I signed up for Afrihost Pure Fibre – Yes please

Afrihost’s new Pure Fibre products contained three tantalizing terms when they launched earlier this month:

1. Uncapped
2. Unshaped
3. Price cuts

As an Openserve fibre user with a 100Mbps uncapped account from a competing ISP, I was very interested in a potential upgrade.

And upgrade I did, after finding that a 200/100 Mbps account from Afrihost was the same price as the 100Mbps fibre account I had.

Sweetening the deal was the fact that Afrihost would cover the Openserve line migration fee, activation fee, and the first two months’ subscription fee.

As my existing ISP required a 30-day notice period for a cancellation, the free month from Afrihost worked nicely.

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Signing up

I signed up for Afrihost Pure Fibre on the Afrihost customer portal, and was subsequently contacted by SMS to state that the order had been logged with Openserve.

I clarified that I already had an Openserve fibre line, and was then told I must ask my current ISP to release my fibre line.

Several emails later between myself, my current ISP, and Afrihost – which included accessing my fibre B number and requesting an immediate line release – and my Afrihost account was active.

My Afrihost PPPoE details were available in the customer portal, and only required me to enter them into my router.

The only glitch in the process was that my Afrihost fibre account initially ran at 100/50 Mbps.

I suspected this was a limitation on Openserve’s side, as my previous account was 100Mbps – and I used the Afrihost WhatsApp line to request a customer service agent to check my line configuration with Openserve.

A couple hours later and the taps were open – I was getting 200Mbps down and 100Mbps up.

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Speed Test 1

The first tests were the obligatory speed tests using MyBroadband’s speed test portal.

Test 1 was through my MacBook Pro which was connected via Wi-Fi to a Netgear Orbi’s mesh system. More specifically, the satellite unit which is connected to the primary router using a dedicated 5GHz channel.

Even with two Wi-Fi jumps, the speed test measured 194Mbps down, 76Mbps up, and 6ms latency.

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Speed Test 2

Test 2 saw my Windows 10 gaming PC connected via Ethernet to the Netgear Orbi satellite.

The test produced 195Mbps down, 96Mbps up, and 5ms latency.

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Speed Test 3

Test 3 comprised the the same MacBook Pro connected via Wi-Fi to the primary Netgear Orbi router – the unit which is connected via Ethernet to the fibre ONT.

This resulted in 192Mbps down, 95Mbps up, and 5ms latency.

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YouTube and Netflix

The next tests were on YouTube and Netflix.

As Netflix worked flawlessly on my 100Mbps line, there was nothing new after the upgrade and it continued to work well.

It was a similar story with YouTube.

4K YouTube videos played straight away after being selected, and within seconds I could track the video 30 seconds forward if I wanted.

The same is true if you drag the tracker to an “unloaded” part of the video. It takes less than a second to start playing again, and 30 seconds of video is almost immediately buffered.

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Torrents

Next up was the torrent test, using the qBittorrent client and well-seeded media torrents (which I have been advised by my legal team were in no way copyright-protected).

Three torrents were selected and their download times were measured.

The results are shown in the table below.

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Steam

At the time of writing, Steam was holding a “Quakecon” sale – which meant Doom was on special for R98.

The 59.3GB download file was a perfect test for my new fibre connection. Here are the key figures:

• Download peaked at 24.5MB/s (196Mbps)
• After 10 minutes 13.7GB had been downloaded – that’s 1.37GB per minute
• The total download took 45 minutes

Unfortunately for the scientific accuracy of the test, after the first 10 minutes I went to the lounge and watched an episode of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.

Without thinking, I played the 4K, 20-minute Netflix show at the same time the Doom download was in action.

As 4K Netflix shows use 15Mbps of bandwidth – according to my TV’s info panel – this would have affected the total time of the Steam download.

Me watching the show during the download was a mistake, but a fitting conclusion to this test nonetheless.

I don’t want to worry about bandwidth limits. I want to watch Netflix and download games at the same time. I want to torrent while working online.

I want uncapped fibre at high speeds – and fortunately, I now have it.

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