Need to swop over to another ISP asap

Last month I got heavily throttled on the afrihost network and was advised to swap over to the Internet Solutions network by the Afrihost techie guys, as that would increase our speed and service...

What a joke tho... was around the 5th or so of this month when they (I.S) throttled my download speed to between 5 and 10KB/s (on a 384kb line) after using what they said to be 8Gigs - which cannot be true - because I had bought a couple Gigs of unshaped, capped bandwidth from Afrihost as well, which I was using between the 1st and 3rd of the month...

This whole BS story of "If you're in Top 20% of users for the 384kbs, 512kbs and 1024kbs connection speeds, you will be shaped" policy is a joke. They refuse to even give the public an average % to work with, and by never having to show us any hard numbers they can basically shape, throttle and manage whenever and however they like.

So basically worse off than before...

So, wanted to ask you guys that are using 384kb lines (or what ever speed), if you would mind telling me more or less when you are getting shaped or throttled (5G, 10G, 15G's etc) and what ISP have you found to be the best for downloading movies and series?
I download mostly from Filestube, Megaupload etc, never used torrents as I have no idea how to use them

I am using 384k and mweb uncapped. Day speeds are throttled but at knight its been great. Browsing etc. fine during the day. Been avg. 60-70 Gigs/mnth for the last 4 or five months...

Hey Fox

Two Q's

Are you throttled during the day right from the beginning of the month?
What average speed are you getting during the day while you're downloading?

Yip but that also depends on which servers i am DL from. The popular ones like hotfile, rapidshare etc are throttled from the get go (protocol throttling). However I have DL's from 4shared and fileserve DL @ about 20-30kb 24/7. I found the trick is to spread your DL;s over as many of them as possible. The older stuff is generally slower too. Not 100% how they implement. During the day can be anything between 0 and 20kb

Use a download accelerator that will open up multiple connections to the same site an sometimes to multiple mirrors. Another trick is on shaped connections try use a proxy and force to go through port 80 same for torrents.

Dont rapidshare downloads come through port 80???? Thought it did and that somehow they throttle everything from rapidshare....etc

Hmmm that wasn't how I understood mweb shaping. They told us port 80 is not shaped... will order a 4mb line and test if I get my 400Kb

Its what they dont tell you that you should be worried about, you know the details printed in fine print so fine that nobody can read it....:laugh: Bastardos.... I think this is what they call protocol shaping, ie. even if it comes through port 80 it uses a certain protocol and that is what they shape?

When I studied in Potch, we used to go to all the internet cafe's and look for the one with the best connection and then install a download manager that supports resuming. Then we set it up to download a number of things we wanted.

After it's running, we would end the program's process by pressing Alt, Ctrl and Del. Then I used a batch file to start the download manager at startup... the trick here however was to force the GUI to be hidden, so that no-one can see what we were doing. Can't remember the command we used, but it was very simple...

A couple of days later we would go back and collect what we downloaded for free... lol

Nice, where there's a will there's a way, haha. The ISP's are just too cleaver these days, tough getting around their traffic monitoring.

Fox wrote: Its what they dont tell you that you should be worried about

Agree man. There seems to be so many hidden rules/protocols and a person only finds these out once you've signed up...
Might give Mweb a try next and see how it goes

Anybody else using Axxess, Openweb, Digichilli etc??

admin wrote: When I studied in Potch, we used to go to all the internet cafe's and look for the one with the best connection and then install a download manager that supports resuming. Then we set it up to download a number of things we wanted.

After it's running, we would end the program's process by pressing Alt, Ctrl and Del. Then I used a batch file to start the download manager at startup... the trick here however was to force the GUI to be hidden, so that no-one can see what we were doing. Can't remember the command we used, but it was very simple...

A couple of days later we would go back and collect what we downloaded for free... lol

Haha, smart

Fox wrote: Its what they dont tell you that you should be worried about, you know the details printed in fine print so fine that nobody can read it....:laugh: Bastardos.... I think this is what they call protocol shaping, ie. even if it comes through port 80 it uses a certain protocol and that is what they shape?

The protocol for web browsing and downloading is TCP.. You have to shape something, but you are right and you can say IP XYZ limit bandwidth to X during hour X or Y. Or limit bandwidth on large files, etc. However these sites that you grab things from rapidshare, etc don't just have 1 IP associated, they have a cluster of servers to handle the download load.

I will check into this more next week when I get an account to test, I have many ADSL lines so I will just try the account and see how it goes.

I am using 2 X MWeb 4mb uncapped unshaped with a wishbone solution (multiplexing), seems to work quite nicely... I hear the ADSL infrastructure has been updated in parts to that of 10mb after the world cup they are releasing this bandwidth too. I will be getting a 10mb uncapped unshaped line as soon as they are available

Lucky swine... what i would give. I understand that TCP is the transport protocol, but is it not possible that, rapidshare for example, has somthing unique that can thus be identified and then throttled? I am using 3 diff download managers simultaneousley from about 6 or 7 file sharing sites...

How much are you downloading a month BBguy? I resell SAIX and IS ADSL and we were talking to one of our account managers about highest users etc and they were in the high 100s of Gbs. Also what about the local usenet sites, heard they have decent content, get a 2Gb IS account which gives you 30Gb local and use it just for that.

I VPN a Fixed IP from our DC and then break out over fibre onto IS's backbone. None of the ISPs throttle VPN traffic and it all seems local to them. On tests I was doing for entry level Video Conferencing I was getting close to full speed on a 4mbs ADSl line.

SAIX still seems the fastest to me but we have our own radius and are not selling there consumer products so not sure if this makes a difference.

SAI (not sure if its the same as SAIX) are awesome.

Thanx for all the replies guys

@Thug
when I wasn't throttled too badly by Afri(months ago) I was getting between 40-60 Gig a month. At the moment I don't think it will even be possible to DL another 5G for the month(getting 5KB at the moment lol) but will be happy with 20-30 Gig/month with the way ISP's seem to be tightening up on the unshaped accounts

get a 2Gb IS account which gives you 30Gb local and use it just for that

Would the 30G local be unshaped ?

Have heard of Usenet sites, do they all charge a fee?

Will have to do some reading up on VPN and all these protocols hey, TCP etc(clueless)

Are SAIX and IS the 2 main guys? What about Mweb are they independent?

What the hell are you guys downloading? 80Gb per month is insane. I use about 5Gb per month... lol.

I guess it's MS Windows that require that many updates and software. lol... my Mac had everything out of the box, so I didn't have to install allot on it...

I'm guessing LOADS of movies.

haha, ja I guess. I was just trying to piss the Windows guys off.

00pump wrote: Use a download accelerator that will open up multiple connections to the same site an sometimes to multiple mirrors. Another trick is on shaped connections try use a proxy and force to go through port 80 same for torrents.

Dunno how I missed this post...
Download servers like Filestube etc only let one IP download at the same time, will these download managers get around this?

@Admin the windows updates are pretty small in comparison. I remember getting an update on the mac and it was sumin like 2/3gigs :ohmy: ... I think it was for Garageband...
MAC SUX :whistle: Windows7 for the win :lol:

lol, sorry but I use linux on my desktop... you mac and windows girls...

BB_guy wrote: @Admin the windows updates are pretty small in comparison. I remember getting an update on the mac and it was sumin like 2/3gigs :ohmy: ... I think it was for Garageband...
MAC SUX :whistle: Windows7 for the win :lol:

Yes, but there are 50 Windows updates per day... lol... I'm just playing around and have nothing against Win-doos... I have to state though that the only software to ever crash on my mac is MS Office 2008, but I guess that's MS's way to hit back at Mac users... lol.

00pump wrote: lol, sorry but I use linux on my desktop... you mac and windows girls...

Well Mac is running a linux kernel, so I guess the penguin is not too shabby...lol

Hey IT People,

Just for fun I have read all posts in this topic and my conclusion is the following: I have no fuckin idea what you're talking about.......:laugh:

Glad you understand