Amobia Uncapped - throttling to death

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redcliff

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So the party is over....

Had Amobia uncapped for close to 18 months and been solidly impressed with the speed and reliability. The 3Mb/s connection pretty much maxed out most of the time and while latency wasn't great it was more than made up for in terms of reliability (Telkom take a hint, your ADSL local loop sucks).

Then Amobia started tweaking those proxy servers a little and sniffed packets - the first hint was speedtest.net no longer picked up a 41.xxx.xxx.xxx IP address it picked up 1.9.0.1 (the internal address of the proxy server on the Amobia network) and as a result speediest.net thinks we are in Malaysia.

The next sign was that all downloads that are not port 80 was throttled down to single figures in Kb/s speed - my previous glory days of newsgroup downloads running at 350Kb/s were now running at 3.5Kb/s. I have not even tried torrents but guess they will languish at the same speeds as well. Worst though my newsgroup connections on port 80 with SSL encryption are not allowed anymore. Though shalt use non SSL connections only and then only on port 119 (all this of course proven by simply connecting to a VPN server and suddenly all the woes go away..)

Crafty little geeks they are too since the VPN workaround only lasts a day or two before they simply just throttle the entire connection down to what i guess is the equivalent of a 256kb/s (i.e. 25KB/s) line.

So if you are burning through those gigs on Amobia enjoy it while it lasts - not sure if they are basing the throttling on the 10,000MB/3 days soft limit or whether they are simply just shaping all non standard traffic.

So this will be my last month of Amobia-ing - great fun for a while but now worse than I ever had experience on ADSL. Simple tasks like sending email is now tedious, web browsing is hit and miss, half the sites timeout at the proxy server - jhb-squid.amobia.com(squid/2.7.Stable.9) some sites do not even resolve (DNS) etc.

Any suggestions for where to next? Kawuzela? Neotel WiMax?

PS. FYI my monthly usage has been below 100Gigs consistently for the last year, so not exactly raping the interwebs - mostly weekend usage at that.
 
maybe if you didn't use it to download your torrent crack all would be good no?
 
stricken said:
maybe if you didn't use it to download your torrent crack all would be good no?
Click to expand...

Nice try, but nope, no torrents whatsoever...nothing of interest there - but thanks for the deeply meaningful and constructive comment....

The 'offending' downloads were mainly a few TV series via newsgroup and the ?? GB per month of Apple software updates (iPad, iPhone, Air...).

And all the 'downloads' are schedule via Sickbeard so they typically happen between the hours of 3AM to 7AM - even had my client set to limit the download speed to 100KB/s during daytime if ever it happened that anything spilt over to the online day.

So the shaping is pretty much regardless of actual usage patterns - it's simply a case of xxGB for the past month so slap the deathgrip onto the connection. Pretty disappointing really since I actually went out of my way to not 'abuse' but maybe I was just asking for too much.

Simply posting this as a heads up to folks considering going the wifi route to temper their expectations. Perhaps I'm the exception, but if you check my previous posts, I was a pretty enthusiastic supporter of the product. It was great, now it sucks - just a heads up, new buyers beware.
 
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Hi Redcliff,

We are pleased that you have been happy with our service to date, and apologize for the inconvenience caused by our implementation of a proxy server.

This was a necessary step in order to improve the browsing experience for all our users, as some of the users are abusing our open policy (downloading in excess of 500G per month!).

The proxy setup allows us to more accurately classify traffic in order to deliver the best experience for all.

There were some initial glitches, but currently your experience should be better than what it was before.

As for your newsgroup SSL connections, this is a limitation imposed by the technology used to proxy and classify traffic, and unfortunately this is something we can not work around.

Please feel free to call our call centre to discuss other possibilities in assisting with the newsgroups.

We welcome your feedback and will gladly take it into consideration when formulating our load balancing / shaping policies.

We are also discussing implementing an AUP policy. Currently there is no such policy, but it seems that we have to start separating the abusers from the others. (Policy has not been set yet, but any
reasonable usage will not be seen as abuse).

The "3 day window" that you see is part of a legacy system that is not actually applying any shaping. It is left over from an uncapped product that we had years ago. (Long before the recent uncapped
products hit the market).

We look forward to hearing from you.

Regards,

The Amobia Team
 
Well done, now we have an Amobia representative on MyBB. Please ask rpm or any of the admins to change your profile. :)

I will still start my own thread about a problem I am experiencing... :(
 
I'm in the OP's boat. Been with Amobia since September last year and my average usage since has been 85Gb per month (the usage portal is pretty neatly laid out, kudos).

P2P has basically died this week regardless of what time I use the line (recently, I've been using Amobia to download stuff late at night when Mweb's shaping policy eased up on P2P). I have ADSL now (wasn't an option last year in my area) so I'll also have to consider moving on unless you guys find a way of improving things for people who want to download moderate amounts of data (and not be lumped into the abusive users category). I was filling in the form to downgrade the account speed when I thought to come check Mybb.

I don't believe 85Gb per month is an unreasonable amount of data to expect on an uncapped 3Mb/s line?

To add, the service I've gotten when I needed assistance with frequency changes etc was unfailingly excellent...really didn't mind the occasional hiccup as they were invariably handled very professionally.

ps. I had to logoff the Amobia connection and log onto my ADSL one because the line died while I was busy...that's been happening for a bit.
 
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Any existing Amobia clients who are experiencing problems should please contact our call centre on 0861 AMOBIA.

This call centre is open 24/7/365 for your convenience.

We will address individual problems one on one.

Thank you

Amobia Support
 
Last year I was really interested in getting Amobia, emailing them daily asking queries of coverage, seeing the one circle's boundary closest to my house ended within 1KM from my house, with them never even bothering to reply back to me even ONCE!

so I got ADSL instead, and never looked back.
 
I just had a 3Mb uncapped installation done a few days ago based on the good feedback I got from this forum at the end of october.

The experience is dreadful, have been trying the all week-end to have a skype conversation with my family in europe and it just keeps cutting on their side. Looks like the uplink is being shaped like hell, I even cut the video on my side but still the same.

Looks like they will get my cancelation letter before the end of the month unless something can be done. (Support has been contacted)
 
This seems to be the way all ISP's go after a period of time. Start with the shaping, throttling or whatever. Probably they realise they can increase revenue by squeezing in more browsers in place of the downloaders ala Mweb.
 
SharkBait said:
How is your "downloading the internet" going? ;)
Click to expand...

oh my speeds have even improved since this month looking at around 340kbps to 480kbps or so and it's a lot more stable.

I kind of had to limit my downloads. i am struggling with storage space as you know hdd cost a willy and 2 balls since the taiwan flooding.
 
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onaz said:
oh my speeds have even improved since this month looking at around 340kbps to 480kbps or so and it's a lot more stable.

I kind of had to limit my downloads. i am struggling with storage space as you know hdd cost a willy and 2 balls since the taiwan flooding.
Click to expand...
How much are you paying per month? is it un/capped?
Also how much did you pay for all the initial equipment and set up?
 
Slootvreter said:
What do you download when you use 100's of gigabytes per month???? :confused:
Click to expand...

Download wise looking at Tutorial videos , vector pack or design work , remote desktop support to my clients, skype, a couple of tv shows (HD 720p only), stream music from my xbox, youtube etc.

i am on uncapped and i am paying R799 a month for a 3mb wireless , set up was R1700 for a complex installation.:D

Traffic used on 2011/11/23: 17529.9076 Mbytes
Traffic used for 3 day moving time window: 63375.9081 Mbytes
Traffic for 3 day moving time window acceptable use: 10000.0000 Mbytes
Monthly traffic used for 2011/11: 429997.1793 Mbytes
Normal monthly traffic allowed for 2011/11 0.0000 Mbytes
Additional monthly traffic allowed for 2011/11 0.0000 Mbytes
Total monthly traffic allowed for 2011/11 0 Mbytes


AMOBIA:love:
 
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Skype was no good today even though I have change the port number as per support request. Have contacted support again, really hope they can sort this out as it is the only real issue for me so far...
 
Gave it a bit of time and I've seen a marked improvement in general performance over the past week.....web pages aren't timing out as often and throughput has increased back to the point where I'm able to download 2-3 Gb at night (pretty much all I require it to do).

I can't speak to the Skype issues (not a user) but Amobia have rectified the P2P problem I was having so kudos to them.
 
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