Web Africa's & Telkom data usage calculation bug?

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RoosTa

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I have just been capped due to a bug in Web Africa and possibly even Telkom's systems for calculating data usage.

Between 14:00 and 18:00 today, I downloaded an ISO for Windows 7 Home Premium x64 (official), which weighed in at 3075MB. The file can be found here:
http://msft-dnl.digitalrivercontent.net/msvista/pub/X15-65733/X15-65733.iso

During the time it was downloading I watched TV.

My HDD crashed few days ago, which is the reason why I needed to download the file. I used a fresh install of Free Download Manager on another PC to download the file and didn't bother to setup it up for my line. It opened a total of 31 sessions but downloaded very slow on my 10MB line. As soon as the file completed, I received notification that my line was capped.

I wish there was any way to prove this, since the only file I have in FDM is that one and I know for a fact that no one else used the PC or internet. So there definitely is a problem, I believe it has to do with the amount of sessions used to download files.

After calling Web Africa, they obviously denied that their system is at fault, because they also viewed the Telkom system which displayed the same thing.

This is what their logs report:
10:00 - 11:00 18 702 bytes 18.00 KB
11:00 - 12:00 2 692 975 bytes 2.57 MB
12:00 - 13:00 1 039 032 bytes 1 014.00 KB
13:00 - 14:00 5 718 855 bytes 5.45 MB
14:00 - 15:00 2 346 717 488 bytes 2.19 GB
15:00 - 16:00 2 916 017 801 bytes 2.72 GB
16:00 - 17:00 3 146 788 320 bytes 2.93 GB
17:00 - 18:00 1 036 099 201 bytes 988.10 MB
Click to expand...
As you can see, they calculated the file to be 8.83 GB

I'm planning to re-download this as a test next month, using the same PC (an old PC which was gathering dust) and this time I will have network monitors installed.

Could the overhead of many sessions cause dubious calculations within the data usage systems?
 
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Have you queried it with them?

No overheads can't cause that.

One thing that could though is if the server does not support resume & the connection broke for whatever reason. Not sure whether FDM start from scratch or immediately gives up in that case. The 1st would explain a much greater d/l.

Start by contacting wajeff.
 
Your not the only one who had a problem with WA and the way they measure bandwith usage.

See this recent thread : http://forums.webafrica.co.za/showthread.php/5063-Usage-stats

There was no explanation further after that to anybody as to what exactly happened and if this matter was isolated to one person or not. Personally I think not.

But thats just me, i'm happily leaving WA for a another ISP the end of this month and I hope you get this sorted out.

If you contact WA, ask to speak to Jeffrey (WAJEFF). As far as i'm concerned he's the only one there that really goes 50 miles out of his way to help people.

Best of luck, you will need it.
 
Morning guys,

First off, thanks for the referrals HavocXphere & latro - much appreciated :)
Righto, down to business.

@RoosTa: Can you drop me a PM with your client code and DSL Username that was used during the download? I'd like to double check from our end to see what could have possibly gone wrong.
Have you had a look at the FDM logs? I've seen a few .iso files that are somehow corrupted on the way down that need to be re-downloaded. Again, there very well may be an issue on our side too.
 
WAJeff said:
Morning guys,

First off, thanks for the referrals HavocXphere & latro - much appreciated :)
Righto, down to business.

@RoosTa: Can you drop me a PM with your client code and DSL Username that was used during the download? I'd like to double check from our end to see what could have possibly gone wrong.
Have you had a look at the FDM logs? I've seen a few .iso files that are somehow corrupted on the way down that need to be re-downloaded. Again, there very well may be an issue on our side too.
Click to expand...

I use FDM and it does not redownload if it is corrupt, It normally is never corrupt anyway
 
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