Afrihost CAPPED ADSL Feedback (MTN)

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S1ght said:
It's in the screenshot ;)

41.0.11.164:27161

Or if you want to look up the server in the game it's the 1v1 AIM Intoxicated JHB server.
Click to expand...

:erm:

Sorry... I was so focused on the results I didn't even realize the IP was there...
 
AfriGenie said:
if we start hitting our maximum we shaped the Uncapped users P2P and HTTP downloads to ensure that the Capped and Business Uncapped users - and real-time services for Uncapped - receive the proper priority that it needs.
Click to expand...

Yea, you shape your uncapped users... But what about your business and capped users, You can't shape them can you now? So you don't exactly have much control over them. So when you oversell your capacity on capped and business, their contention ratios get higher, and higher, and higher. Until you have a situation like in November last year.

Which brings me to the next question, Why are the gamers having higher latency and packet loss in the evening between 5pm and 10pm? Telkom congestion perhaps, ALL the gamers are complaining... So I think not.
 
AfriGenie said:
:erm:

Sorry... I was so focused on the results I didn't even realize the IP was there...
Click to expand...

No worries. Will see if I can do the same tests with a different ISP's account. Maybe the routing will show something different (I'm just taking guesses at this point in time :p)

ghostR said:
Which brings me to the next question, Why are the gamers having higher latency and packet loss in the evening between 5pm and 10pm? Telkom congestion perhaps, ALL the gamers are complaining... So I think not.
Click to expand...

This guy does make a good point that it is only in the evenings. I tried in the morning yesterday and experienced 0% packet loss.
 
ghostR said:
Yea, you shape your uncapped users... But what about your business and capped users, You can't shape them can you now? So you don't exactly have much control over them. So when you oversell your capacity on capped and business, their contention ratios get higher, and higher, and higher. Until you have a situation like in November last year.

Which brings me to the next question, Why are the gamers having higher latency and packet loss in the evening between 5pm and 10pm? Telkom congestion perhaps, ALL the gamers are complaining... So I think not.
Click to expand...

In November we had a surge in growth and demand, and we had to expand our IPC significantly sooner than we had expected. We've started monitoring our network and bandwidth demands in significantly greater depth to make sure that this does not happen again.

I don't think ALL of the gamers are having these issues, at the moment I'm helping two users with specific issues to CS:GO, and from what I have seen I don't think it is an IPC capacity issue as they aren't seeing any reductions in speeds on Speedtests or even increases in latency on their ADSL connection that would indicate contention.

I've been very honest with our Users here on MyBB since I started posting here in October, if there is an issue, I would let you guys know. Continuously saying that Afrihost has IPC issues is definitely not helping me to resolve the queries that our Users are raising. If you have a specific issue that you feel strongly about, you are welcome to raise it with me via PM.
 
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AfriGenie said:
In November we had a surged in growth and demand, and we had to expand our IPC significantly sooner than we had expected. We've started monitoring our network and bandwidth demands in significantly greater depth to make sure that this does not happen again.

I don't think ALL of the gamers are having these issues, at the moment I'm helping two users with specific issues to CS:GO, and from what I have seen I don't think it is an IPC capacity issue as they aren't seeing any reductions in speeds on Speedtests or even increases in latency on their ADSL connection that would indicate contention.

I've been very honest with our Users here on MyBB since I started posting here in October, if there is an issue, I would let you guys know. Continuously saying that Afrihost has IPC issues is definitely not helping me to resolve the queries that our Users are raising. If you have a specific issue that you feel strongly about, you are welcome to raise it with me via PM.
Click to expand...

I actually was a customer of Afrihost's for about 5 years, Until of course, November last year. I used to rave about you guys.. Not so much now.
 
S1ght said:
No worries. Will see if I can do the same tests with a different ISP's account. Maybe the routing will show something different (I'm just taking guesses at this point in time :p)



This guy does make a good point that it is only in the evenings. I tried in the morning yesterday and experienced 0% packet loss.
Click to expand...

Okay, our Critical Care team is going to recreate your connection specifics over the weekend and Monday, and then he's going to test CS:GO extensively.

I doubt it is an IPC issue, but there could be a number of other points on the connection between your modem and the CS:GO server that is experiencing a higher than normal load. Our Critical Care Team will locate the issue, and they will get it resolved.
 
AfriGenie said:
In November we had a surge in growth and demand, and we had to expand our IPC significantly sooner than we had expected. We've started monitoring our network and bandwidth demands in significantly greater depth to make sure that this does not happen again.

I don't think ALL of the gamers are having these issues, at the moment I'm helping two users with specific issues to CS:GO, and from what I have seen I don't think it is an IPC capacity issue as they aren't seeing any reductions in speeds on Speedtests or even increases in latency on their ADSL connection that would indicate contention.

I've been very honest with our Users here on MyBB since I started posting here in October, if there is an issue, I would let you guys know. Continuously saying that Afrihost has IPC issues is definitely not helping me to resolve the queries that our Users are raising. If you have a specific issue that you feel strongly about, you are welcome to raise it with me via PM.
Click to expand...

No offence intended here, but I have raised the issue of packet loss on more than one occasion, i pm'ed results and have still to receive feedback going on 3 weeks now. At this point it is moot, I opened a WA account and have been playing online games in the evening with no packet loss at all. I'm a pretty patient guy, but everything has it's limits, and i don't see why i need to keep chasing up on something that I queried weeks ago, and there has been no improvement or response.

My AH account is being canned come end March and will move everything over from then.
 
AfriGenie said:
Okay, our Critical Care team is going to recreate your connection specifics over the weekend and Monday, and then he's going to test CS:GO extensively.

I doubt it is an IPC issue, but there could be a number of other points on the connection between your modem and the CS:GO server that is experiencing a higher than normal load. Our Critical Care Team will locate the issue, and they will get it resolved.
Click to expand...

Shouldn't be too difficult to replicate. Install CS:GO, open console type net_graph 1 to bring up the network stats. Join 1 of the local servers and experience the joy of packet loss. It only seems to be bad in the evenings though. For instance at the moment there is only about 2-5% packet loss.

Also the reason that other tool probably isn't going to show much is because it's going over TCP/HTTP where as CS:GO will be using UDP...So I guess when the protocol is nice and prioritised then the packets get to where they want to go :p
 
S1ght said:
Shouldn't be too difficult to replicate. Install CS:GO, open console type net_graph 1 to bring up the network stats. Join 1 of the local servers and experience the joy of packet loss. It only seems to be bad in the evenings though. For instance at the moment there is only about 2-5% packet loss.

Also the reason that other tool probably isn't going to show much is because it's going over TCP/HTTP where as CS:GO will be using UDP...So I guess when the protocol is nice and prioritised then the packets get to where they want to go :p
Click to expand...

Our Man in Critical Care is going to be playing during the times you mentioned specifically in the evening, he already has CS:GO installed, so he should be good to go. He is loathe to play CS:GO, but he'll take one for the Team. :)
 
I think it is easy to replicate the packet loss and latency on Afrihost's network.

So using my free 1GB Afrihost account, I have a monitoring server at home, that specifically tests the IPC links (Cape Town).

A traceroute look like this:
Code: 
[root@dl ~]# traceroute -I 105.237.67.65
traceroute to 105.237.67.65 (105.237.67.65), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
 1  router.heaven.za.net (10.0.0.1)  1.940 ms  1.911 ms  1.906 ms
 2  * * *
 3  41.181.53.149 (41.181.53.149)  176.918 ms  178.052 ms  179.473 ms
 4  ipc-recieve-tb-1a.mtnbusiness.net (41.181.53.150)  154.864 ms  155.962 ms  157.036 ms
 5  tb-dca-2.za--qux-c.za.mtnbusiness.net (41.181.198.188)  120.128 ms  121.341 ms  123.098 ms
 6  qux--tb-dca-2.za-b.za.mtnbusiness.net (41.181.184.31)  187.657 ms  185.998 ms  187.177 ms
 7  41.181.223.221 (41.181.223.221)  24.211 ms  7.180 ms  7.792 ms
 8  105-237-67-65-esr-lo.mtnbusiness.co.za (105.237.67.65)  131.403 ms  127.567 ms  127.016 m
ps. That latency is not my exchange, it is the IPC links, because the same graphs for other ISPs on my line is perfectly fine. Right now for some reason latency on cape town IPCs for Afrihost.

Either way, to explain what happen above:
I do a traceroute to the IP address assigned to the BRAS or BNG in my case, as I was moved over to an Alcatel router instead of a Cisco one on Telkom's side.
1. DSL router
2. BRAS/BNG not pingable with BNG
3. Afrihost IPC-up-something
4. Afrihost IPC-up-something
5. Afrihost router
6. Afrihost IPC-down-something
7. Afrihost IPC-down-something
8. Afrihost IP address on Telkom BRAS/BNG

How does it work that a packet traverses both direction of the IPC links in a single trace? Easy. Telkom IPC makes use of half-duplex MPLS vpn.

Here are the graphs.
Right now, high latency:
Screen Shot 2015-03-06 at 4.06.37 PM.jpg

Earlier this week, normal latency high packet loss:
Screen Shot 2015-03-06 at 4.07.32 PM.jpg

That is some very good information, to pin point exactly where there is packet loss, that the guys notice in CS:GO. Look no further than IPCs. At least in Cape Town.
 
Tinuva said:
I think it is easy to replicate the packet loss and latency on Afrihost's network.

So using my free 1GB Afrihost account, I have a monitoring server at home, that specifically tests the IPC links (Cape Town).

A traceroute look like this:
Code: 
[root@dl ~]# traceroute -I 105.237.67.65
traceroute to 105.237.67.65 (105.237.67.65), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
 1  router.heaven.za.net (10.0.0.1)  1.940 ms  1.911 ms  1.906 ms
 2  * * *
 3  41.181.53.149 (41.181.53.149)  176.918 ms  178.052 ms  179.473 ms
 4  ipc-recieve-tb-1a.mtnbusiness.net (41.181.53.150)  154.864 ms  155.962 ms  157.036 ms
 5  tb-dca-2.za--qux-c.za.mtnbusiness.net (41.181.198.188)  120.128 ms  121.341 ms  123.098 ms
 6  qux--tb-dca-2.za-b.za.mtnbusiness.net (41.181.184.31)  187.657 ms  185.998 ms  187.177 ms
 7  41.181.223.221 (41.181.223.221)  24.211 ms  7.180 ms  7.792 ms
 8  105-237-67-65-esr-lo.mtnbusiness.co.za (105.237.67.65)  131.403 ms  127.567 ms  127.016 m
ps. That latency is not my exchange, it is the IPC links, because the same graphs for other ISPs on my line is perfectly fine. Right now for some reason latency on cape town IPCs for Afrihost.

Either way, to explain what happen above:
I do a traceroute to the IP address assigned to the BRAS or BNG in my case, as I was moved over to an Alcatel router instead of a Cisco one on Telkom's side.
1. DSL router
2. BRAS/BNG not pingable with BNG
3. Afrihost IPC-up-something
4. Afrihost IPC-up-something
5. Afrihost router
6. Afrihost IPC-down-something
7. Afrihost IPC-down-something
8. Afrihost IP address on Telkom BRAS/BNG

How does it work that a packet traverses both direction of the IPC links in a single trace? Easy. Telkom IPC makes use of half-duplex MPLS vpn.

Here are the graphs.
Right now, high latency:
View attachment 197070

Earlier this week, normal latency high packet loss:
View attachment 197072

That is some very good information, to pin point exactly where there is packet loss, that the guys notice in CS:GO. Look no further than IPCs. At least in Cape Town.
Click to expand...

Thanks for posting the results.

Please feel free to correct me, but wouldn't any sort of congestion on the Exchange / BRAS also give those sort of results? I do realize that the Telkom Exchanges no longer respond to ICMP requests, but any latency there would affect any follow-on results.
 
AfriGenie said:
Thanks for posting the results.

Please feel free to correct me, but wouldn't any sort of congestion on the Exchange / BRAS also give those sort of results? I do realize that the Telkom Exchanges no longer respond to ICMP requests, but any latency there would affect any follow-on results.
Click to expand...
Yes if the exchange was congested, it would look the same. But the exchange is not congested. I can tell you right now, my exchange is only using roughly just just below 50% of the capacity.

Also, lets have a look at some of the other ISPs graphs on my ADSL line:

Cybersmart (test account)
IS (WebAfrica home capped)
VOX (gig4gig with uncapped bolt-on)

Screen Shot 2015-03-06 at 4.45.30 PM.pngScreen Shot 2015-03-06 at 4.45.41 PM.jpgScreen Shot 2015-03-06 at 4.45.58 PM.jpg

Correct me if I am wrong, it is only the Afrihost and VOX account that shows high latency? That means Afrihost's (and perhaps VOX) IPC links must be the culprit. The IS and Cybersmart graphs look much better.

It is up to you, to tell the critical care team at Afrihost, there really is a problem with IPCs.

I have shown you how I did the testing, so it should be easy to replicate on your side, as long as you connect a PC and a router to a DSL line in Cape Town.
 
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So, Afrigenie, What were you saying about your IPC's being hunky dory?
 
Tinuva said:
Yes if the exchange was congested, it would look the same. But the exchange is not congested. I can tell you right now, my exchange is only using roughly just just below 50% of the capacity.

Also, lets have a look at some of the other ISPs graphs on my ADSL line:

Cybersmart (test account)
IS (WebAfrica home capped)
VOX (gig4gig with uncapped bolt-on)

View attachment 197084View attachment 197086View attachment 197088

Correct me if I am wrong, it is only the Afrihost and VOX account that shows high latency? That means Afrihost's (and perhaps VOX) IPC links must be the culprit. The IS and Cybersmart graphs look much better.

It is up to you, to tell the critical care team at Afrihost, there really is a problem with IPCs.

I have shown you how I did the testing, so it should be easy to replicate on your side, as long as you connect a PC and a router to a DSL line in Cape Town.
Click to expand...

I'm close to 100% positively sure that the latency you are seeing isn't related to our IPC capacity, but as a precaution I've sent your results through to our Critical Care Team, I've asked them to go through it, and share their thoughts with me.

Do you know if Vox has IPC capacity in the Cape? When I last checked they were using IS bandwidth.
 
AfriGenie said:
I'm close to 100% positively sure that the latency you are seeing isn't related to our IPC capacity, but as a precaution I've sent your results through to our Critical Care Team, I've asked them to go through it, and share their thoughts with me.

Do you know if Vox has IPC capacity in the Cape? When I last checked they were using IS bandwidth.
Click to expand...
You can be 100% sure, but so am I. I found these tests to be very accurate in the past, they have never let me down when I need to choose the best ISP account for the night to game on in peace.

Vox do have IPC capacity in Cape Town and JHB.
VOX uses their own IPC for their gig4gig accounts as capped data, and resell IS uncapped accounts for uncapped data.

Just do traceroutes to the IP addresses in those graphs, and you will see the vastly different routes they take.
 
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Anyone else having issues with their Afrihost account dropping/having a poor connection? CPT Northern Subs
 
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