In late September Afrihost launched a broadband package that significantly undercut the pricing offered by competing ISPs.<\/p>\n
By using their marketing budget to subsidize the limited offer, the company offers consumers international bandwidth at R29 per gigabyte. The offer was announced on a limited promotional basis, but users who sign up are guaranteed access to the R29 per GB price point indefinitely.<\/p>\n
Most ISPs that sell ADSL broadband in South Africa either buy from SAIX or Internet Solutions (IS).<\/p>\n
Afrihost makes use of IS bandwidth, which means that user experience should be comparable to other ISPs who use IS, such as Axxess.<\/p>\n
With this is mind, we put Afrihost to the test in some of the more popular online games played in SA.<\/p>\n
These include Call of Duty 4 (CoD4), World of Warcraft (WoW) and Defense of the Ancients (DOTA).<\/p>\n
Call of Duty 4 and DOTA are both hosted on local servers, and users with 384kb lines should typically be able to attain speeds of between 40ms and 80ms. DOTA, which is played p2p and hosted locally on the Twilight servers, typically delivers latencies of below 20ms to ADSL users. There is no local World of Warcraft server, and most South African’s play on European servers where they can typically expect latencies of between 350ms and 700ms.<\/p>\n
All tests were conducted using a 384kb ADSL line without any speed enhancing applications installed.<\/p>\n
Call of Duty 4<\/strong><\/p>\n Afrihost definitely provides competative latencies in CoD4. In our test, SGS’ Tactical Warfare server offered the lowest latency, hovering between 39ms and 45ms, although there were only three players using it.<\/p>\n The iGame Delta server presented a consistent 50ms at around 80 percent player capacity, and most other servers were available at between 50ms and 60ms, making for a highly playable online FPS experience through Afrihost.<\/p>\n These latencies were practically identical to those delivered by Telkom, MWeb, Axxess and WebAfrica bandwidth.<\/p>\n Because unshaped bandwidth only affects the provisioning on international data use, it delivered no improvement CoD4.<\/p>\n In short, in terms of locally hosted FPS gaming, Afrihost delivers an equally playable experience as its competition. Afrihost makes use of IS’s shaped bandwidth, and international access is supplied via the undersea SAT 3 fiber cable. This basically means that the gameplay experience is very similar to that supplied by other ISPs that resell IS bandwidth.<\/p>\n Latency averaged around 600ms using Afrihost in WoW. On the same line using Mweb and Telkom’s shaped international bandwidth, supplied by SAIX, we experienced slightly lower latencies of around 550ms on average.<\/p>\n This did not come as a surprise, as reports that SAIX provides supperior international data provisioning are common.<\/p>\n Latency was fairly consistent, with occasional spikes disturbing gameplay. There were times when the latency rose to around 650ms and even 700ms, which made raiding and PvP gameplay quite difficult, but it was uncertain whether this was due to server load or problems with data provisioning.<\/p>\n These spikes seemed to be as prevalent on Telkom and Mweb shaped accounts as they were on Afrihist.<\/p>\n Shaped bandwidth offerings unsurprisingly delivered superior latencies in WoW. Players can expect consistent latencies of around 350ms using unshaped bandwidth.<\/p>\n Using third party ping reducers, players can effectively achieve sub 400ms latencies in WoW with Afrihost.<\/p>\n As far as similarly priced data offerings go, Afrihost’s bandwidth performed admirably considering the price.<\/p>\n DOTA<\/strong><\/p>\n The locally hosted Twilight server offers players exceedingly low latencies, and this was no different using Afrihost.<\/p>\n Afrihost delivered latencies below 20ms in DOTA, as did Axxess, Mweb, Telkom and Webafrica. There was no distinguishable difference in latency, and prospective Afrihost users who are planning on using it to play DOTA have nothing to worry about.<\/p>\n Edit<\/strong><\/p>\n DOTA matches are played “peer to peer” in SA, which means gamers connect directly to each other instead of over a dedicated server.<\/p>\n Conclusion<\/strong><\/p>\n In summary, Afrihost delivers excellent value for money to online gamers.<\/p>\n For those looking to play online locally, there is no reason to use any other ISP. It seems that those looking to play MMO’s that are hosted internationally will be slightly better served using bandwidth supplied by SAIX, however, the difference is negligible and far greater improvements can be achieved using ping reducers.<\/p>\n For the most part, Afrihost offers similar online gaming performance to the ISPs we tested it against.<\/p>\n However, it is significantly cheaper than all other offerings.<\/p>\n Afrihost is still offering bandwidth at R29 <\/a>per GB although this offer will expire at some point. For as long as it is still available, it is the best value broadband offering for online gamers in SA.<\/p>\n
World of Warcraft<\/strong><\/p>\n