MWEB upgrades ADSL network; increases capacity

Was also skeptical about Mweb and could'nt wait for Afrihost's uncap and sighed up with them. Seems to be a wise move . Speed is fine and I'm happy with then overall
 
That's the difference between the BIG guns and the smaller players. They plan ahead and add capacity!
 
soltyrei said:
I feel like a typical South African that just got conned again for the millionth time.

I just got 386KB Shaped from axxess and when I did a speed test on their on website (which should be running on port 80 with highest priority) my line speed was only 131 KB.

How the hell can that be right? by the looks of it.. it seems more than just shaping but throttling as well. I'm definitely no noob when in comes to stuff like this.. but I would really just like someone to explain that.. and not just gave me a typical answer by saying its Shaped is not good enough.. what happend to the other remaining KB.
Click to expand...

It could be ADSL contention rather than ISP contention... what most people don't realise is that your 20:1 contention ratio that everyone talks about is actually Telkoms contention on the local loop, even ISP's that provision their own bandwidth like MWEB have to get the data from your dsl modem to their network over Telkoms IPC service, so for example, every 20x 4Mb lines on an exchange, Telkom only provides 4Mb of bandwidth back to the ISP, so if your mate next door is trying to download the internet its going to effect your speed dramatically regardless of who your ISP is...

To be fair, its not just Telkom that does this but most infrastructure providers worldwide do this and worse... in the UK the standard ADSL contention is 50:1 but with more bandwidth over there and people generally not in the "eat as much as you can" frame of mind that us bandwidth starved saffers are in its not as noticeable... Business ADSL in the UK can be done on a 1:1 ratio but its a lot more expensive than consumer products. The term broadband actually comes from the fact that its shared bandwidth rather than becasue it is high bandwidth.

You could try swapping between different ISP accounts to see if its your local contention slowing you down but thats not always going to give you a good indication 'cos they might have different shaping policies and network load etc... Would be nice if Telkom could give you an indication of what the active usage on your ADSL segment is but then pigs might do advanced calculus before that is likely to happen!

Not saying that ISP contention isn't sometimes an issue, but its not ALWAYS the issue... I would look to see if it seems like all users for an ISP are reporting slow speeds in which case I'd assume their bandwidth provisioning is under heavy load and it is ISP bandwidth contention , on the other hand if some users are getting great speeds and others are not it would point more to local loop contention, or some other localised issue Telkom might have in getting that data back to the ISP.

Hope that makes sense....
 
malier said:
Quote Originally Posted by soltyrei View Post
I just got 386KB Shaped from axxess and when I did a speed test on their on website (which should be running on port 80 with highest priority) my line speed was only 131 KB.

You should get a max of 48KB on a 384 line
Click to expand...

LOL, was thinking the same thing. People don't seem to understand the difference between a Kilo BIT (as in kb/s) and a Kilo BYTE (as in KB/s).
Line speed is measured in BITS, people, so it's 384 kiloBITS per second, divide by 8 to get kiloBYTES, which gives your max of 48KB/s.
So if you're getting 141KiloBYTES /sec, you should be very happy, you're running at 1mb/s line speed
 
malier said:
Quote Originally Posted by soltyrei View Post
I just got 386KB Shaped from axxess and when I did a speed test on their on website (which should be running on port 80 with highest priority) my line speed was only 131 KB.

You should get a max of 48KB on a 384 line
Click to expand...

Which is why I asked him where on earth he gets that speed. You will never reach 48 on that line but that's the theoretical max.
 
fragtion_ said:
Wow, Go Mweb. More Seacom capacity, upgrade to SDH local with Telkom, AND Sat3 redundancy!
To all the ISP's who were waiting to see if this 'mweb uncapped' would be sustainable: better get your product offerings ready, as you can see mweb aren't joking around here ;)
Click to expand...

Ditto! ;)

shortestpath said:
It could be ADSL contention rather than ISP contention... what most people don't realise is that your 20:1 contention ratio that everyone talks about is actually Telkoms contention on the local loop, even ISP's that provision their own bandwidth like MWEB have to get the data from your dsl modem to their network over Telkoms IPC service, so for example, every 20x 4Mb lines on an exchange, Telkom only provides 4Mb of bandwidth back to the ISP, so if your mate next door is trying to download the internet its going to effect your speed dramatically regardless of who your ISP is...

To be fair, its not just Telkom that does this but most infrastructure providers worldwide do this and worse... in the UK the standard ADSL contention is 50:1 but with more bandwidth over there and people generally not in the "eat as much as you can" frame of mind that us bandwidth starved saffers are in its not as noticeable... Business ADSL in the UK can be done on a 1:1 ratio but its a lot more expensive than consumer products. The term broadband actually comes from the fact that its shared bandwidth rather than becasue it is high bandwidth.

You could try swapping between different ISP accounts to see if its your local contention slowing you down but thats not always going to give you a good indication 'cos they might have different shaping policies and network load etc... Would be nice if Telkom could give you an indication of what the active usage on your ADSL segment is but then pigs might do advanced calculus before that is likely to happen!

Not saying that ISP contention isn't sometimes an issue, but its not ALWAYS the issue... I would look to see if it seems like all users for an ISP are reporting slow speeds in which case I'd assume their bandwidth provisioning is under heavy load and it is ISP bandwidth contention , on the other hand if some users are getting great speeds and others are not it would point more to local loop contention, or some other localised issue Telkom might have in getting that data back to the ISP.

Hope that makes sense....
Click to expand...

Great 1st post and welcome to MyBB! :D
 
I really hope this is the start of better things to come from MWEB. IMO they have the opportunity to take a giant size chunk out of the ADSL market if they keep this up, the rest will be left flapping in the wind. However, past experience has taught me that it will not last and the bubble is bound to burst at some point. I really really hope I'm wrong...
 
soltyrei said:
I feel like a typical South African that just got conned again for the millionth time.

I just got 386KB Shaped from axxess and when I did a speed test on their on website (which should be running on port 80 with highest priority) my line speed was only 131 KB.

How the hell can that be right? by the looks of it.. it seems more than just shaping but throttling as well. I'm definitely no noob when in comes to stuff like this.. but I would really just like someone to explain that.. and not just gave me a typical answer by saying its Shaped is not good enough.. what happend to the other remaining KB.

Another question. if I get a 512KB Shaped account does that mean I will get 131KB as well as my full line capacity is not being used at the moment?

At peak times..

Why would there be a difference between a 386KB Shaped account and a 4MB shaped account
Click to expand...
I assume you mean 131kilobits per second as opposed to KB (kilobytes ps). Anyway, I used that axxess speed test from my 384 mweb line and its running at 260kbps... So axxess might be throttling you...
 
burn said:
My connection is pretty shoddy today. This site is struggling to load while facebook flies... Guess they helping out the masses again ;) Oh and I know it is shaped and all but my well seeded South Park torrent is shaped to non-existence (1-2kbps). Let's hope these upgrades help...
Click to expand...

Dude they will not help, office hours are for business to run not for downloaders to run full speed torrents. So queue your files up and download at night. Very easy.
 
Thanks Lightscribe, been lurking since the uncapped bomb dropped but figured it was time to put my 2c in the hat, and now that I've started, you'll probably wish I kept my mouth shut soon enough :-)

I moved from the UK a while ago and have been struggling with the concept of paying per Gb for internet access, it was such a foreign concept! Being a techie I often thought how it was holding SA back, not because you can't download every TV episode ever aired but more because it kept the majority of SA users (yes, mom and pop) with little more than the dial-up mentality of "switch it off so you don't run up a huge bill"... BTW I really think mom and pop should get a bit more respect seeing as they fund the rest of us :erm: just my opinion, no need to turn the flame throwers on me

I was in the UK during the transition from dial-up to broadband and never really thought about how it changed the culture of the country until I saw how it hasn't changed a lot of things in SA. For example, a few weeks after moving to Joburg I needed a plumber, ok methinks, jump onto google and find a local plumber.... de nada... hours later find a few on yellowpages.co.za and 75% of the info is out of date! After a while of ranting about backwards SA I realised if the eyeballs aren't there why spend the time and effort getting your business online, which is fair enough I guess, its a chicken egg situation with largely you know who keeping the egg from hatching...

Then the Seacom hype started getting me hopeful, until 6 months later and all the ISPs were saying in the press how it wasn't really going to bring prices down 'cos of blah blah blah... plain profiteering IMHO but anyway... we've all bitched about that ad nauseum. Then I was hoping the WC would kick things into gear and that looked promising when companies like google started investing in more map data and street view, etc.... but still the problem of the business model... per Gb price drops were great and I was a big fan of axxess uncapped for high bandwidth needs like online backups, etc :whistle: but it wasn't a solution for the masses with rolling windows making it unusable during the day so you had to do a complicated per Gb for work during the day or local routing table hacks, etc...

Finally tho it seems the egg has been liberated and the chicken seems inevitable now (there's a Nando's add in there somewhere) When the majority of users can stay online without worrying about the bill we'll see the real benefits of an online culture coming through, apps like www.crashplan.com start making sense, you can get voip off your PC and into the living room with a skype handset, or on your cell via wifi and *shock* not have to arrange a time to call your grand/parents/kids, stream your favourite radio station if you live in the mountains like I do with crappy indoor reception... the list goes on! It'll take a while before we get 24Mb for R300 a month, you can't turn the titanic overnight, it took about 4 years to progress to that stage in the UK but I think the process is starting.

I think the point that seems to be largely missed on myBB is that the major benefit of the uncapped groundswell is not to get power users 4Mb all the time but to simply get everyone online all the time.

The idea of paying per Gb (i.e. unit of data) as opposed to paying per mbs (unit of bandwidth) is so entrenched that for the first few days noone would believe there wasn't a catch because thats just the way its done here. The concept that an ISP wouldn't cap you at x00Gb didn't compute until people started realising if the ISP is paying a fixed price for their pipe upstream why not let people download whatever in off peak periods and shape it so constant high bandwidth apps don't kill off the avereage user experience. Don't get me started on misconceptions of shaping :rolleyes:

Anyway... just realised why I stopped participating in forums, I seem to have a weaknes for a soapbox when I get started so I'll give it a rest for now!
 
For a name like "shortestpath", you sure have much to say. I could almost hear your accent as I read your post (just kidding!). Anyway, both your posts were good reading. Refreshing doses of clarity...
 
Built up over the last 3 weeks of lurking I guess! I didn't know a Durban accent was that noticable :D
 
Shortestpath, do not concern yourself with writing more than most, since we prefer insight like yours. You said it right. People need to remember that this is not about getting as much as you can for as cheap as you can, but rather, about lifting the poorer members of our country, into the information age.

Hitler built nazi Germany from the ashes of the 1st world war and a in a time of major poverty/recession/unemployment...People are susceptible. The sacp, cosato, julius and his advisor mugabe will forge a communist state here by 2015, as per their internal and publicly stated intentions. Simply don't let them. We need every South African educated and earning a living. It's just became more possible, to show communism the finger in SA.
 
Last edited:
shortestpath said:
Thanks Lightscribe...

Anyway... just realised why I stopped participating in forums, I seem to have a weaknes for a soapbox when I get started so I'll give it a rest for now!
Click to expand...

Hey, I agree with wafarer - a good read. :)
Although I have been hitting the red wine after a ridiculously busy (short) week. :wtf: :p
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X