Friday 20 May 2011

I cancelled my uncapped ADSL account at Afrihost today (ADSL in South Africa)

I'm being throttled so badly (down to +-7KBps on a 512kbps=80KBps line) that I had to turn on my prepaid account so I could view some web pages while downloading a couple of megs. I had to stop bittorrent too :( I only downloaded 40.9GB so far this month and I don't know why they need to throttle me after hours..



Some other user experiences:
http://handshake.co.za/2011/uncapped-adsl-in-south-africa/
http://www.carforums.co.za/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=36411&sid=4bfbaa0a65133fdee40f95c062a3208b
http://mygaming.co.za/forum/showthread.php/13410-Axxess-vs-Afrihost
http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthread.php/222441-Afrihost-Uncapped-Subscribers-Feedback/page82
http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthread.php/264071-Afrihost-uncapped-ADSL-account-move-why-it-was-done
http://www.bblounge.co.za/showthread.php?t=1563
http://forums.icreatehosting.co.za/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=63
http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthread.php/315785-so-far-Which-ISP-uncapped-is-the-best?p=5678667#post5678667

That settled it, now I just had to decide: mweb or openweb?
http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthread.php/316473-Mweb-or-Openweb
In the end I'm going for mweb because it is cheaper.

Compare prices:
http://pcbunny.co.za/adsl/uncapped-data-only/

I see mweb throttles bittorrent quite badly :(
http://outsourcehouse.co.za/afrihost-vs-gamco-vs-mweb-vs-openweb-uncapped-adsl-south-africa/

MWEB Uncapped ADSL claims questioned
http://mybroadband.co.za/news/adsl/20086-MWEB-Uncapped-ADSL-claims-questioned.html

I don't see much difference between the throttling of p2p stuff between mweb and afrihost:
http://wiki.vuze.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=Bad_ISPs#South_Africa

Bonus 1: You get 2 months free when signing up for 6 months at mweb:
http://www.mweb.co.za/productspricing/Get2MonthsFreeAdsl.aspx

Bonus 2: Telkom are upgrading their 512kbps lines to 1024kbps lines for free:
http://mybroadband.co.za/news/adsl/20112-Telkom-ADSL-speed-upgrades-begin.html
...mmmm maybe I should get the faster isp account too for an additional R70...
(will need to double check that my line is in deed 1024kbps...)

5 comments:

  1. I changed from Afrihost to Openweb earlier this year because of exactly the same issues. Afrihost's "Acceptable Usage Policy" is crazy and they basically throw you into the naughty kids corner as soon as you open that bittorrent client.

    Since running with Openweb Gold Uncapped, I've never looked back. Between my housemate and I, we download ~500gb a month without any hassles (4mbps line). The gold is a little bit more cost, but its lower contention ratios basically mean that you're pumping full speed ahead all month.

    They say they shape P2P traffic, and I have noticed some slowdowns during the day, but I'd rather have my torrents slow up a bit and the rest of my internet function perfectly, than get completely throttled for the whole month because of having downloaded stuff in the past.

    When I was playing WoW, latency was also good. Basically, moral of the story is Openweb rock, you should try them.

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  2. I have an unshaped 50GB account, and for the last 3-4 days I have been unable to download via BitTorrent @ more than 17 k p/s on a 4mb line. I purchased a 1GB top-up with WebAfrica last night and it munched away @ ~390 k p/s. Full speeds. I got a reply from Afrihost this am saying it's a latency issue but my web browsing, FTP upoads / downloads are the same as they always are. I've followed-up again this evening with Afrihost support and said in no uncertain terms if it's not rectified by tomorrow lunch I will be terminating the account and will go back to the ISP I've had for 7 years WebAfrica (I've only been with Afrihost for ~3 months). As stated, I have an *unshaped* account with 22GB remaining! I also will push for a pro-rata refund if they can't fix my torrent situation as this is why I opted for a 50GB package in the first place, and if the service is unusable, then how am I meant to consume the full bandwidth! But unlikely I'll see that happening.

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  4. @Andrew I've been with mweb uncapped since this post and am extremely happy, I basically get full speed (108KBps on a 1Mbps line) all the time. I torrent a lot, but I throttle that myself to be able to do other stuff too :) . The only issue I had with mweb is that they proxy e-mail on port 25 which caused problems with authenticating with my work mail.

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  5. Sainet baby the best ISP ever paying R339 uncapped and ive downloaded 3TB without any restrictions on a 384 line lol with the amounts fluctuating sometimes i saw 126 kb/s when downloading.

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