Gamer's guide to ADSL - Share your connection experiences

First time I've seen someone else using the hosepipe analogy to explain the whole line-speed vs ping thing - it's great for getting the less technical folks to understand how things work.

And then ... major typo:

Capped shapped offerings
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Not quite sure what shapping is ... but it sounds dirty, and I hope they don't do it on my line :D

Anyways - I'm currently with WebAfrica (on the RedAfrica special) with a 4Mbps line - I was actually pretty happy with the 384k line until I tried downloading Star Wars: Force Unleashed over Steam - it literally took 3 weeks - obviously I stopped the downloads when I was playing anything.

My ping on local with the 384k and 4Mbps were kinda comparable - there was a slight improvement (about 5 - 10ms) on local server gaming, and there was a more noticeable improvement (20 - 40ms) on international servers. Regarding shaping - well, WA has always been pretty gaming friendly, and they do give the ports that WoW/Aion/GW/etc run on higher priority - and if I remember correctly - RedAfrica accounts are unshaped - but I didn't see a difference between that and my previous package in terms of pings.
 
shadowfox said:
First time I've seen someone else using the hosepipe analogy to explain the whole line-speed vs ping thing - it's great for getting the less technical folks to understand how things work.

And then ... major typo:

Thankls

Not quite sure what shapping is ... but it sounds dirty, and I hope they don't do it on my line :D

Anyways - I'm currently with WebAfrica (on the RedAfrica special) with a 4Mbps line - I was actually pretty happy with the 384k line until I tried downloading Star Wars: Force Unleashed over Steam - it literally took 3 weeks - obviously I stopped the downloads when I was playing anything.

My ping on local with the 384k and 4Mbps were kinda comparable - there was a slight improvement (about 5 - 10ms) on local server gaming, and there was a more noticeable improvement (20 - 40ms) on international servers. Regarding shaping - well, WA has always been pretty gaming friendly, and they do give the ports that WoW/Aion/GW/etc run on higher priority - and if I remember correctly - RedAfrica accounts are unshaped - but I didn't see a difference between that and my previous package in terms of pings.
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Interesting. Having moved between 4Mbps and 384Kbps a few times, I must say I have not noticed any discernable difference in pings. The largest differentiating factor for me has been moving house. The first time I moved by pings dropped from about 80ms to 30ms on local CoD4 servers.
 
I once lived in a house with 4meg line in a poor suburb and since I think we where only a few poeple having internet the internet was just awesome pings where very low sometimes even 18ms.

Now moved to a ritcher area and well internet has been very shaky and not really stable at all. So yeah where you live makes the biggest diffrence sometimes.

Nic why is Afrihost 50Gig price cheaper than their 25Gig Package?

EDIT: O I see what you did there. Does not always work out when you add packages like that price wise. I think you could have rather used a larger table and just had N/A in the packages that the isp did not have on their website.
 
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Lately, and when I say lately I mean this whole year so far, I've been getting random line drops almost every 20 minutes every night. Seems like they're overselling our exchange. I never had problems before, but it's starting to get really bad, and really annoying now. Thank goodness they never upgraded our exchange to 10mb, otherwise it would have been much worse I reckon.

Also, reporting line faults to Telkom does not help at all. The problem just keeps on persisting until they stop overselling or upgrade the exchange.
 
Tinman said:
Interesting. Having moved between 4Mbps and 384Kbps a few times, I must say I have not noticed any discernable difference in pings. The largest differentiating factor for me has been moving house. The first time I moved by pings dropped from about 80ms to 30ms on local CoD4 servers.
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Like I said ... the difference was only really noticeable on international gaming ... and I would guess that since your PC is constantly communicating anyways that uses up a part of the 384k bandwidth you have. But again, I had to specifically test the pings in-game to notice the improvement - I never noticed any doing the usual TCP/IP pings, and in actual in-game play - like you said - doesn't really make itself noticeable.
 
to0kenZA said:
Lately, and when I say lately I mean this whole year so far, I've been getting random line drops almost every 20 minutes every night. Seems like they're overselling our exchange. I never had problems before, but it's starting to get really bad, and really annoying now. Thank goodness they never upgraded our exchange to 10mb, otherwise it would have been much worse I reckon.

Also, reporting line faults to Telkom does not help at all. The problem just keeps on persisting until they stop overselling or upgrade the exchange.
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yup and guess what, my exchange supports 10Meg.....

right now as of now, i have not net at home because the lien cant even sync, the telephone line is crackling and you can barely hear the person on the other end. Logged a fault...

Last tiem this happened, the line was corroded hence the issue, that was only a few months ago and it took them a full week to rectify it

1st trip: telkom techie : "seems as if you cant sync at 4meg, we'll drop you to 2meg"

outcome: line is now slower and it STILL DROPS

Me: "please bring me back up to 4Meg and come down here again, im logging a fault again"

2nd Techie: " Seems as if the first guy didn't notice you copper line was corroded, he should have seen this and your less than 2KM from the exchange so they need not drop your line speed"


and now.....after a few months, the problem has yet again returned.

Following a different route this time though, fault logged (even though telkom can find nothing wrong on their side)

I have also got my ISP involved this time, Afrihost are getting one of their telkom contacts to speak to me2 nite, i dont care if they bribe this bloke to get this shit done.

tonight im getting answers :mad:
 
Crzwaco said:
I once lived in a house with 4meg line in a poor suburb and since I think we where only a few poeple having internet the internet was just awesome pings where very low sometimes even 18ms.

Now moved to a ritcher area and well internet has been very shaky and not really stable at all. So yeah where you live makes the biggest diffrence sometimes.

Nic why is Afrihost 50Gig price cheaper than their 25Gig Package?

EDIT: O I see what you did there. Does not always work out when you add packages like that price wise. I think you could have rather used a larger table and just had N/A in the packages that the isp did not have on their website.
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I considered doing that, but the problem is that there would have been mostly NAs because of the way different ISPs stagger their product range :/

A bigger table might have helped...
 
You can also use some regediting to edit tcpack'ing so that window's rubbish throughput optimiser is turned off.
 
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