrGray
Honorary Master
I think you need to re-read much of this thread.
Sinbad
Honorary Master
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kripstoe
Expert Member
Yip, not even a single spelling mistake in that post.
MrGray
Honorary Master
So there have not been issues with poor performance in Cape Town, including throughput, and the IPC has never been mentioned in this regard? I must be in a parallel universe.
I understand the concept of an IPC better than you may imagine, and don't need it explained as if to a child. It is not the users who have been saying that the IPC will resolve the speed issues in Cape Town, it is Afrihost.
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I am definitely with Garp on this issue, the IPC will improve SPEED was said, This morning approx 10am as a test nntp news Astraweb was giving me 6KB/s of my 200KB/s line uncapped package Meaning when I goto Astraweb with my 2 Mb Capped account I used to get 200KB/s That was last week. Now capped nntp is being impacted as well.
Piesang
Executive Member
Thanks Afrihost.
I got 97% discount on my March account. That is a saving of R773.09.
I got 97% discount on my March account. That is a saving of R773.09.
Sinbad
Honorary Master
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The IPC has increased speed. I'm doing 1MB/sec right now, which is peak time, when I used to get 1/20th of that.
The IPC will not increase CAPE TOWN SPEED EXCLUSIVELY. But it will improve CAPE TOWN LATENCY.
Speed on the WHOLE will (and has?) improved.
AH could have just doubled the IPC in Joburg. Then everyone's speed would improve, but CT latency would not.
Do you see the reasoning now?
I am with garp on this one, I have been part of this thread for like 4-5 months now and the impression I was lead to believe by Afriman was that this was additional capacity. I was not lead to believe this was purely a ping (latency) improvement. I was 100% lead to believe that it was additional capacity. On page 491 for example right at the bottom Afriman says
"...Anyway, as I said, our new IPCs are due within a week's time, and there's no need for such drastic measures. One we have 60% more capacity running on the network, there should be plenty of bandwidth for everyone, shaped or unshaped. We really appreciate everyone's patience, and the wait is nearly over ..."
I read this to mean that additional capacity is being purchased. How else can you read that?
MrGray
Honorary Master
It was never expected to be a fix exclusively for Cape Town, it was just that Cape Town has experienced the bottleneck to the JHB IPC more acutely as it is a large centre with all traffic, even local, being routed via the JHB IPC. Also, looking at the Afrihost network diagram, it is little wonder that especially international traffic would be so poor since it seems intn'l traffic to Cape Town would have been routing from WACS up to JHB and back again to CPT, with latency and potential bottlenecks growing at every hop.
(Although latency and throughput are different things, poor latency can have a cumulatively negative effect on bandwidth as tcp acks are slower, so the transmitting server takes longer to send subsequent packets, or if there are timeouts, i.e. the acks take too long to reach the server, the server re-sends packets unnecessarily. I suspect that the poor architecture of the Afrihost network over the last few months has contributed to a "feedback loop" of increasing congestion, worse latency, increased packet loss and re-transmission leading to increased congestion...)
The jury is out - I will check this tonight, but it did seem marginally faster the last time I checked.
jackshiels
Expert Member
I'm still only running on 1mb atm, whats up?
diepeterpan
Well-Known Member
I am in CT and running Business DSL up to 6 Mbps and today was dismal to say the least, since I joined Afri Nov it isthe worst performance I have seen as a Bussiness DSL subscriber. Only getting 1Mbps on a 5Mbps line. Whats the point of paying the extra amount for an business account if this is the performance. I thought it were supposed to be uncapped and unshaped at full line speed.
new_in_za2
Senior Member
More people missing the point...
For those who have a hard time following the conversation, here's how it has unfolded so far:
Garb first implies (like many others before him have done, and have then been corrected on) that only users in Cape Town are having bandwidth problems with Afrihost:
Garb gets a sarcastic reply as a reward for being the 500th person to repeat that misinformed bull****:
Garb gets angry (I'll spare you from quoting every comment) and then makes a claim about what Afrihost told him:
Afriman makes a comment Garb doesn't understand. The short version of it is that he says the primary purpose of setting up an IPC in Cape Town is to get better latency for Cape Town users. At no point does he state that setting up an IPC at Cape Town won't improve throughput. It is implied that they set up in IPC in Cape Town rather than just increase the capacity of their IPC in Johannesburg exactly because they want better latency for people in Cape Town and not just more throughput:
Now Garb gets really, really, REALLY angry because he doesn't understand what is going on around him. He quotes an email from an Afrihost support guy, claiming that it says that the IPC in Cape Town will be there to improve throughput for Cape Town users. The email says no such thing. He then goes on to say:
He clearly still didn't understand how the whole thing works.
New_in_za2 (yours truly) then writes a long, somewhat sarcastic, explanation of how IPC nodes interact with latency and throughput. It's rather long, so I'll spare you the quote.
Garb, still not having gotten it, gets even more upset, and once again claims that not only is it only users in Cape Town who are having throughput issues, but that setting up the new IPC in Cape Town will only help users in Cape Town. Despite my lengthy explanation, he still doesn't get how having Cape Town users on their own, dedicated IPC node will mean more throughput for every Afrihost user as well:
So long story short: Whether or not the increased IPC capacity will improve throughput for anyone remains to be seen. But if it does, it will improve throughput for everyone. Throughput could also have been improved simply by upgrading the Johannesburg IPC node. The decision to set up an IPC node in Cape Town instead of upgrading the one in Johannesburg was made so that users in Cape Town can also get improved latencies.
If there's anyone who at this point still doesn't get it, then I give up.
For those who have a hard time following the conversation, here's how it has unfolded so far:
Garb first implies (like many others before him have done, and have then been corrected on) that only users in Cape Town are having bandwidth problems with Afrihost:
Garb gets a sarcastic reply as a reward for being the 500th person to repeat that misinformed bull****:
Garb gets angry (I'll spare you from quoting every comment) and then makes a claim about what Afrihost told him:
Afriman makes a comment Garb doesn't understand. The short version of it is that he says the primary purpose of setting up an IPC in Cape Town is to get better latency for Cape Town users. At no point does he state that setting up an IPC at Cape Town won't improve throughput. It is implied that they set up in IPC in Cape Town rather than just increase the capacity of their IPC in Johannesburg exactly because they want better latency for people in Cape Town and not just more throughput:
Now Garb gets really, really, REALLY angry because he doesn't understand what is going on around him. He quotes an email from an Afrihost support guy, claiming that it says that the IPC in Cape Town will be there to improve throughput for Cape Town users. The email says no such thing. He then goes on to say:
He clearly still didn't understand how the whole thing works.
New_in_za2 (yours truly) then writes a long, somewhat sarcastic, explanation of how IPC nodes interact with latency and throughput. It's rather long, so I'll spare you the quote.
Garb, still not having gotten it, gets even more upset, and once again claims that not only is it only users in Cape Town who are having throughput issues, but that setting up the new IPC in Cape Town will only help users in Cape Town. Despite my lengthy explanation, he still doesn't get how having Cape Town users on their own, dedicated IPC node will mean more throughput for every Afrihost user as well:
So long story short: Whether or not the increased IPC capacity will improve throughput for anyone remains to be seen. But if it does, it will improve throughput for everyone. Throughput could also have been improved simply by upgrading the Johannesburg IPC node. The decision to set up an IPC node in Cape Town instead of upgrading the one in Johannesburg was made so that users in Cape Town can also get improved latencies.
If there's anyone who at this point still doesn't get it, then I give up.
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Why don't you stop for a bit and catch your breath. 
Bottom line is that Afrihost are disappointing us month after month. I actually don't care anymore about whether they are going to sort it out or not. Will definitely be my last month with them. Cant handle paying for a severly crippled service month after month and then getting bullsh*t promises all the time that never comes to fruition.
Bottom line is that Afrihost are disappointing us month after month. I actually don't care anymore about whether they are going to sort it out or not. Will definitely be my last month with them. Cant handle paying for a severly crippled service month after month and then getting bullsh*t promises all the time that never comes to fruition.
So you're basically saying that the IPC is gonna give our computers more ram?
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