WebAfrica Capped ADSL

Orihalcon said:
Using the free capped gives me full speed on nntp...no idea what you're talking about then seeyou. When did you use their product? I ask because things sound like it changed. I'm certainly not seeing what you've experienced.

I'll give home pro a bash next month and see how it goes. Though be damn sure I'll pop right on here and apologise to you if my account will indeed be as shaped as your experience was.
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I'd love to get to the bottom of this then, but as I said, WA were no help there. I tried the account today, and got the same shaped results. Would you mind pm'ing me your nntp server settings? Just need the port and whether or not you have ssl enabled. I'm wondering if I've somehow landed on a combination that WA are shaping. I'd have no problem admitting fault if that turned out to be the case, and WA offers far more bang for buck in terms of gigs/Rand.
 
I am considering a move to a 120GB Anytime + 240 GB Download Plus capped account.

Based on current usage it is unlikely that I will use more than 50GB Anytime in any given month.

OTOH I may (in theory) use more than the 240GB Download Plus.

If I do run out of Download Plus bandwidth (during the night) will the download stop due to insufficient bandwidth, or will the account switch to using the Anytime bandwidth ?
 
rrh said:
I am considering a move to a 120GB Anytime + 240 GB Download Plus capped account.

Based on current usage it is unlikely that I will use more than 50GB Anytime in any given month.

OTOH I may (in theory) use more than the 240GB Download Plus.

If I do run out of Download Plus bandwidth (during the night) will the download stop due to insufficient bandwidth, or will the account switch to using the Anytime bandwidth ?
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If you downloading only during download plus hours, the 240GB will get used first, then it will start using the Anytime data.
 
Tinuva said:
If you downloading only during download plus hours, the 240GB will get used first, then it will start using the Anytime data.
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That's what I thought but the WebAfrica sales rep that I spoke to says that usage is "ring-fenced" and that one can only consume Download Plus bandwidth during Download Plus hours.

So, if one does run out of bandwidth during Download Plus hours, according to WA the download will stop and that it will have to restarted during the Anytime hours.
 
rrh said:
That's what I thought but the WebAfrica sales rep that I spoke to says that usage is "ring-fenced" and that one can only consume Download Plus bandwidth during Download Plus hours.

So, if one does run out of bandwidth during Download Plus hours, according to WA the download will stop and that it will have to restarted during the Anytime hours.
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If that was the case, it wouldn't have been called "Anytime" data. It would be called something else. Maybe the sales rep was a new employee who didn;t know better and guessed.

I say this, because I have in the past used up my DL+ and downloads didn't stop, they went ahead and used up my anytime data too.
 
Tinuva said:
If that was the case, it wouldn't have been called "Anytime" data. It would be called something else. Maybe the sales rep was a new employee who didn;t know better and guessed.

I say this, because I have in the past used up my DL+ and downloads didn't stop, they went ahead and used up my anytime data too.
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^^^ Good point: I didn't think of that :)

He was pretty adamant though.
 
From the WebAfrica website:


What is Download Plus?

Download Plus is additional bandwidth on all our Capped Internet products that can be used between midnight and 6am.

All our capped customers automatically get free Download Plus gigs, equal to the gigs of the capped package.

Download Plus usage will be deducted between 12am – 6am every day of the week. Data usage between these hours will only come off your anytime gigs if you run out of Download Plus.
 
Chevron said:
It's the IS News Server. So decent if you want a free news server.
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Sweet! I used the IS one a few years back. Considering moving to WA and if they have a decent server I can save another couple of bucks. That I can use for, uhm, beer and stuff.
 
heartbroken said:
Any body using the web africa news server? How is it in terms of speed/completion/retention?
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I link to both the WA and IS news servers and tend to get pretty awesome speeds most of the time bar during office hours when it can be a bit slower
 
Fulton17 said:
I link to both the WA and IS news servers and tend to get pretty awesome speeds most of the time bar during office hours when it can be a bit slower
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Does the IS news server accept WA credentials ?
 
Fulton17 said:
I link to both the WA and IS news servers and tend to get pretty awesome speeds most of the time bar during office hours when it can be a bit slower
Click to expand...

Sounds good, most of the downloads will be in the DL+ time. During the day will be streaming, emails, ftp etc and some gaming over weekends.
 
heartbroken said:
Sounds good, most of the downloads will be in the DL+ time. During the day will be streaming, emails, ftp etc and some gaming over weekends.
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During DL+ time I get full speed on a 10MB line to the WA news server.
 
rrh said:
Does the IS news server accept WA credentials ?
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Yep

Out of interest I see that about 2/3 of my traffic is from IS server and a 3rd from WA server

rrh said:
During DL+ time I get full speed on a 10MB line to the WA news server.
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I would be the same about 95% of the time but never really an issue as my DL's would finish before 06:00
 
WA and IS news server is the same server.

Code: 
tinuva@tinuva-nix ~ % sudo ping news.wa.co.za
PING news.isdsl.net (196.26.208.250) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from cdsl2-rba-vl8.ip.isnet.net (196.26.208.250): icmp_seq=1 ttl=57 time=21.7 ms
64 bytes from cdsl2-rba-vl8.ip.isnet.net (196.26.208.250): icmp_seq=2 ttl=57 time=21.9 ms
64 bytes from cdsl2-rba-vl8.ip.isnet.net (196.26.208.250): icmp_seq=3 ttl=57 time=22.0 ms
^C
--- news.isdsl.net ping statistics ---
3 packets transmitted, 3 received, 0% packet loss, time 2003ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 21.777/21.930/22.075/0.121 ms
tinuva@tinuva-nix ~ % sudo ping news.is.co.za
PING news.isdsl.net (196.26.208.250) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from cdsl2-rba-vl8.ip.isnet.net (196.26.208.250): icmp_seq=1 ttl=57 time=21.7 ms
64 bytes from cdsl2-rba-vl8.ip.isnet.net (196.26.208.250): icmp_seq=2 ttl=57 time=21.7 ms
^C
--- news.isdsl.net ping statistics ---
2 packets transmitted, 2 received, 0% packet loss, time 1001ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 21.755/21.757/21.760/0.147 ms
 
Well I did some extensive testing today. Spent the whole day on the trial account, and started up an NNTP download and let it run for a minute to get up to full speed every hour on the hour.

Got full speed all morning and early afternoon, until around 2pm when it started degrading steadily. By 4pm I was only managing around 1.1MB/sec and it's gone up and down since then. As I type this, after hours, I still cannot exceed 1.3MB/sec, when max speed should be 2.0MB/sec. Before anyone jumps in with "it's your exchange!", if I switch across to my Axxess account I get line speed.

I even went so far as to buy an account with the same news provider as Orihalcon and duplicate his server/port setup, with much the same results. I can only conclude that either WA hates me, or NNTP is pretty heavily shaped during the day, or WA are having the same IPC capacity issues in the South as Afrihost are currently experiencing. Granted, this is a lot better than the 120k/sec which was my maximum speed during the day on WA a few months ago when I was still with them, but not ideal. If I could be assured of >1MB/sec performance during office hours I might actually consider moving back, but since I don't know what the cause of the slowdown is, I don't want to sign up again and have the service degrade further.
 
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