Aerosat Issues

I was wondering if anyone else other than myself seem to be having issues with aerosat and gaming ? for as long as i can remember i have had issues with world of warcraft among other games. I can handle that the latency is sometimes a little high, but really when it starts hitting 4000 - 15000 ms it is unplayable.

Also aerosat has twice now implemented p2p restrictions that have blocked ports and rendered some games useless to play, starwars galaxies can only be played between 7PM and 7AM, and flyff and dungeons and dragons don't work at all. In fact i quit starwars galaxies and went and bought dnd because i could not play swg, then 2 days later they put restriction up again and now dnd does not play. And i got no warning at all about anything on the line being changed, no email nothing. so end result i wasted almost R1000 in 1 month on products i cannot use.

I find aerosat's service also not quite up to par, 95% of my calls never get returned and half the time i phone there is no technician availible to assist me. The last few weeks i have been experiencing short downtimes during the day and when i enquired about this i was told that it is due to sun spikes ( the sun moving in front of the aerosat antenna ). I have already requested to downgrade my line from 512k to 192k, no sense in making them rich and not being able to make use of the connection.

Also going back to the p2p issue, basicly you are buggered if you want to download anything via p2p, during the day it is totally blocked, and at night it crawls along slower than 14k line, they might as well advertise the line as a "no p2p package".

I spoke to sentech today and they will be in port elizabeth soon, everyone that i know that has aerosat or telkom is going to go with sentech they moment they set foot in port elizabeth. Sentech has a really good name and i think will find it easy to steal the market in PE ...

anyway, i just wanted everyone elses opinion on the matter as i am very unhappy about all this, i have enough stress as is, i hate going to sleep everynight knowing i have to fight with my isp in the morning.

ummm stupid question but what about adsl?

can u get it?

wireless will never work gaming

even sentech

not exactly true, when aerosat works, it works well, the latencies are well within playable range, i remember back when i first got wireless, i was never happier. My issues aren't with downloading, i get my max download speed, but i am a serious gamer as well... you are right ofcourse, i adsl is faster for gamers, but i really hate telkom, they are responsible for technology in this country being 10 years behind the rest of the world. My cousin plays dnd in JHB on sentech line and never has issues with it.

Hi everyone,

Jacque, you have been dealing with myself personally regarding your gaming ever since you have been a customer. We have always strived to make the extra effort for you, but you must also please understand that calling us every night and emailing us twice a day, it becomes quite difficult to get back to you instantaniously. We unfortunately (with the price you pay and the service you're getting) are unable to justify the salary of a person to sit in our office and deal solely with yourself (even though the work load that you give us at times may require that).

Matching packets / connections is quite a complicated task at the best of times. The problem we had lately is that customers were pushing an excessive amount of P2P traffic via the UDP protocol. This was shaped recently and the most common games on our backbone were matched at the same time.

Of course, its difficult to match every game on the Internet which I'm sure you can agree with me on. Yourself and Craig from Aerosat have been dealing with the matching of your games recently (even last night, the time of this post, I personally sat until 9pm at the office working on this for you).

You must also understand, that we are selling customers high quality bandwidth, which we purchase as CIR from various other Tier1 ISPs. We have to clamp down somewhere and that place (as per our contract) is P2P activity during the day. Contrary to your statement, paying us R950pm for 512Kbit/s and using it quite heavily will not make us rich, in fact, we encourage gamers - they use far less than people who are on a mission to download the Internet.

I dont think its unfair what we're doing, you for one are one of the higher bandwidth users on our network (definately not the highest) but most definately above average.

Yesterday afternoon from 12pm until 6pm, you were flatlining 512Kbit/s. As you're aware, we do not have any data transfer limits, however we do shape certain protocols (shape, not block). These rules are subject to be lifted with proper justification from customers...We have no problems with customers playing games at any time of the day/night on our network.

At the time of this posting, you have already downloaded 15.80Gb this month (15 Sept 2006), uploading 850Mb.

The average you do on our network each month is between 20Gb and 30Gb, which I dont feel is too bad for the price you're paying? We do have customers on the same package who download up to 120Gb per month.

In terms of the service I can give you, these are the ping times to the various ISPs via my office:

SAIX DNS: 14-18ms
IS DNS: 35-45ms
Google via Fiber: 280 -320ms
Google via Satellite: 450-550ms

If you are willing to pay per MB for the bandwidth I route you, I'd be glad to give you the very best of gaming that you could ever imagine in PE, that I can assure you.
Failing that, I encourage you to take a business package from us, whereby you will have near CIR bandwidth all day, all night with no shaping at all, other than a fixed rate limit (please give me a call to discuss this pricing).

With regard to the claim "I find aerosat's service also not quite up to par, 95% of my calls never get returned and half the time i phone there is no technician availible to assist me." I find that extremely hard to believe, judging by the number of service tickets that have been logged lately under your account. However, I would like to follow up this allogation with the relevant support managers. Could you please email me a comprehensive report as to the times you called, the reasons for your calls and whether or not it got resolved, so that I can match it with records on my side.

As far as the "Also going back to the p2p issue, basicly you are buggered if you want to download anything via p2p, during the day it is totally blocked, and at night it crawls along slower than 14k line" line, I could show you graphs of customers who get their full 512Kbit/s download on P2P. Depending on the application you're using I guess? You said yourself, you seem to get your full bandwidth for the most part, indicating that we have plenty of free capacity - why would we block P2P? We simply contend it on a much higher level than HTTP etc. We could change this around, but then you'd be calling me to tell me that your HTTP downloads are the ones going at 14k due to the congestion generated by other users using P2P protocols

Our shaping policies are more of an art than a science, sure we sometimes shape protocols (such as a few of your games) when we do a blanket shape, however we are quick to admit it and act accordingly.

If you cannot give us the correct information as to the game protocol itself, how are we to match it? (this was the case with your Star Wars Galaxies game. I matched everything you asked me to and more and it still didnt work!).

So, in summary, I'm looking forward to the following from you:

* List of calls you made that were / werent returned, the reason for the call, action taken by someone on our side.
* Your upgrade letter to move to a business package or PAYG package

I hope this post helps to clear up a few of your issues. We have the capacity to deliver to you any service, it all comes down to price.

Please feel free to contact me at anytime at my office on 086 111 2871 or 0861 AEROSAT.
Alternatively, drop me a mail.

Kind Regards

Ryan Goss
Technical Director
Aerosat

ok i will contact you.

killadoob said:

wireless will never work gaming

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Not so, if set up properly wireless can be amazing. I was using Uninet via a secondary wireless connection in Blouberg and my pings to MWEB CS servers were <20ms and to SGS servers <40ms. Also depends on the routing and network load though, but wireless can be great from my experience.

MaD said:

Not so, if set up properly wireless can be amazing. I was using Uninet via a secondary wireless connection in Blouberg and my pings to MWEB CS servers were <20ms and to SGS servers <40ms. Also depends on the routing and network load though, but wireless can be great from my experience.

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Agreed.

Granted the distance of this test is from Port Elizabeth to Cape Town, however here is the ping time from a customer of mine to SAIX:
traceroute games.saix.net
ADDRESS STATUS
1 196.x.x.x 3ms 3ms 3ms
2 196.x.x.x 2ms 3ms 2ms
3 196.x.x.x 3ms 4ms 4ms
4 196.x.x.x 8ms 8ms 8ms
5 196.43.11.78 17ms 17ms 17ms
6 198.54.202.4 18ms 17ms 16ms

The first 3 hops are part of the Aerosat PE Backbone, first being our edge repeater for customer access in the area, thereafter 2 links (spanning +- 20km in total) thereafter it hits our fixed lines and the Internet itself.

18ms ping time? would be quite playable in my opinion. The edge repeater in question here has over 50 concurrent customers associated to it at the moment, let alone the other customers sharing the same backbone links (average throughput most likely 2.4 to 4 mbit/s)

So yes, gaming on wireless does work. Its more about the external factors that are never seen and are not really possible to measure and/or mitigate! Usually, these factors effect the client's connection and the customer often ends up with the "Gaming and wireless simply dont work!" philosophy

my Aerosat is working and all games are functioning 100% , now i am happy. thnx ryan for helping me out of a tight spot

hmmm ive never seen a wireless guy playing bf 2 get less than a 100 constant ping

if aerosat is so great why is it limited to one area?

i mean with those pings i would sign up if it was cheaper than adsl hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

explain!!!!!!!!!

i don't know about bf 2, but i can shed some light on other games. here is a list and the latency i get with each.


World of Warcraft : 400 - 900ms ( average around 600ms - 800ms, on a bad night i may hit 1000 - 2000ms )
Starwars Galaxies : 650ms ( very good servers )
Dungeons And Dragons : 600ms ( very good servers )

As you can see these are very playable scores, most adsl users don't even get those, my problem was not latency, it was just that ports were blocked and my games would not play, but ryan has fixed it for me, now everything works fine again. is BF 2 local or are you playing on international servers ? all of the above are US based. I find that world of warcraft lags more than any other game i have ever played, the pings hop around with virtually every step you take, i suppose this is due to the sudden increase in server population and due to the fact that blizzard was not quite ready for that. But sometimes when my bro plays wow and lags really bad, like 2000-4000ms latency, my starwars would be running at a constant 650ms ....

aerosat said:

I hope this post helps to clear up a few of your issues. We have the capacity to deliver to you any service, it all comes down to price.

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A very impressive response. I have to say I would not want a R950 30Gb endless whiner as a customer - your patience with the man gets my respect.

raymerjacque said:

but i really hate telkom, they are responsible for technology in this country being 10 years behind the rest of the world.

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HAHHAHAHAHAAHA

So your choice in having a ****ty Internet connection is self inflicted ... so why do you moan here about how stupid you are ???.

aerosat is not ****ty according to those pings 3ms local is better than adsl

is aerosat available in jhb?

Aerosat

wow, detailed response on Ryans side.
Id prefer to stay anonymous , but it seems aerosat underestimates the intelligance of some people. When i had issues they would always try push the issue onto our equipment.

thavinci, runs 8 servers 5 access points outside, multiple mail and web servers. a ppoe server, and numorous shaping procerdures.
And ow wait, thats for my home system just for me and a few budies, so i think i knew what i was doing.

However aerosat unfortunetly is not stable at all.
I work for a company and used to distrubute internet to some of our customers.

We had a "Bussiness Class" package for R1500 if i can recall.
Its also a pity i do not have all the stats anymore. But the folowing is more or less correct.
If you have decent reception to one of there towers youre latency is in fact better than Telkom adsl. Which is the best by far.
(Also you actually get what you get 512k is 64k downloads! Now keap in mind that it is excepted that you only get 80% i think of youre bandwidth thats exceptable!)

However p2p was blocked and heavelly contended during night. And FTP also, to the point that it would simply time out MOST times.
And things would be changed and altered without us knowing constantlly.
Customers weir not happy and we could not really do our bussniness successfully. The link would continouslly go down and i would get stories after stories saying all is in order. I deceded to drive to the tower myself only to see someone hanging up there. Sure tell the customers nothing is wrong and fix it quicklly. Not a proffessional way to do things.

In fact i have even spoken to a Aerosat techinition that admits that they lie to customers often.

Aerosat is on the IS backbone so there bandwidth supplied is really good.
However constant modification of a running "live" system irritated me beyond words. At the end of the day i let a budd of mine download porn movies off http cause thats all the link was usefull for.

As for wireless, it is more than sufficient to be used for gamming. If reception is good. It can really preform. I have run a 6k link of 512K stable with extremely low latency. (Cant recall stats soz)

But my towers do not add more than 20ms worst case to what i supply.
Average latency is 300ms to max 600ms

I have now moved over to starght IS ADSL and although they too have many issues , most of the time its telkom and there damn infrastructure.

To be more specific ive got the 512k uncapped adsl IS, and have now moved up to adsl over fibre to avoid downtime.

15.08Gb you gotta be kidding me, My line does about 120Gb +-

Also guys please keep in mind internet is expensive! Theres nothing else to it.
Want garraunteed bandwidth pay R172000 per month for Diginet 512k i think!

Was actually just under 2mb for R172000 gold class diginet. Soz bout that...

Isnt Aerosat those guys that are getting sued by ICASA? Heard rumours they might go to jail, ouch

Ye my Mom back in PE has Aerosat in the Westering area, it works well but the signal does drop down there unfortunetly quite often.
Worst thing about SA's lack of intelligence in government is that OUTRAGEOUS cost.
950 for 512k, are you KIDDING ME!.
Im presently in the US, getting cable TV, +6Mb/sec down and 394K up, and my speed tests show my lowest to date download speed at just over 5.5Mb/sec with my upload always been at 394K.
Hell you can get Fibre here with up to a 100Mb/sec down link for less than $60.00 USD.

Something needs to happen back home before its another freaking Zimbabwe.
The Wireless tech here is pretty pricey compared to cable, roughly $70.00 per month for a 3.5Mb down, 256K up link using WiMax but it always works 24/7 and might go down once a year.

I wonder if that new under sea cable thats been built will even effect the price that SA is been ripped off with, we been screwed in every way shape and form.
Every product, every tax, moving to a 1st World country opens ones eyes as to just how expensive living in SA is.

Cheers

Sheldon

necro1234 said:

Ye my Mom back in PE has Aerosat in the Westering area, it works well but the signal does drop down there unfortunetly quite often.
Worst thing about SA's lack of intelligence in government is that OUTRAGEOUS cost.
950 for 512k, are you KIDDING ME!.
Im presently in the US, getting cable TV, +6Mb/sec down and 394K up, and my speed tests show my lowest to date download speed at just over 5.5Mb/sec with my upload always been at 394K.
Hell you can get Fibre here with up to a 100Mb/sec down link for less than $60.00 USD.

Something needs to happen back home before its another freaking Zimbabwe.
The Wireless tech here is pretty pricey compared to cable, roughly $70.00 per month for a 3.5Mb down, 256K up link using WiMax but it always works 24/7 and might go down once a year.

I wonder if that new under sea cable thats been built will even effect the price that SA is been ripped off with, we been screwed in every way shape and form.
Every product, every tax, moving to a 1st World country opens ones eyes as to just how expensive living in SA is.

Cheers

Sheldon

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Now you have done it. I feel

Does anyone know of someone that could help me with wireless internet in the Barberton area. I'm living on a farm, just out of Barberton and there is no ADSL here.

You will probably have to go the 3G route and hopefully get either 3G or GPRS connections.
There is also the satellite route...

*sigh* Aerosat can say all thay want.... I still think that they ca ndo MUCH MUCH better too bad I am stuck with thier 64k internet only upside is the "uncapped" part but then again, bad pings 90% of the time no asess to certain web pages and yet again slow bad speeds and don't even mention the customer service...

No wonder everyone I know that was on Aerosat left...

I am going soon and I will not miss them!!