MWEB Uncapped Subscribers Feedback

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Will, you didn't mention anything about HTTP shaping in your reply to Marlin but you did refer to everything else he said.

Is HTTP being shaped? Yes/No?
 
Okay

As much as i do or have moaned above, and i know not everybody is goign to share my sentiments here, but i received a surprise call from Mweb now, they are asking for details on the Music production site i am going to be using to stream tutorials/live masterclass sessions from next week, they want to assist and try accommodate my needs for this. So Thank you Mweb, i mean that sincerely.

However i do think that there is a serious problem at the moment with regards to HTTP traffic, and now that Will@Mweb has mentioned that there is supposedly no shaping on youtube.com, this leaves me even more reason to believe something is wrong.

I am sure we are all in agreement that we took on the 4 meg uncapped knowing that there is shaping in business hours, and im sure we are all in agreement that we accept this. But after business hours (except between 1am and 5am), there is still a problem somewhere.

I will provide feedback on my experience when i start my course on monday. And Again, thank you mweb for taking my needs into consideration
 
Will@MWEB said:
Hi Marlin

I'm sorry to hear that you're not happy with the product. We do classify traffic from VPS providers who allow torrentflux, or other such mechanisms to turn p2p traffic into FTP/HTTP as p2p sites which means that you are right, this traffic will be shaped. If you require an unshaped experience on these activities then please consider moving to one of our unshaped products.

Youtube however is not shaped.

Kind Regards
Will
Click to expand...

Will,

With all due respect, I think I'm being given the runaround.... my http traffic IS shaped, iTunes traffic IS shaped (takes a couple of hours to download a 100MB podcast - HOURS!), that's not to mention the horrific performance of streaming stuff from the iTunes Store, YOUTUBE IS definitely shaped; 480p video buffers to a point of being unwatchable and of late 360p video has a 5-10 seconds (sometimes longer) buffer as well???? It takes a few seconds to open web pages, where previously pages would open instantly! Your technician said Youtube was shaped, please feel free to listen to your call logs. He was all too eager to tell me about torrent shaping and was not interested in hearing about my general user experience. Terrible terrible service MWEB! I can appreciate torrent shaping, by all means, but surely the rest of the web experience should not be affected... or has MWEB now introduced punitive measures?? I find it appalling that my Vodacom 3G service is exponentially better performing than my DSL! My further irritation stems from the fact that there is a denial campaign going on within MWEB, when the truth of the matter is that there was excellent performance prior to say a month ago when things went pear shaped!

Youtube SHAPED? iTunes SHAPED? HTTP Shaped? Even local sites??? Online gaming is a joke on MWEB!

It is unfortunate that this exploding thread has not really made a difference; it is apparent that MWEB has no commitment to customer service and a quality general user experience. I have been BS'd to infinity, I think that South African's are so used to disgusting service that MWEB may just get away with this! Is that the strategy?! The question I find myself asking is why on earth do I have a 4MB account when at the current levels of performance a 56K connection would suffice because apparently e-mail is the only protocol that MWEB will allow me!

This is REALLY bad form MWEB!

Disgusted!

M
 
FYI, I have created a new thread about the discrepancy between DBN/JHB performance and Cape Town performance. I felt the issue was getting lost amongst the other unrelated problems here. Furthermore, I've hit a brick wall with MWEB support, as they refuse to look past my total usage and investigate what is an obvious problem affecting EVERY user in Durban / JHB, regardless of their usage. You can read it here and hopefully someone else with "acceptable usage" can get through to MWEB support and get them to fix it.
 
PerfectBlue said:
Will, you didn't mention anything about HTTP shaping in your reply to Marlin but you did refer to everything else he said.

Is HTTP being shaped? Yes/No?
Click to expand...

Apologies if I was unclear on this point, we don't shape based purely on ports, which is the much older (perhaps you might say traditional) method of doing this. The traffic managers we use carry out deep packet inspection which evaluates the signature of the packet and determines the traffic category based on ports, destination and various other parameters.

As such we have a general assurance level for HTTP traffic, but you will find that specific sites, such as one click hosting providers, or those that belong to seedboxes, or VPS providers that allow torrents, will fall into the p2p category, regardless of which protocol you are attempting to use to retrieve content from these destinations.

this is nothing new and has in fact been the topic of lengthy discussion on these forums before, but there's certainly no harm in restating the point for the benefit of newcomers.

I trust that clears things up for you?
 
My uncle was upgraded (1Mbps), sent me this vid, and he was boasting about the speeds :D (well, nothing to boast about really), acceptable for 1Mbps though:
[video=youtube;0kvFZnaxMfA]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kvFZnaxMfA[/video]
 
The issue of what is shaped or not is constantly being side skirted by the MWEB reps. Everytime they go to great lengths to explain about if you use one click hosting providers, seedboxes, or VPS providers that allow torrents then http traffic is shaped. Well we can ALL understand that because we ALL by now know that p2p, in any way, shape or form, is an "evil" to most ISP providers in SA. But what I want to know is are NORMAL http downloads.......such as downloading a programme that you just legally purchased on the official software maker's website, downloading update drivers from nvidia, ati, adobe updates and are downloads, updates and streaming video from iTunes.......are these considered standard http traffic, or is that now also being shaped to death? Because my experiences over the past 2 weeks sure as hell tells me that all those http services are indeed being shaped, at least until past 11pm at night anyway.
Any "official" and logical explanation for this?
 
Khanya said:
My uncle was upgraded (1Mbps), sent me this vid, and he was boasting about the speeds :D (well, nothing to boast about really), acceptable for 1Mbps though:
Click to expand...

The kak thing is I'm actually envious of these speeds, and I'm on a 4MB line!!!

M
 
Will@MWEB said:
Apologies if I was unclear on this point, we don't shape based purely on ports, which is the much older (perhaps you might say traditional) method of doing this. The traffic managers we use carry out deep packet inspection which evaluates the signature of the packet and determines the traffic category based on ports, destination and various other parameters.

As such we have a general assurance level for HTTP traffic, but you will find that specific sites, such as one click hosting providers, or those that belong to seedboxes, or VPS providers that allow torrents, will fall into the p2p category, regardless of which protocol you are attempting to use to retrieve content from these destinations.

this is nothing new and has in fact been the topic of lengthy discussion on these forums before, but there's certainly no harm in restating the point for the benefit of newcomers.

I trust that clears things up for you?
Click to expand...

Ok, thank you for your reply. But would file hosting sites like Megaupload be considered P2P? I find that a bit drastic, if that is the case, since it was never an issue before. And why, when downloading (not streaming) a movie trailer directly from a site, am I only getting 30 KB/s on that download, with just that single download running? I also tried downloading trial versions of software from a few different sites to test this and I'm still only getting 30 KB/s.

This is a really big issue at the moment. It's unacceptable to be downloading at that speed (via HTTP) on a 4MB package. And it's also unacceptable that in off-peak hours, I still face this issue, except for maybe 4 hours very early in the morning when everybody is usually asleep.
 
cabelosa said:
The issue of what is shaped or not is constantly being side skirted by the MWEB reps. Everytime they go to great lengths to explain about if you use one click hosting providers, seedboxes, or VPS providers that allow torrents then http traffic is shaped. Well we can ALL understand that because we ALL by now know that p2p, in any way, shape or form, is an "evil" to most ISP providers in SA. But what I want to know is are NORMAL http downloads.......such as downloading a programme that you just legally purchased on the official software maker's website, downloading update drivers from nvidia, ati, adobe updates and are downloads, updates and streaming video from iTunes.......considered standard http traffic, or is that now also being shaped to death? Because my experiences over the past 2 weeks sure as hell tells me that all those http services are indeed being shaped, at least until past 11pm at night anyway.
Any "official" and logical explanation for this?
Click to expand...

It really isn't our intention to circumvent the question, we've tried in as much as possible to explain the way this is done on more than one occasion, let's have another go:

Traffic which requires high, or real time priority, such as audio and video streaming and gaming is given the highest assurance level.
At the next level (call it medium priority) you have all of the generic mid range traffic, including mail http, ftp and so forth.

At both of these levels we have various QoS measures that we have put in place to ensure that these traffic types get the best experience possible.

At the next level, by popular request in these forums, we have placed the MWEB News servers, with a priority level slightly higher than generic p2p.
Then finally you have all types of p2p traffic which share the lowest priority level.
 
PerfectBlue said:
Ok, thank you for your reply. But would file hosting sites like Megaupload be considered P2P? I find that a bit drastic, if that is the case, since it was never an issue before. And why, when downloading (not streaming) a movie trailer directly from a site, am I only getting 30 KB/s on that download, with just that single download running? I also tried downloading trial versions of software from a few different sites to test this and I'm still only getting 30 KB/s.

This is a really big issue at the moment. It's unacceptable to be downloading at that speed (via HTTP) on a 4MB package. And it's also unacceptable that in off-peak hours, I still face this issue, except for maybe 4 hours very early in the morning when everybody is usually asleep.
Click to expand...

EXACTLY!! All of this is becoming highly unacceptable ISP behaviour. We are paying for a product that no longer performs they way that it used to just a few weeks ago. Are we really expected to just accept these new "shaping" protocols? And if its not that, then please explain what is really going on with our "LEGAL" downloading?!?
 
PerfectBlue said:
Ok, thank you for your reply. But would file hosting sites like Megaupload be considered P2P? I find that a bit drastic, if that is the case, since it was never an issue before. And why, when downloading (not streaming) a movie trailer directly from a site, am I only getting 30 KB/s on that download, with just that single download running? I also tried downloading trial versions of software from a few different sites to test this and I'm still only getting 30 KB/s.

This is a really big issue at the moment. It's unacceptable to be downloading at that speed (via HTTP) on a 4MB package. And it's also unacceptable that in off-peak hours, I still face this issue, except for maybe 4 hours very early in the morning when everybody is usually asleep.
Click to expand...

Unfortunately sites like Megaupload deliver I would say 99% the same content as any other p2p source. From our point of view the only thing that's different is the medium. If you were using one of these sites that previously wasn't being categorized as p2p it's possible it got caught up with in a signature update as these do happen on a regular basis.

If you're experiencing speeds like the ones you quoted from other types of HTTP sources then please provide us with the specific examples and I'll be happy to try and replicate the experience and have it investigated.
 
Will@MWEB said:
It really isn't our intention to circumvent the question, we've tried in as much as possible to explain the way this is done on more than one occasion, let's have another go:

Traffic which requires high, or real time priority, such as audio and video streaming and gaming is given the highest assurance level.
At the next level (call it medium priority) you have all of the generic mid range traffic, including mail http, ftp and so forth.

At both of these levels we have various QoS measures that we have put in place to ensure that these traffic types get the best experience possible.

At the next level, by popular request in these forums, we have placed the MWEB News servers, with a priority level slightly higher than generic p2p.
Then finally you have all types of p2p traffic which share the lowest priority level.
Click to expand...

Well thanks for explaining, again, as to how you claim to shape the various protocols but in saying what you just did it does not explain then as to why my iTunes downloads and streaming and downloading of software and upgrades are seeing speeds between 15KB/s and 50KB/s up until almost midnight during the week especially. I have had to resort to an Axxess dsl lite package of 7GB just to be able to download what I require without it taking all night long. And amazingly even on that average package all http downloads pretty much fly at around 450KB/s......and well before the clock strikes midnight too!
 
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