MWEB Uncapped ADSL - Official Q & A

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SabreWolfy said:
Following on from my previous reply... I think that there may be the (false) expectation that a 4mbps line, for example, means that you can expect constant transfer speeds of nothing less that 400kBps, always and for ever, no matter where you are downloading from, what the other demands on the network infrastructure are, what the weather conditions are, regardless of power failures in India or fibre breakages. All I'm pointing out is that there are many points of failure and points of congestion and points of performance-loss.

As a purely trivial example: my pings to www.mybroadband.co.za are in the region of 135ms. Other users on these forums get pings as low as 11ms; that's an order of magnitude difference. I concede that a "slow" ping to a local site is not the same as slow downloads, but I'm illustrating the point that there is and always will be variance in the system, and that the expectation of maximum speeds all the time is simply unrealistic. Maybe throttling or failures are in play at the source. Maybe there is a local failure somewhere. Maybe the constant rain over the last few weeks has caused some link in the system to perform at less than optimal speed.
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I agree entirely, and must point out that many of the comments in this thread lack the basic information necessary to make any kind of response. Without being too technical, these should at a minimum include:
1. Location. Since all Mweb traffic from CT currently first goes via Jhb, which has a minium ping time of 30ms.
2. Site destination. Ping times to the EU are > 200ms, and some sites in the US can be up to 400ms.
3. Traffic type: HTTP/image/torrent, etc. All of these have differing technology and shaping.
4. User operating system/browser/package. I have a particular problem with IE6 and international sites (latency).
5. Time of day, network load, etc. Outside the users control, but affecting everybody.
6. Temporary factors such as nework breaks.

Any comment about performance which doesn't mention at least these basic factors is just 'noise' or 'opinion', and doesn't add to the collective wisdom, which is the whole point of a forum...
 
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Some douche's must be abusing their work lines over the weekend because im back to getting 15KBps down again....ON A SATURDAY
 
Oh yeah - I'm not at all saying that people should be expecting massive speed all the time. The comment about "best effort" was more related to everything in SA rather than just Mweb. SA consumers seem to have this "Thank you so much for giving me your product!" way of thinking.

There are so many factors to consider with speed it's crazy - but if you've been hitting 30k all the time and then suddenly the max you can get is 15k and it stays like that, chances are the ISP is doing something.
 
AntiThesis said:
There are so many factors to consider with speed it's crazy - but if you've been hitting 30k all the time and then suddenly the max you can get is 15k and it stays like that, chances are the ISP is doing something.
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The MWeb representative said they were going to migrate more existing users to the new network. I'm not sure if it happened this week, but that would certainly increase traffic, and shaping would produce slower speeds for low-priority protocols.
 
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Gordon_R said:
The MWeb representative said they were going to migrate more existing users to the new network. I'm not sure if it happened this week, but that would certainly increase traffic, and shaping would produce slower speeds for low-priority protocols.
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Yeah but stuff like http should (theoretically) still be running at full speed since it's a priority service.
 
what are the speeds like ATM? i am getting no more than 130Kbs on news server.
 
AntiThesis said:
There are so many factors to consider with speed it's crazy - but if you've been hitting 30k all the time and then suddenly the max you can get is 15k and it stays like that, chances are the ISP is doing something.
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AntiThesis said:
Yeah but stuff like http should (theoretically) still be running at full speed since it's a priority service.
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Well, your comment didn't specify HTTP, which reinforces my point about clarity! Contention ratios come into play at some point, and the other points I mentioned (browser, latency, congestion) all apply.

I'm just dreaming, but imagine if we could have a 'traffic graph' like they do for CINX and JINX (public network interchanges).
http://stats.cinx.net.za/showtotal.php
 
Gordon_R said:
Well, your comment didn't specify HTTP, which reinforces my point about clarity! Contention ratios come into play at some point, and the other points I mentioned (browser, latency, congestion) all apply.

I'm just dreaming, but imagine if we could have a 'traffic graph' like they do for CINX and JINX (public network interchanges).
http://stats.cinx.net.za/showtotal.php
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That would be pretty cool yeah. I know I didn't specify HTTP :D I must remember to clarify - it does help. It's mainly when I think faster than I write ;)

I'm going to be setting up my proxy today so I can at least measure totals from all over the house and get an idea of exactly how throttled things are :) Should be fun.
 
killadoob said:
Sabre reboot your router dude, my pings were also 80-100 to mybb and games.saix.net but a reboot sorted it out.
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w00t!

Code: 
--- www.mybroadband.co.za ping statistics ---
10 packets transmitted, 10 received, 0% packet loss, time 9017ms
rtt min/[B]avg[/B]/max/mdev = 25.761/[B]29.278[/B]/35.836/3.053 ms

~30ms << 135ms :)
 
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AntiThesis said:
Oh yeah - I'm not at all saying that people should be expecting massive speed all the time. The comment about "best effort" was more related to everything in SA rather than just Mweb. SA consumers seem to have this "Thank you so much for giving me your product!" way of thinking.

There are so many factors to consider with speed it's crazy - but if you've been hitting 30k all the time and then suddenly the max you can get is 15k and it stays like that, chances are the ISP is doing something.
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Fair enough. I agree that "best effort" should not be used as an excuse for poor service.
 
I just pulled a 220mb file off megaupload at speeds between 410-430kBps... Took just over 9 minutes..
 
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question, does shaping lift over weekends and in the evenings with Mweb? I need to download from Rapidshare
 
Sorry if this has been asked already. If I get the 384kb uncapped, will online gaming be throttled or shaped at all during work hours.
 
eafreak said:
question, does shaping lift over weekends and in the evenings with Mweb? I need to download from Rapidshare
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shaunvw said:
Sorry if this has been asked already. If I get the 384kb uncapped, will online gaming be throttled or shaped at all during work hours.
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My understanding (and I'm sure I'll be corrected if I'm wrong) is that a shaped account is always shaped -- you can't change that unless you change to an unshaped (business) account. However, the effect of this shaping is determined by the load on the network. So at 9am on a Monday morning, I expect that http and email traffic will have the highest priority because of the load on the network. At 9pm on a Friday night, I expect that the priority given to http and email will be lowered (because there is less of that traffic on the network) and hence other protocols will move faster.

Regarding gaming -- I posted in this thread a while back something I found elsewhere which showed that MWeb removed the word "gaming" from their description for the uncapped service, suggesting it was not aimed at gamers. At least once before I've heard reference to an upcoming "gaming" account from MWeb, but nothing has officially been announced AFAIK.
 
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Well its Sat, and I am getting only 10kb/s download on rapidshare.. I am on a 384 account.. is this normal?

edit: looking at stats, I notice its not a good 10kb/s either.. its going between 3 and 10 the whole time.
 
eafreak said:
Well its Sat, and I am getting only 10kb/s download on rapidshare.. I am on a 384 account.. is this normal?

edit: looking at stats, I notice its not a good 10kb/s either.. its going between 3 and 10 the whole time.
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Same with all of us. Getting very slow download speeds this weekend
 
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