Extremely retarded shaping on the IS network

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DeFi

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User feedback concerning the extremely retarded shaping affecting the IS network

Good day everyone,

For many months now, there has been a serious issue on the IS network, that not only affects IS ADSL, but also other ISPs who use the IS backbone, such as Afrihost, and is not limited to uncapped accounts.

I find it really hard to believe no one else on MyBB has noticed this, as I have spoken to a few people who live in Cape Town, who have experienced the same kind of behaviour, perhaps it only affects certain areas?

From early in the morning, between 8 and 9am on week-days, until close to 5pm, ping to local servers constantly spikes between 90 and 130ms, torrents will not download faster than between 3 and 20KB/s and HTTP performance is very inconsistent. This makes web browsing slow and difficult and gaming almost impossible.

At times, there is also some kind of extreme persistent TCP per-socket connection shaping in place, which appears to effect IS ADSL accounts more than other ISPs.

The behaviour I have observed is as follows: When a socket has been connected for an extended period of time, such as IRC or SSH, incoming data flow grinds to a complete halt for anywhere from 5 seconds to over a minute. At times for so long that connections to servers time out. If you however open a new socket connection to the server, the data transfers at normal speeds without freezing up for anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes, before grinding to a halt again. These issues also occur after hours and over weekends, relatively rarely, at random.

This means that important connections such SSH or SFTP stop responding for long periods of time, making them very time consuming and painful to use. Since I work from home, this obviously affects my work and studying rather badly.

I know that these issues can be hard to pinpoint, but I am interested to see how many other people have experiences this kind of behaviour.

EDIT:
I would like to clarify that this thread is for people who are experiencing such issues to respond with details such as their ISP and area so that we narrow down the effected region(s). You are also welcome to post if you have any useful information about the issue, but simply posting uneffected areas does not help and will only create a long thread with a lot of irrelevent information. Thanks


Here is a trace-route to mybroadband.co.za from this morning using a per-GB, capped Afrihost account:
Code: 
Tracing route to mybroadband.co.za [41.203.21.137]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1    33 ms    26 ms    26 ms  196-210-146-129.dynamic.isadsl.co.za [196.210.146.129]
  2   138 ms   134 ms   131 ms  cdsl2-rba-vl2663.ip.isnet.net [196.38.73.25]
  3   112 ms   118 ms   114 ms  cdsl2-rba-vl150.ip.isnet.net [196.38.73.9]
  4   132 ms   135 ms   130 ms  168.209.1.140
  5   138 ms   134 ms   173 ms  168.209.1.179
  6   121 ms   133 ms   129 ms  41-208-29-126.mtnns.net [41.208.29.126]
  7   118 ms   110 ms   119 ms  jh-cr-2.za--jh-pr-1.za.mtnns.net [196.44.0.223]
  8   127 ms   124 ms   126 ms  196.44.31.99
  9   133 ms   140 ms   157 ms  ge11-0-0.gw2.jnb6.za.mtnbusiness.net [196.30.1.22]
 10   136 ms   141 ms   136 ms  vlan9.hr3.jnb6.za.mtnbusiness.net [196.30.156.136]
 11   131 ms   131 ms   145 ms  core-router1.jnb2.host-h.net [196.30.213.108]
 12   145 ms   138 ms   129 ms  41.72.136.53
 13   108 ms   109 ms   111 ms  mybroadband.co.za [41.203.21.137]


DeFi
 
Last edited:
I am on Afrihost, I share your problem.

Cape Town areas have been affected badly with high latency (100-500ms) and huge contention ratios.

Neotel i think is the way to go, they are in a good position currently with a massive infrastucture and relatively few customers :)

Im personally considering Neotel for my home office.
 
100s of people use SSH every day on IS connections...if there were really a country-wide issue it would become clear fast. Its more likely to be a regional issue.
 
HavocXphere said:
100s of people use SSH every day on IS connections...if there were really a country-wide issue it would become clear fast. Its more likely to be a regional issue.
Click to expand...

My thoughts exactly
 
I'm in Cape Town in the northern suburbs. Using IS accounts. Never had a problem with SSH or even vpn's over IS accounts.

Torrents and such being shaped during work hours is normal and expected.

Havn't been playing much in the way of online games lately except for the BF3 beta, and I didn't experience any lag spikes (not that one could see the ping though) except when my adobe decided middle of a game was the best time to do a 115mb update...

And yes, I'm using the capped and uncapped normal IS accounts, not the business ones.

As HavocXphere mentioned it's probably localised. Perhaps a certain area of Cape Town. Might even be a single telkom exchange giving hassles?
 
hyarion said:
I'm in Cape Town in the northern suburbs. Using IS accounts. Never had a problem with SSH or even vpn's over IS accounts.

As HavocXphere mentioned it's probably localised. Perhaps a certain area of Cape Town. Might even be a single telkom exchange giving hassles?
Click to expand...

All the people I have spoken to who have this issue so far seem to be in the northern suburbs.

It cannot be a single exchange, as the issue occurs on the IS backbone but not Telkom Internet, and also on multiple exchanges (which support different sync speeds).

The issues also almost always stop very close to 5pm, which is far too consistent not to be shaping.
 
DeFi said:
All the people I have spoken to who have this issue so far seem to be in the northern suburbs.

It cannot be a single exchange, as the issue occurs on the IS backbone but not Telkom Internet, and also on multiple exchanges (which support different sync speeds).

The issues also almost always stop very close to 5pm, which is far too consistent not to be shaping.
Click to expand...

dude this is easily resolved. buy yourself 1GB WA unshaped and use that for testing. You will soon figure out where your "problem" lies
 
I am using IS right now, and I can SSH with no problems to anywhere.
 
techead said:
dude this is easily resolved. buy yourself 1GB WA unshaped and use that for testing. You will soon figure out where your "problem" lies
Click to expand...

You quote me explaining that it is specific to the IS backbone since a Telkom Internet account works perfectly, yet you ignore that fact, or are you just blindly advertising for WA?
 
Last edited:
ghoti said:
I am using IS right now, and I can SSH with no problems to anywhere.
Click to expand...

During the reasonably brief period I used an actual IS account today, I have not experienced that issue, but it happens intermittently and can take an open TCP socket connection such as SSH some time before it occurs.

This is why it very rarely affects HTTP connections, as they are generally not persistent, though I have observed persistent HTTP connections such as long polling AJAX connections get affected at times.
 
Code: 
Tracing route to mybroadband.co.za [41.203.21.137]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1     8 ms     7 ms     7 ms  196-210-146-129.dynamic.isadsl.co.za [196.210.146.129]
  2    33 ms    35 ms    34 ms  196.38.73.113
  3    30 ms    30 ms    28 ms  cdsl2-rba-vl150.ip.isnet.net [196.38.73.9]
  4   103 ms   106 ms   103 ms  168.209.1.140
  5   105 ms   108 ms   116 ms  196.26.0.130
  6    38 ms    38 ms    38 ms  41-208-29-126.mtnns.net [41.208.29.126]
  7    97 ms    97 ms   101 ms  jh-cr-2.za--jh-pr-1.za.mtnns.net [196.44.0.223]
  8   110 ms   109 ms   110 ms  196.44.31.99
  9    54 ms    53 ms    52 ms  ge4-0-0.gw17.jnb6.za.mtnbusiness.net [196.30.1.37]
 10   108 ms   104 ms   101 ms  vlan9.hr3.jnb6.za.mtnbusiness.net [196.30.156.136]
 11    41 ms    40 ms    42 ms  core-router1.jnb2.host-h.net [196.30.213.108]
 12   111 ms   112 ms   108 ms  41.72.136.53
 13   102 ms   148 ms   106 ms  mybroadband.co.za [41.203.21.137]

Northern Suburbs, Afrihost. Rather inconsistent latency until around 5PM +-
 
DeFi said:
Good day everyone,

For many months now, there has been a serious issue on the IS network, that not only affects IS ADSL, but also other ISPs who use the IS backbone, such as Afrihost, and is not limited to uncapped accounts.

I find it really hard to believe no one else on MyBB has noticed this, as I have spoken to a few people who live in Cape Town, who have experienced the same kind of behaviour, perhaps it only affects certain areas?
Click to expand...
Does using IS blind your vision of the search function. IS shaping and etc,etc,etc,been discovered and discussed to the nth degree on MyBB. Maybe your IS account is so bad it doesn't load the search function...
 
Gauteng, East Rand - While I'm not normally using the connection during the day (unless I'm on leave), I have experienced this exact behaviour doing various things.
 
DeFi said:
During the reasonably brief period I used an actual IS account today, I have not experienced that issue, but it happens intermittently and can take an open TCP socket connection such as SSH some time before it occurs.

This is why it very rarely affects HTTP connections, as they are generally not persistent, though I have observed persistent HTTP connections such as long polling AJAX connections get affected at times.
Click to expand...

I have IS uncapped at home and at work. Also have Cell C and Vodacom, and other than some Seacom cable break issues. I dont have SSH problems. Your problem seems to be localized.

Oh I should add... if you are using IS uncapped and your star rating has dropped, this may impact your SSH services. Since I dont use my line for big downloads (except games and game updates). I am always on 4 or 5 stars.
 
Wasp_21 said:
Does using IS blind your vision of the search function. IS shaping and etc,etc,etc,been discovered and discussed to the nth degree on MyBB. Maybe your IS account is so bad it doesn't load the search function...
Click to expand...

I did some brief searching and did not find anything detailed enough to matter, but the search functionality is quite limited due to the fact that searching for words that are less than 3 characters long, such as "IS", is not allowed at all.
 
ghoti said:
if you are using IS uncapped and your star rating has dropped, this may impact your SSH services. Since I dont use my line for big downloads (except games and game updates). I am always on 4 or 5 stars.
Click to expand...

This is not limited to uncapped accounts, as I mentioned in my original post.
 
Please do not reply unless you actually are experiencing an issue, or have something useful to contribute to the discussion. That way people who actually do have an issue will be able to see who else is experiencing issues, on which ISPs and in which areas, without having to read through 100 pages of irrelevant posts.

Thanks.
 
Internet Solutions in East London has no problem, so your problem is localized. Enjoy.
 
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