Gaming & ADSL

[Xargon]

So we Pay limbs for the service, we pay souls for capping, now we get shaped to perfection?

What next?? Oh, I forgot.. pay per Gig... omw ppl, this is getting out of hand :/

As much as I would try find ANY good in all this, I fail to get it... cant we at least decide on what we want to spend out precious gigs on per month?

If I want to play Quake I on some hidden server in country X, then let me for pete's sake, I paid blood money for that bandwidth and service!

C'mon Telkom, at least grant us unrestricted access to what we want to do with our cap.

 

[Clipse]

Clipse - Sorry if I sound ignorant - but by "packet shaped" do you mean that the packet is inspected as to what kind of protocol it is really carrying?

If that is so - all we need is to design a deviously clever p2p application that uses http to transfer data.

Mmmm - now to find some time... I wonder if port shaping is used anywhare else in the world?

If that can be done, I suppose it might work. Have never seen something of that sort tho, and the packet inspection methods im not 100% sure of.

yes port sharing is used in ALOT of countries, but you get generous unshaped/less contented packages aswell,

 

[Kabraal]

I really don’t care about the technical bits or what stands in Telkom’s disclaimers. Point is that since world of warcarft was released, I had extreme fast latencies of 350-400ms and a very stable connection. Now all of a sudden, out of thin air, it’s done for…oor en verby…goebaai. What is Telkoms congestion ratio…16:1? They’ll prolly ramp it up to 100:1 with all these price “decreases” They can really keep the line rental costs the same imo. They should rather focus to reduce and improve the cap cost and service…

 

[gkm]

P.s Is it legal to open and view peoples packets? I mean there could be some really Personal Info in there at times
If so then we need some Good Encryption, Muahha

Cheers.

Your IP packet's header is inspected at every router it goes through to see where it should go next.

If you want your data to be secure, you need to send it via a IPSEC VPN tunnel. That way the data portion in encrypted. Obviously, both sides of the connection need to use it, so it will not help for WoW packets.

Edit: I should add that international VPN traffic is also heavily shapped, or was when I last used a shaped ADSL account two years ago. I got something like 0.5 KB/s during the day on a 512 connection.

NukeCap may be an option, since it is a local VPN, so does not suffer from the problems of international VPN.

 

[Kabraal]

So my point is that this problem surfaced over night. So one, some where had to push a button or cut a cable to make this happen and I would like to know why. Now I still pay R700 pm for a though put of “5” MB per hour. Again shaped vs unshaped, capped vs uncapped, national vs international, HTTP vs p2p2, ying vs yang, I don’t care, this is a seriously bad service for the price…

 

[gkm]

So my point is that this problem surfaced over night.

I wonder (actually I do not wonder) if any new bandwidth has been added on the international link to cover those 30Gb accounts. At R199 an account, some of the heavy downloaders are probably buying a couple of accounts. And new international bandwidth is also probably being added slower than new general ADSL singups, which means the shaped traffic like gaming, which gets the bottom of the barrel, now probably finds the barrel pretty empty.

 

[francoistk]

Hey, Some people i work with have also been experiencing this lately specifcly with WoW and only from August 1st. I believe either telkom changed something on the port shaping they do. Or something is broken somewhere and they don't want to tell anyone about it.

 

[Soulburner]

Well on news24 there is a topic about telkom. They are making threats there that they want to charge a monthly fee for adsl or they will cut the people off. So i wont be surprized that the latency problems everyone is having is because of that. Until they get their way they are going to screw everyone around with their adsl.

.......or something like that.

 

[pgrobler]

Let 'em know

But why m8 i just cant understand why??

Why not do a traceroute to whatever gaming server you are connecting to, and mail this to [email protected]. I've done it this weekend, due to suddenly being unable to play TSO.

Contact them, hammer them, until they respond. When I mailed again this morning and asked if anything was up, they said they'll follow up and let me know.

Still waiting, though.

If we all hammer them with support requests maybe they'll consider looking at what's wrong.

My latency is <20ms up to a specific machine in the telkom-ipnet.co.za network, where it jumps by about 300ms.

Peet

 

[Clipse]

No SAIX/TELKOM tech support will go and manually route your shaped account over a wonderfull unshaped pipe. They will just awww at u in amazement.

 

[Kabraal]

Read the article on news24…who cares about the damn price, please do increase it! Just give me service for what I’m paying for. What the point in having R50 pm ADSL but you can only open 4 text based websites living next to a telkom exchange. Which by the way seems to be the case now…

 

[Zardoz]

Isn't that 300ms jump when the addres you are tracing goes over the big dam (International) peet.

 

[EchoDown]

Telkom is under pressure.....you should hear the "tech" support theyre in a frenzy lol
and apparently adsl has nothing to do with gaming

 

[Novacloud]

I am also a fellow WOW player that has been getting crap Lat....Yesterday was my all time high of 29 460 ..yes that is right....I am to pissed of with Telkom to bitch and moan about everything they are doing wrong and nothing they are doing right.
Most of you have probably seen this link but it always makes me relize wat F*&ks Telfuk really is.

http://gotblog.za.net/archives/2005/05/snails_that_are.html.

 

[sburrell]

This has probebly been documented somewhere before already, but you have to look at facts about the SAIX network in south africa. The WoW servers are located in Europe. Telkom only has one direct line over the SAT cables to Europe which only runs at 45mb/s. And this line is only ever used for unshaped accounts or Business users. The rest of us Joes are redirected to the U.S, and from there driected to Europe, equalling stupid latency times. One of my family works for a ISP in S.A and they have actually told me these cables running under the sea are actually only running at 40% of their capacity, cos Telkom knows running them at these caps earns them more $, cos increaseing them to 100% cap would cost them to much money. UUnet has the same problem, SAT cables are expensive.

I myself dont play WoW, but i do play EVE:Online which is even bigger than WoW. My ping times to their servers are usually around 400ms which is still quite bad and lag is a big problem.

Concerning the dial-up issue, Dialup users imidiately get full internation bandwidth because of the price they pay, as does ISDN, so latency is usually around 200ms - 300ms for them.

But i must admit Telkom is keeping South Africa in the dark ages because of their failure to upgrade lines and bring them in line with the rest of the world. Ive been living in the UK for the past 7 years and have had a standard packagae of adl from BT for £27 a month( thats R290 for everything, Telkom = R500 + ISP costs) and my pings were around 13ms to the EVE servers, and when i was at University, they were 1ms or nothing.

I sympothise with the rest of you now that im back in South Africa, but nothing is going to change until Telkom is properly deregulated, and there is more than one public tier 1 telecom provider. (In the UK there are 3 BT, C&W, NTL although BT owns over 50% of the lines)

 

[Kabraal]

I really wish I could have a 400ms lag in WoW instead of 4000-15000ms

 

[sburrell]

Take a look at this website and youll get a general idea what south africa is lacking: http://www.bulldogbroadband.com/

 

[Leia]

What I fail to understand is: why where I used to get a 700-800 ms ping to the WOW EU servers a month ago, I now get 5000-10 000 ms. What changed and why? Also, will the attrocious pings remain? I'm also a bit curious, how are things on unshaped looking like at the moment, specifically in WOW?

 

[Kalvaer]

Lastly might I add that while patching the game (P2P), which is also done from the same WOW network on which I play, I get download speeds of 50KBps and transfer about 20MB in 10mins. Why this speed does not translate when I’m playing the game (for which I require only a mere 2MB per hour)…I do not know…

Your download speed you are getting there has nothing to do with your latency. Even though you are getting it in at 50kbps its still arriving a few seconds late. That is what is effecting you in WoW. Clipse is also very right that your downloads and upload is more in the region of 5 - 15 megs and hour. Last night I think i hit 29 megs after an hours worth of a 50 horde vs 50 Alliance PVP Session

The WoW servers are located in Europe.

Hmm depends on where you play, I play on the USA servers so thats not the case

I myself dont play WoW, but i do play EVE:Online which is even bigger than WoW. My ping times to their servers are usually around 400ms which is still quite bad and lag is a big problem.

Well I do BETA testing for a gaming site where the admin just happens to be a long time friend in the USA, for this I have to do articles for the site and reviews ETC... EVE does not have more players than WoW has.. its gotten HUGE! especially with the new servers going up in Japan.

Anyway as to the latency Issue. I feel all of your pain as I am obviously also a fellow MMO gamer. Last month there was a heated debate on these forums since it seems end of month any person who relies on Latency is pretty much screwed. The P2P junkies say they have nothing to do with it however..

If anyone tells me to get ISDN if I want Latency.. please **** *** right now! People all over the world have decent latency's using ADSL except us in SA. I say screw the 30 gig caps and give us all unshaped!. That way we are all on equal footing and if you want to download 30 gigs a month pay for it.. because right now I'm paying for a service I'm not getting...Even the Kangaroo boys in Auzzie get better pings on ADSL and they moan about having 350 ms ping spikes to the US's WoW servers... I wish!

I gaved in last month and got a Nukecap account, as lewstherin mentioned it is sad that I have to get another option in order to play. Nukecap just proves to me that playing on ADSL is viable with the South African ADSL system. My ping rate at its best is around 280ms on nukecap now and usally averages at about 400-450ms. At the end of the month .. well seems even nukecap is effected but my pings are around 600-700. Which is still one hell of a lot more playable than the 4k ms pings from my ISP's normal shaped ADSL

 

[Kalvaer]

Isn't that 300ms jump when the addres you are tracing goes over the big dam (International) peet.

That what it seems like.. though check the forums for the trace routes from american or britsh ADSL users to other places all over the world.. the 300 ms ping is ONLY when leaving or arriving in South Africa. There is also a post around where the speeds where calculated and doubled for inaccuracy.. its less than 300 ms

Telkom is under pressure.....you should hear the "tech" support theyre in a frenzy lol
and apparently adsl has nothing to do with gaming

Has anyone seen the new telkom ADSL add in the new FHM... Check it out... They must not advertise something if they say it is not for gaming.. or else putting two women with joysticks in their hands with the words do what you want when to want (on those lines i cant remember it exactly) is false advertising!