We've been getting extremely slow and intermittent speeds on our Afrihost Business DSL 10mb connection in Cape Town for the past few months. Lately it's gotten to the point where we can barely work. Uploads fail constantly, email accounts go down, emails don't send, and websites require multiple refreshes to load. In fact, it took me about 5 minutes to get to this page on MyBB alone.
About two weeks ago, I phoned Afrihost and requested an explanation. We got told to phone Telkom and reset the line, which we did, to no effect.
Yesterday, we tried a Telkom account on the router, in an attempt to troubleshoot the connection, and rule out anything like network overuse or line faults. With the Telkom account in place, the connection functioned perfectly as it should. Speeds were great, and everything just worked. Now, we're back on the Afrihost account as the Telkom account is not uncapped, and the internet is practically dead again.
I am not exactly an IT specialist, but this test indicates to me that the Afrihost account itself is the problem, not the line. I have phoned Afrihost for more information, and got told that they will rebuild the account/reset the connection/something and we need to give it a day. However, I don't really have much confidence in the technical skills of the person on the other end, as he asked wether our ping was "438 megabytes". Right.
Does anyone have any other insights? Afrihost representative - do you have any ideas?
Thanks in advance.
Edit: Speedtest on SAIX, when it loads, gives us around 2mbps down this morning, and less than 0.2mbps up, with pings between 150-500. The Speedtest itself only works about 1 in 5 times. Hell, I'd probably be happy with 2mbps, if it stayed at that speed constantly.