This may be a fairly lengthy post, here goes.
A couple of general things. Firstly, not everyone is going to post when they are having a problem. I for example will browse this thread and if I see a number of posts highlighting the same issue that I am experiencing, I assume it's a general issue and that MWeb are attending to it so I won't bother posting (partly to prevent cluttering up an already cluttered thread).
Secondly, many posts do not provide much information of use. They will simply be along the lines of "my connection's slow" or "my speed sucks" and so on. I guess this is possibly why many PMs are requested by Will. Many people don't even have their location listed which could be of some help. I also think a decent proportion of problems are not MWeb related or under their control.
Thirdly, from the postings over the last week and a half (and this is my personal observation) there does appear to be a widespread issue with MWeb. Though it appears to be prevalent in Gauteng, and is mainly limited to certain types of shaped traffic (Usenet/news servers in particular).
Now for my problem in particular. This will be my 8th month with MWeb (uncapped, shaped on 4096kbps line). I'm not a particularly difficult customer and am fairly easy to please, so while there has been an issue here and there, I have been quite happy overall and have not considered moving in that time. 138GB is the largest amount of data I have downloaded in one month in that period. Most of that coming off Usenet/news servers (Giganews to be specific). During office hours I would get 10KB/s and while this is extremely slow on a 4096kbps line I understood, due to it being a shaped account and was satisfied with that. Speed would increase to 60KB/s early evening once shaping started to relax, then late night 120KB/s and finally 250+KB/s early hours of the morning when shaping was at it's lowest. So while at times the speeds may have been slow it was consistent. Then around 10 days ago something changed, and since then downloading from Giganews at any time other than the early hours of the morning has been an exercise in futility, with speeds being non-existent, peaking now and again at 2KB/s. Let me say, that browsing and downloading e-mail has been fine, as has downloading from Steam (running at 250+KB/s). Speedtests also show the account to be fine. I also have a number of other accounts with different ISPs (both freebies and capped), and when using these, Giganews runs at full speed so I am confident in saying that it is not a line or exchange problem. The fact that Giganews also runs at full speed on MWeb itself during the early hours of the morning when shaping is at it's most relaxed suggests that the shaping has a major role in whatever changed 10 days ago.
What I simply want to know from MWeb/Will is, are MWeb aware of this? Are they investigating? And is there any reasonable expectation of the speeds on the news server returning to what they were previously (slow at times but consistent), or are MWeb satisfied with the way things are running at the moment in regards to the shaping and they don't forsee much change?
I really don't want to get into a discussion about the nature of binary news content, but there is a very good reason why the concept of .par files was developed for repairing incomplete archives.
