Official Crystal Web ADSL performance feedback thread Part 2...

Are you satisfied with your Crystal Web account?

  • Total voters
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Crystal Web said:
Did you not receive the email sent to customers? If not please PM me your details.

The Netflix changes happened quietly behind the scenes, and we thought it best to not announce this having watched the balls-up our red cousins made with their own strategy to announce new things while there remained a network problem.
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Ah, so the current flawless streaming is a result of the Netflix changes?
If so, bloody well done.
 
Looney said:
Edit: on your current account CW give you 200gb of unshaped data to use. It is your responsibility to use it wisely. Not theirs.
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I'd like to just add that it's not possible for anyone to "use the shaped allocation wisely." You run through ALL of your Tier1 data first and then move to Tier2. There's no way to prolong this or avoid the Tier 1 data being used up, even through after-hours downloading. You're effectively wasting through all of this fantastic unshaped bandwidth through things like regular browsing and streaming and downloading updates. Despite the fact that it's unshaped, I would have to change my downloading habits anyway so that I stay in the habit of downloading anything after-hours.

The fact that it's unshaped is more or less a perk that may help some people, but it doesn't suit everyone's needs. If I was signing up today, I might have to increase the unshaped allocation on the 4Mb package to 200GB so that there's little chance I'll run out of that halfway through the month. Its still cheaper than Afrihost, though.
 
Think of it as a shaped account, like any other ISP out there.

That the first 100GB is awesome to use, in any way you see fit.
 
I found the last two days that Hulu Plus would buffer every 2 - 3 minutes and that a reboot of the modem would not help.

That said, after one of the reboots the IP changed and I had to update the IP addresses via the browser bookmark. The throughput immediately shot up and no more buffering.

Is that normal and why would the IP change improve my experience.

It does not seem like it was ISP related as I tested with other ISP's with the same buffering result.

Is it an Unotelly issue?

Edit:
Even before the IP update, although lower, the throughput seemed good enough for a good experience.
 
Crystal Web said:
I personally spent hours, probably days across all support issues trying to get your specific issues resolved. I still don't know what the problem was with your account and upstream could not provide sufficient answers either. It wasn't even account related - every account we provisioned for you experienced similar issues. Once on an alternate network things were always great for you though - partly what has now informed our decision to split things into a symmetrical network, precisely to address issues such as those you experienced.
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So the real question here is would Electrics problems with his CW account have been fixed by the new symmetrical network implementation...?
 
RoMark said:
I found the last two days that Hulu Plus would buffer every 2 - 3 minutes and that a reboot of the modem would not help.

That said, after one of the reboots the IP changed and I had to update the IP addresses via the browser bookmark. The throughput immediately shot up and no more buffering.

Is that normal and why would the IP change improve my experience.

It does not seem like it was ISP related as I tested with other ISP's with the same buffering result.

Is it an Unotelly issue?

Edit:
Even before the IP update, although lower, the throughput seemed good enough for a good experience.
Click to expand...

Could certainly be Unotelly related but cannot be sure - it's tough when asking if another service unrelated to us was the cause of something that happened in the past. :D
 
I don't understand Electric's problem.

I reckon I'm about 80km from him and I mostly have a great experience with CW.
I can't recall if he always had the faster line, but he hardly ever had joy with his line and I think it got even worse when he upgraded to 20Mbps.

Obviously there are some differences in exchanges, but we both route via Cap Town.

The only issues I have is regular packet loss. It will be great for two days and then bang, back for another week.
Even single threaded httpdownloads come down at line speed most of the time.

I really feel for Electric. It is hell when you don't see the expected performance.
It drives me crazy when my line does not preform within 75 - 80% of the expected parameters.
 
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RoMark said:
I found the last two days that Hulu Plus would buffer every 2 - 3 minutes and that a reboot of the modem would not help.

That said, after one of the reboots the IP changed and I had to update the IP addresses via the browser bookmark. The throughput immediately shot up and no more buffering.

Is that normal and why would the IP change improve my experience.

It does not seem like it was ISP related as I tested with other ISP's with the same buffering result.

Is it an Unotelly issue?

Edit:
Even before the IP update, although lower, the throughput seemed good enough for a good experience.
Click to expand...

Crystal Web said:
Could certainly be Unotelly related but cannot be sure - it's tough when asking if another service unrelated to us was the cause of something that happened in the past. :D
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My understanding is that Unotelly uses an American IP address for authentication only. Thereafter you connect directly to the CDN, ie. you don't connect via Unotelly for the actual streaming. Is that correct?
 
balky said:
My understanding is that Unotelly uses an American IP address for authentication only. Thereafter you connect directly to the CDN, ie. you don't connect via Unotelly for the actual streaming. Is that correct?
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Correct
 
Sinbad said:
Correct
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How it routes through the ISP core network however may be different, particularly when it comes to peering on to CDN nodes. The specific network architecture cannot be divulged, but working with an alternate DNS provider may not always result in optimal routing over the core network - however much work is done to ensure that this isn't an issue.
 
Crystal Web said:
How it routes through the ISP core network however may be different, particularly when it comes to peering on to CDN nodes. The specific network architecture cannot be divulged, but working with an alternate DNS provider may not always result in optimal routing over the core network - however much work is done to ensure that this isn't an issue.
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Of course, you won't get an optimal cdn node if you're spoofing your location. So until Netflix is licensed in SA and CW gets one of those funky appliances it won't be perfect. But its damn close now ;-)
 
Hey guys, what's a good program to monitor which applications are downloading on my computer?
 
Extremely slow today 50kb/s on NNTP. It starts at 4m then after about 100mb it starts dropping speed. I am glad I canceled as this is the worst adsl internet experience I have ever had. Sorry CW I know you tried and promised great things for January but you have made a lot of promises so far and I have yet to see any improvement. It actually just got worse.

I hope you can sort out the problems for those that are staying. When and if your network has been fixed I might return.
 
Rohan said:
Extremely slow today 50kb/s on NNTP. It starts at 4m then after about 100mb it starts dropping speed. I am glad I canceled as this is the worst adsl internet experience I have ever had. Sorry CW I know you tried and promised great things for January but you have made a lot of promises so far and I have yet to see any improvement. It actually just got worse.

I hope you can sort out the problems for those that are staying. When and if your network has been fixed I might return.
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I keep asking you to contact us on support because I honestly think this is something we may be able to resolve if we know your details. If you just contact support by live chat, phone, or email, we may be able to resolve this for you. Please do.
 
I will send the details via email, I have contacted support before but there was no solution.

lol, figures...now suddenly NNTP runs at line speed. Been bad the whole day up untill I sent an email to support. It will most likely now run great again for the weekend. I will continue to watch it and let support know if there is a change.
 
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Rohan said:
I will send the details via email, I have contacted support before but there was no solution.

lol, figures...now suddenly NNTP runs at line speed. Been bad the whole day up untill I sent an email to support. It will most likely now run great again for the weekend. I will continue to watch it and let support know if there is a change.
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But this is what I was getting at. If an issue exists, let us know and we can look to resolve it for you. There's no way for us to know and fix something otherwise. It's a case of help us help you.
 
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