MWEB Uncapped Subscribers Feedback

[Will@MWEB]

That's a topic for much debate greg, however the short answer is no, not at this stage. I don't want to get into a lengthy discussion about the nature of P2P content, but loosely speaking let's call it bulk media content being shared between many users in a one to many, or many to many fashion. (I spoke with a customer the other day who was consistently transferring between 1.6 - 1.8Gb an hour of 'research material' ).

In this sense NNTP, 'traditional' bittorrent, and the rising popularity of dropbox and one-click hosting type mechanisms all constitute P2P usage. In terms of shaping this means that they are all given the same classification and therefore share the same bandwidth pool in terms of available capacity.

As such I can't actually see why a user accessing material from an NNTP source with sufficient capacity, would not be able to achieve the same throughput as a user downloading well seeded torrents.

 

[Osiris85]

2.9KBps on torrents using a 4Mbps line.........liewe Jissis Mweb

 

[Flip123]

2.9KBps on torrents using a 4Mbps line.........liewe Jissis Mweb

I am downloading at over 200kbps on a mweb 4mb shaped account and a 3mb telkom line at the moment using utorrent..... i think you are downloading a low seeded torrent or your pc is wack?

 

[Mike Hoxbig]

I am downloading at over 200kbps on a mweb 4mb shaped account and a 3mb telkom line at the moment using utorrent..... i think you are downloading a low seeded torrent or your pc is wack?

kbps or kBps? I wish you guys would get this right once and for all because it's a big difference.

 

[Raz00m]

what's the reason why it has been like this since last week only?

 

[Freshy-ZN]

Hi Everyone

We have provided very clear explanations about how shaping works in the past. I've checked back through posts just to clarify where the concept of dynamic was brought up so that I can understand where the confusion is coming from: This is the point I believe you are referring to:



This was said in the context of someone asking us to predict P2P speeds and it is a completely accurate response.

At no point have we made any secret of the fact that bandwidth allocations are adjusted at different times of the day. There are various timebands set during business hours and after hours which control the increases and decreases in the overall amount of available P2P capacity.

Users of P2P will then contend the available bandwidth for these services amongst themselves.

In other words we do not set fixed speeds for P2P, we set fixed capacity. If you get lower speeds, it's because more people are engaging in these activities.

So will you see a drop in P2P speeds at certain times of the day? Absolutely. When the capacity allocated to P2P is decreased and everyone still has their torrents queued up the speeds will decrease accordingly.

We may also, at our discretion, make dynamic adjustments to these timebands and the size of the P2P pools based on network performance and usage trends.

This also serves to highlight why adhering to the acceptable usage policy is so important.

Intentionally obfuscating the nature of your downloads by passing your P2P traffic through other services you are not only putting pressure on the network by giving high priority to traffic which should be low priority. You are also creating a false impression of the amount of P2P usage there is on the network, which affects our ability to accurately forecast how much allocation is needed for these activities going forward.

I trust this serves to clear up any misunderstanding that may have arisen about the manner in which shaping policies can be considered to be dynamic.

Kind Regards
Will

Will

This is all blah blah blah to me. Not to be disrespectful but Im not sure if you are trying to justify something? People are not only complaining about P2P in fact a significant amount are saying plain old browsing is up the pole, youtube is not streaming fast enough to watch on a 4MB line, IMAP is battling etc etc and in my case all this happens late at night and weekends!. Can you give a detailed explanation of this please??

 

[Lounger]

Hi Everyone

We have provided very clear explanations about how shaping works in the past. I've checked back through posts just to clarify where the concept of dynamic was brought up so that I can understand where the confusion is coming from: This is the point I believe you are referring to:



This was said in the context of someone asking us to predict P2P speeds and it is a completely accurate response.

At no point have we made any secret of the fact that bandwidth allocations are adjusted at different times of the day. There are various timebands set during business hours and after hours which control the increases and decreases in the overall amount of available P2P capacity.

Users of P2P will then contend the available bandwidth for these services amongst themselves.

In other words we do not set fixed speeds for P2P, we set fixed capacity. If you get lower speeds, it's because more people are engaging in these activities.

So will you see a drop in P2P speeds at certain times of the day? Absolutely. When the capacity allocated to P2P is decreased and everyone still has their torrents queued up the speeds will decrease accordingly.

We may also, at our discretion, make dynamic adjustments to these timebands and the size of the P2P pools based on network performance and usage trends.

This also serves to highlight why adhering to the acceptable usage policy is so important.

Intentionally obfuscating the nature of your downloads by passing your P2P traffic through other services you are not only putting pressure on the network by giving high priority to traffic which should be low priority. You are also creating a false impression of the amount of P2P usage there is on the network, which affects our ability to accurately forecast how much allocation is needed for these activities going forward.

I trust this serves to clear up any misunderstanding that may have arisen about the manner in which shaping policies can be considered to be dynamic.

Kind Regards
Will

If there are more people "engaged in these activities", then you clearly have more customers. Why not increase capacity to allow for that, instead of trying to squeeze and make villains or scapegoats of anyone using P2P. The "fixed capacity" you speak of, is not keeping pace with customer load, which is why you keep increasing shaping and implement it in areas where you did not before. This is why games are no longer a decent experience on MWEB.

Customers have bought a service that keeps shrinking.

 

[DCBloodHound]

It's even slower than yesterday.at least mybb was loading fine yesterday.now it takes like 1min to load a page instead of the usual 3sec

 

[gregmcc]

In this sense NNTP, 'traditional' bittorrent, and the rising popularity of dropbox and one-click hosting type mechanisms all constitute P2P usage.

I don't agree there. How can nntp possibly be classed as p2p traffic? The only reason that you have clumped them all together is to throttle all the heavily utilized protocols.

 

[Flojo]

Will

This is all blah blah blah to me. Not to be disrespectful but Im not sure if you are trying to justify something? People are not only complaining about P2P in fact a significant amount are saying plain old browsing is up the pole, youtube is not streaming fast enough to watch on a 4MB line, IMAP is battling etc etc and in my case all this happens late at night and weekends!. Can you give a detailed explanation of this please??

Thats what I was left with thinking. Actually reminded me of that scene in the Matrix, where the architect goes off on a tangent, like a bumbling buffoon with a lengthy discussion and Neo simply replying with "you haven't answered my question".

So Will. Why is HTTP traffic performing so poorly. It all nice of you going back checking posts, how about checking posts that matter.

 

[Flojo]

Just an extra thought.

I read this post the other day. And given all the woos we have been having with Mweb lately, and esp how they tried to block us from viewing seclist.org when we got hacked .... it shows and what we dealing with.

http://saulkarl.blogspot.com/2010/11/good-bad-and-ugly-marketing-of-us.html

Lesson Learned
Some companies like Linode are technically superior. This is a big marketing win because it gives potential customers a safe feeling that their businesses are in good hands. Some companies are technically challenged. But that doesn't matter. What matters is companies can take a step forward, own the problems and solve them, instead of ignoring them or telling their customers to go away. Some companies just want to close sales using whatever means and simply won't listen to what their customers are saying. Whatever these different companies do, it has a big impact on their company's brand images. Potential customers may never be their customers. These potential customers may tell their partners and friends never to patronize these companies. Losing 1 potential customer can mean losing 10 more potential customers.

Would have been nice if Mweb was like a ZA Linode.

 

[Flip123]

I don't understand what you guys are complaining about seriously...the adsl we have now is much better than 1 year ago and i am sure it will continue to get better....today i downloaded 13gb of data today through p2p on a shaped mweb account using utorrent and a 3mb line... i think thats a decent amount for a shaped account and at a speed of 200-300KBps and a total of 81,7546 GB (so far)this month so i am happy with mweb
the only problem i have is with the latency of wow... my friend using iburst has around 300-400ms! never more but i always have 400+ normally around 700ms and that just makes gaming no fun
but i know that test were being done late Friday night to try and identify the problem with the latency to the wow servers so mweb is at least trying to do something which they are not obligated to do

 

[MFour]

I don't understand what you guys are complaining about seriously...the adsl we have now is much better than 1 year ago and i am sure it will continue to get better....today i downloaded 13gb of data today through p2p on a shaped mweb account using utorrent and a 3mb line... i think thats a decent amount for a shaped account and at a speed of 200-300KBps and a total of 81,7546 GB (so far)this month so i am happy with mweb
the only problem i have is with the latency of wow... my friend using iburst has around 300-400ms! never more but i always have 400+ normally around 700ms and that just makes gaming no fun
but i know that test were being done late Friday night to try and identify the problem with the latency to the wow servers so mweb is at least trying to do something which they are not obligated to do

Flip123 that's part of the problem, whilst you were able to download at decent speeds, many of us simply can't for some not very clear reason. I only use NNTP from a paid subscribed server whitch has no capcity problems, yet my average download speed for the day has been 11kBps on a 512 shaped account. So whilst you were getting great speeds, others are seeing speeds reminisant of 56k dial-up connections. I had the same, Friday night my NNTP flew from around 23h00 to 08h00, whilst others complained about bad speeds. Now Will's explenation of network usage per area makes sense, but it all seems to be just to random.

Anyway, it is clear that the MWEB Uncapped Shaped packages won't improve until MWEB has more capacity. So I guess we have to (1) accept it for what it is, or (2) move on to try and find something more suitable. MWEB has never promised consistent high speed for what they term "P2P" usage, so we can't really moan about it too much, BUT the http issues that some experience, well that is a different story.

 

[Raz00m]

Hi Everyone

We have provided very clear explanations about how shaping works in the past. I've checked back through posts just to clarify where the concept of dynamic was brought up so that I can understand where the confusion is coming from: This is the point I believe you are referring to:



This was said in the context of someone asking us to predict P2P speeds and it is a completely accurate response.

At no point have we made any secret of the fact that bandwidth allocations are adjusted at different times of the day. There are various timebands set during business hours and after hours which control the increases and decreases in the overall amount of available P2P capacity.

Users of P2P will then contend the available bandwidth for these services amongst themselves.

In other words we do not set fixed speeds for P2P, we set fixed capacity. If you get lower speeds, it's because more people are engaging in these activities.

So will you see a drop in P2P speeds at certain times of the day? Absolutely. When the capacity allocated to P2P is decreased and everyone still has their torrents queued up the speeds will decrease accordingly.

We may also, at our discretion, make dynamic adjustments to these timebands and the size of the P2P pools based on network performance and usage trends.

This also serves to highlight why adhering to the acceptable usage policy is so important.

Intentionally obfuscating the nature of your downloads by passing your P2P traffic through other services you are not only putting pressure on the network by giving high priority to traffic which should be low priority. You are also creating a false impression of the amount of P2P usage there is on the network, which affects our ability to accurately forecast how much allocation is needed for these activities going forward.

I trust this serves to clear up any misunderstanding that may have arisen about the manner in which shaping policies can be considered to be dynamic.

Kind Regards
Will

How does this explain some people downloading at good constant speeds during any time of day peak and off-peak vs me and lots of others experiencing the above trend you mention
Please could anyone shed some light as i am not understanding too well.

 

[SSung]

what's the reason why it has been like this since last week only?

I'm also in Cape Town (Durbanville) & I have noticed a significant drop in MWEB's performance since about a week ago. Newsgroups are unconnectable (not even slow) for 20/24 hours/day. Torrents suck ass all day long and http downloads have to be resumed constantly.

 

[Hecate]

Used to be able to stream anything no problem but atm it keeps buffering >.< and I swear one of the mweb guys told me that streaming was never going to be shaped?

 

[SSung]

I don't understand what you guys are complaining about seriously...the adsl we have now is much better than 1 year ago and i am sure it will continue to get better....today i downloaded 13gb of data today through p2p on a shaped mweb account using utorrent and a 3mb line... i think thats a decent amount for a shaped account and at a speed of 200-300KBps and a total of 81,7546 GB (so far)this month so i am happy with mweb

I have PM'd you a list of what I need from P2P for the next week or so. Please reply with your address so that I can send you some removable storage in order for you to deliver my data to me. Thank you in advance.

 

[Lounger]

I don't understand what you guys are complaining about seriously...the adsl we have now is much better than 1 year ago and i am sure it will continue to get better....today i downloaded 13gb of data today through p2p on a shaped mweb account using utorrent and a 3mb line... i think thats a decent amount for a shaped account and at a speed of 200-300KBps and a total of 81,7546 GB (so far)this month so i am happy with mweb
the only problem i have is with the latency of wow... my friend using iburst has around 300-400ms! never more but i always have 400+ normally around 700ms and that just makes gaming no fun
but i know that test were being done late Friday night to try and identify the problem with the latency to the wow servers so mweb is at least trying to do something which they are not obligated to do

So where did you put this 81Terabytes of data my 5 poster friend?

So games are out and "don't understand what you guys are complaining about".
Seriously ... which other nick are you using?

 

[Flip123]

So where did you put this 81Terabytes of data my 5 poster friend?

So games are out and "don't understand what you guys are complaining about".
Seriously ... which other nick are you using?

note the use of a comma you know the thing that looks like , , , , and i lost the info to my previous account on these forums as i have not used it for a long time

 

[Mike Hoxbig]

So where did you put this 81Terabytes of data my 5 poster friend?

So games are out and "don't understand what you guys are complaining about".
Seriously ... which other nick are you using?

I think he means 81 point 7546 GB.