Openweb Uncapped Feedback

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I have also noticed this "death throttle" lately. During office hours "Uncapped", anything but browsing is left gasping and sputtering at under 10KBs... with rare short-lived squirts up to 18kbs... it seems to be an across the board throat clench and not only limited to the Filserve/sonic/rapidshare etc. Even audio streaming becomes a victim and streams over 24kbs are buffered and are useless. Even on the capped packages, there is a marked slow-down across the board. I noticed this from the 1st May this year... almost as if a big switch was flicked in interwebz ISP land. With Cybersmart the throttle was extreme for me, it was unrelenting and was no way linked to any threshold... with OpenWeb it seems to be an office-hours thing.

I think that if one approaches the package with this in mind, and realises this to be the norm... the frustration of a 2KBs download from Intel support will not be as extreme. I am still coming to terms with this on these uncapped packages. It also seems there is no single package that will allow frustration free uncapped ADSL with reasonable shaping during the "congestion" periods. Perhaps the contention ratios are too high? I dunno.

From my 19 days 384 OpenWeb experience I can tell that the BCS backbone seems to be focused on all things browsing only... with moderate slow-down during office hours and also no real gain after hours. P2P / torrents etc completely choked on this.

The IS backbone seems to be completely erratic during the day... either completely throttled or up-and-down / all over the place. After-hours it really seems to fly... weekends become a little temperamental, but nothing too extreme.

It is all about the cost and what is affordable. It would be great if we all could afford unshaped bandwidth... but we can't. I struggle to use 20GB a month on an uncapped package because of the throttling. It is not possible unless I sit 24 hours a day every day all month babysitting failed downloads and disconnects etc. For me it is NOT about how much I can download in a month for some free ice-cream... it is about not being frustrated to distraction by a throttled service. I think I am coming to terms with the nature of the uncapped beast in this country.

So far the OpenWeb uncapped gold route has proved to be a lot less frustrating than my Cybersmart head-wall-desk-router-teethgrind-scream-pray-beg-threaten-blood experience.

Qrox said:
Why is it that download services have been getting more and more throttled during the day? On my 384 I was able to download from megaupload, fileserve, etc at 38-42kbs during the day. Switch over to 1mbs and now I struggle to get above 25kbs. Getting 17kbs atm.

Is it that the 1mbs has terrible throtteling or did the throtteling recently become worse on these sites or what? If I download from other sites or downloads on Steam I can get full line speed.
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I know that the Gold packages aren't throttled, but my connection has been a lot better since I stopped trying to download the entire internet every month. Don't get me wrong, I still download a lot but have learned that I don't need to have my downloads going the whole time (especially when you start running out of hdd space). My speedtest result during office hours: http://www.speedtest.net/result/1392184394.png

I am still very happy, thanks MrBeep!
 
Yeah, uncapped is an absolute fruit salad at the mo!!! Thanks to MWEB's, they really turned the market on its head!!

They hammered all and sundry with their cheap "uncapped" packages, then all and sundry followed them into battle. Companies that had brilliant reputations like Cybersmart and Afrihost come out with their uncapped packages and soon realized that a truly uncapped package at under R600 on a 4mb line is impossible to sustain.

MWEB who's reputation has mostly been in the gutter for the last 10 years then, true to form, degraded their "uncapped" product to such an extent that it is virtually impossible to get more than 100gb's a month without contravening one or other of their archaic FUP T&C. In the meantime Cybersmart and Afrihost have all but flushed their good reps down the drain with their pitiful uncapped products.

Axxess IS have always offered an uncapped after hours package for around R800 and many users got in excess of 300gb's a month on a 4mb line without any repercussions. Axxess are really the only ISP to offer a truly uncapped at a reasonable price solution... Even if it is limited to after hours...

Openweb have benefited out of the mayhem. Unfortunately all that stands between them and liquidation is their CEO extraordinaire Keoma Wright. Can't be all that profitable for OW having all these MWEB heavy lifters subscribing to their network. I honestly believe that anything over 90gb's a month on the Gold packages and you start running at a loss. (4mb)

Anyway, there's still great value for money to be had. You can quite easily get away with paying under R10 a gig for unshaped bandwidth but on uncapped, bearing in mind the volumes users are pulling, and we paying under R5 a gig..
 
Is anyone on Altec experiencing problems with Google Talk / MSN etc; ?

Connections keep timing out randomly, although our PPP session has not died in 3 days.
 
Eh... IS Gold Uncapped must be throttled! At least my 384 is. 2kBs download, unable to do much of anything except browse.... on my Cybersmart (last days) account now, getting 33kBs for same downloads that IS OpenWeb 2kBs or timeouts.


timvdwest said:
I know that the Gold packages aren't throttled, but my connection has been a lot better since I stopped trying to download the entire internet every month. Don't get me wrong, I still download a lot but have learned that I don't need to have my downloads going the whole time (especially when you start running out of hdd space). My speedtest result during office hours: http://www.speedtest.net/result/1392184394.png

I am still very happy, thanks MrBeep!
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I'm surprised I haven't been noticed by Big Brother yet. Still getting full line speeds, day and night. In fact, ever since I'm on the IS backbone, I've been getting even better speeds than my MWEB and Afrihost capped accounts. Rarely downloading under 35kb/s.
 
Hmm... my first really weird report for the month....

On VB Gold (384) and speeds are erratic today. Busy updating Ubuntu now and getting like 20KBps..... it's not funny anymore :(
 
Graal said:
I'm surprised I haven't been noticed by Big Brother yet. Still getting full line speeds, day and night. In fact, ever since I'm on the IS backbone, I've been getting even better speeds than my MWEB and Afrihost capped accounts. Rarely downloading under 35kb/s.
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I have just reported you to the IS team for abuse. You should keep your mouth shut bud. Sorry
 
killadoob said:
I have just reported you to the IS team for abuse. You should keep your mouth shut bud. Sorry
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Aha, but without my name and contact details, nothing can be established. Also, I'm behind 7 proxies. :P

But yeah, I've been going for little more than a week, and I think I should probably have done about 22 or 23 gbs by now. Probably going to get throttled soon.
 
Graal said:
Aha, but without my name and contact details, nothing can be established. Also, I'm behind 7 proxies. :P

But yeah, I've been going for little more than a week, and I think I should probably have done about 22 or 23 gbs by now. Probably going to get throttled soon.
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:p
 
Today I'm also down to 10kbs...
At least last week I was able to get my max line speed during the day.

EDIT: and now its dipping below 10kbs... atm more than 5 hours remain to download 180mb... let down on the throtteling a bit. This is ridiculous
 
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Steam doesn't really have a problem since a lot of the traffic is local.

The VB backbone is fine if all you want to do is download directly from international sites but you can't download torrents and its prone to huge lag spikes every few minutes.
 
O joy. Downloaded 614mb of my file with 24% of the file left and now the download fails because of the damn throtteling. Thank you south africa for kicking my in the ass again.
I'm grateful that the prices are sloooooowly coming down but really. Whats the purpose of uncapped internet when if it becomes useless during the day?
 
I was on the 1mb gold Vodacom backbone and everything was slow so I emailed Openweb and they changed me over to the IS backbone. It flew over the weekend at full speed. On Monday during work hours Rapidshare, Megaupload etc go to a max of 2Kb/s and then disconnects. Torrents the same. Its taking 40 minutes to download a 8mb email, some web pages are taking 3 to 5minutes to load 1 page. At about 5pm it picks up to a max of 60 Kb/s. I don't mind the shaping on the torrents and megaupload etc during the day but that's its affecting my surfing and emails is a problem. The strange part is when I do a speed test it shows that my line is running at 1mb speed. Anyone else having problems with their emails and surfing speed on the IS backbone?

I don't want to write negative things about Openweb. Overall I've been very happy with Openweb Gold and their service is unmatched. When I've had a problem it normally gets sorted out in no time. It's just been this past month since I've had these speed problems like this. I'm going to see if it improves by tomorrow.
Anyone using GOLD PLUS. Is that any good?
 
Qrox said:
O joy. Downloaded 614mb of my file with 24% of the file left and now the download fails because of the damn throtteling. Thank you south africa for kicking my in the ass again.
I'm grateful that the prices are sloooooowly coming down but really. Whats the purpose of uncapped internet when if it becomes useless during the day?
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It seems you have some serious issues, i nailed about 12-14gb yesterday with ease on the VB backbone. Everything is flying today as well
 
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