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...)

Monday, 9 May 2011

Bazaar on sourceforge.net

(sorry if you get this twice, blogspot made it disappear..)

I've bean looking for a place to host a modular project which is being version controlled with Bazaar. I would have loved to use Launchpad, but I can't because of the following:
  1. Launchpad only allows one level of branches (no hierarchy). My project is made up of a lot of sub-projects: I have a main branch which controls the sub-projects as bzr-externals.
  2. Launchpad does not have a nice project wiki or any custom web content.
I saw that sourceforge.net now supports Bazaar, but I was a bit worried when I saw on their wiki that they only support Bazaar version 1.10 . It turns out that it is thankfully only an outdated doc:
[me@shell-21002 ~]$ bzr --version
Bazaar (bzr) 2.1.1
Python interpreter: /usr/bin/python 2.4.3
Python standard library: /usr/lib64/python2.4
Platform: Linux-2.6.18-...
(I don't seem to have rights to correct the wiki and I could not google the current version, so I'm documenting it here for you.)

I did test that I could upload nested branches. But unfortunately the code browsing tool on Sourceforge (loggerhead) does not display the nested branches :( Hopefully that is fixable..
Update: Alexandre Garnier kindly noted that there is a bug report for it.

Thursday, 28 April 2011

Uncapped 512 kbps ADSL...so liberating

Last week I decided I want faster internet so I upgraded my Telkom line to 512kbps (from 384kps) after a quick phone call and waiting a couple of days for the activation. In general my surfing experience didn't improve much but the odd download does come down much quicker, and concurrent downloads doesn't interfere that much with each other any more. I know people in other countries probably laugh at these oxwagon speeds in 2011, but c'mon this is Africa.

I finally took the plunge last night and went over to uncapped internet. Afrihost makes for a great impulse buy since they charge pro-rata for the first month and have instant activation for existing customers. I don't think I'll ever  be able to go back. I'm already torrenting and and downloading big stuff like the latest ubuntu and XP service packs (for family m'kay you can't choose them..) that I usually would avoind or get through other means.