ntl traffic shaping/blocking ports?

rogue-entity

That may be the case, but I find it hard to believe that using a non-BT email server, I could not send emails to gmail.com, eircom.net, hotmail.com and xylene.com, I got Relay Access Denied Error. To be honest, I would not object if BT were blocking outbound port 25 except that to their servers.

JNive

relay access denied meant that you did not authenticate with the SMTP server or you are using a 'from' address which is not listed on its allowed relay domains list.

dathiultaigh

Pretty sure CiaranC is correct a few months back I think all (?) irish ISP set and agreed to this standard as a measure in tighten security for their email servers and network ,to reduce spam and therefore guarantee a better email service for the end user.

I dont know the exact details but this is the basics. You will see this with any other ISP that has set this standard in place. So if BT has implemented this then you need to reference their SMTP settings in your e-mail client otherwise it won't work.

JNive

eircom, magnet and chorus do not block smtp ports, sicne ive used them on all 3

watty

Usually if you are not connected to an ISP and want to user THEIR SMTP server you need to have a user & password logon. When you are connected via that ISP, it works without it.

It's extra settings in most Email programs. Your "from" address can in fact be different domain if you have a valid SMTP logon. I use 3 different domains in my from address and 4 different email addresses according to who I am replying to.

rogue-entity

@JNive: That must be the case, the email server in question was the old one handling emails for my domain, I had since moved to another one, but I just use BT's outgoing server for now.

Sad Professor

I'm experiencing a lot of trouble with ntl/upc and bittorrent as well. Downloads and particularly uploads are just crawling along most of the time—on some highly seeded torrents. I've been with ntl for over 3 years and haven't had any problems in a long time though there was plenty in the beginning.

It may be unrelated but I've also been having problems with a DC++ hub I stay connected to, in the last few weeks I've been getting loads of server time-outs, sometimes every 10 minutes and I'm certain it not a problem with the hub. So I assume this is upc f**king around with p2p traffic.

I'm gonna give UPC a chance to get their act together and then I'll be packing up and heading to Magnet or Smart.

Cabaal

Never had a problem with my NTL connection in rel;ation to speeds on torrents or in general really.

However I got my strike two letter from NTL today saying I'm downloading too much, guess I'll have to cut back

inforfun

Having problems since Christmas with NTL. Every single day my upload goes belly up. Where it used to happen around 5pm it is now even before 4 pm.
Called NTL/UPC 30 or 40 times in the mean time, promises made for call backs broken every single time apart from 2 occasions.
Got to speak to a broadband support guy who thought he was dealing with some noob. He blamed the current "service" on users downloading too much via torrents.
I was supposed to be one of them.
Asked him how much data traffic i had in february. Answer: you had 25 down and 17 up= 47 gb so you are well over.

After tellign him that in the days i was in school 25+17 used to be 42 he got a bit silent. Sure a 2gb over the limit is the cause of this all.

I can only see one reason.
At the moment they have this offer:
You can now get Digital TV and Broadband for €9.99 a month for 6 months and free connection.

For me it is pretty clear they are connecting people like crazy and their infrastructure just can not handle it.

In 2 weeks it is direct debit time again for 130 euro.
If they call why it hasnt been paid yet i ll promise them a call back.

dub45

inforfun wrote:

Having problems since Christmas with NTL. Every single day my upload goes belly up. Where it used to happen around 5pm it is now even before 4 pm.
Called NTL/UPC 30 or 40 times in the mean time, promises made for call backs broken every single time apart from 2 occasions.
Got to speak to a broadband support guy who thought he was dealing with some noob. He blamed the current "service" on users downloading too much via torrents.
I was supposed to be one of them.
Asked him how much data traffic i had in february. Answer: you had 25 down and 17 up= 47 gb so you are well over.

After tellign him that in the days i was in school 25+17 used to be 42 he got a bit silent. Sure a 2gb over the limit is the cause of this all.

I can only see one reason.
At the moment they have this offer:
You can now get Digital TV and Broadband for €9.99 a month for 6 months and free connection.

For me it is pretty clear they are connecting people like crazy and their infrastructure just can not handle it.

In 2 weeks it is direct debit time again for 130 euro.
If they call why it hasnt been paid yet i ll promise them a call back.

If you dont pay a direct debit your bank will levy a charge on you - ntl will levy a service charge on you and possibly a late payment fee on you as well.

The joys of the direct debit scheme:rolleyes:

tinkerbell

Cabaal wrote:

Never had a problem with my NTL connection in rel;ation to speeds on torrents or in general really.

However I got my strike two letter from NTL today saying I'm downloading too much, guess I'll have to cut back

How much you downloading Cabaal?

MartMax

lads

just notice that ntl's DNS servers (89.101.160.5 and 89.101.160.4) are taking their time to get updated. i have made some changes to nameservers for few domains of mine couple of days ago, they haven't been updated on ntl's. or may be it's just me. normally the propogation takes less than 12 hours to be seen on ntl.

Mart

CyberGhost

Received my 5th "love letter" today.

I'm getting really fed up with them, I'll have to call them and threaten to cancel my TV, just to give them a little scare, haha

Cabaal

tinkerbell wrote:

How much you downloading Cabaal?

I've been pretty good since my last warning and I'm pretty sure I kept it to between 40-60GB but as I only run DU Meter on opne PC and NTL don't provide a usage checker I can't say 100%.

CyberGhost wrote:

Received my 5th "love letter" today.

I'm getting really fed up with them, I'll have to call them and threaten to cancel my TV, just to give them a little scare, haha

Wow 5th, here was me thinking they only allowed 3 strikes and your gone.

christophicus

I got my first today

CyberGhost

Cabaal wrote:

I've been pretty good since my last warning and I'm pretty sure I kept it to between 40-60GB but as I only run DU Meter on opne PC and NTL don't provide a usage checker I can't say 100%.

I download in the area of maybe 80 gigs.

So many people receiving those letters is a clear sign that 30gb is a joke!

Make the damn limit 100-120 gigs and everyone will be fine.

christophicus wrote:

I got my first today

Welcome to the club!

inforfun

CyberGhost wrote:

I download in the area of maybe 80 gigs.

So many people receiving those letters is a clear sign that 30gb is a joke!

Make the damn limit 100-120 gigs and everyone will be fine.

I got me 1 of those letters last year in July. I used 90 gb of data about every month.
Since then i have been on a total (down and up) of 40/45 gb a month and they didn't bother me anymore. Take note.. the 40gb limit is for up and down together.

Now they blame people (and as i was told, i was one of those people)for downloading too much and causing the problems i am facing since end of December.
This is fekking hilarious to give as a reason. I am pretty sure people were behaving badly in the past, prior this problems.

So giving this as a reason and do **** all for the rest is just as big a joke as a data limit of 40 gb a month on a 6mb line.

fatherdougalmag

FWIW I can be certain that NTL are targetting torrent by some means. Previously I used to get my full 300Kb/s on torrents. Now they max out at 5/10Kbps. Upload graph in Az resembles a badly cut hedge or the skyline of Dublin whereas previously it was one of those posh hedges. When I connect to my company's VPN the upload stays consistent. However, through my company's network, inbound connections are not allowed so my download is only marginally better (but still 40kB/s ish).

christophicus

Do you guys think this torrent slowing/blocking will be taken away eventually??Im getting more and more doubtfull.

inforfun

I wish it was just the torrents. I can not believe they are targeting torrents only.
Every single night since end of december my upload goes to hell. And that is for http ( take this page, takes 30 sec to load)
FTP ( tried to upload a 80 mb file to my corparate ftp server, 0,8 kb/s)
smtp (sending a text only email is taking minutes)

During the night when i start a torrent i get speeds like in the good old NTL days.

Take these 2 speedtests:
11/03 14:55 D/5897 kbps (720 KB/s) U/522 kbps (64 KB/s) Qos99 % RTT44 ms Max pause 38 ms
And then this one:
11/03 00:52 D/5347 kbps (653 KB/s) U/1 kbps (1 KB/s) QOS84 % RTT46 ms Max pause270 ms

The one on top is how it used to be and how it is during the night and midday. Just say the times that people are working or sleeping.
Late afternoon the performance of the line drops like the 2nd test.
It cant be that NTL is activating some torrent blocker only then as it is going down some time between 4 and 6 in the afternoon and the line is back some time between 23.00 and 1 am

Kernel

christophicus wrote:

Do you guys think this torrent slowing/blocking will be taken away eventually??Im getting more and more doubtfull.

I'm gonna give them the benefit of the doubt for another week (only because the service was once excellent), after that, I'm moving to magnet or smart.

... And I'm taking my telly with me!

Snake Plisken

Well as I posted on my NTL tale of woe yesterday, the tech support guy told me that they were installing some new traffic shaping software to help sort out the contention issues.

Snake

christophicus

Yeah which could very well mean throtteling .

Jumpy

Is there really an issue shaping bandwidth at peak times?

mollser

This is driving me nuts.

Torrents are starting off fast as normal, then over about a minute the speed drops and it disconnects. Restart it, same again happens with all torrents. Some torrents I use I trust implicity to get max d/l speeds.

I've been a long time fan of the ntl service, but this sucks.

Sort it out NTL. :mad:

Jono_g

I am with NTL and they were okay for a while......

But now they are quite ****.....

The broadband kept astarting and stopping etc. NTL rang me and asked me would I turn down my upload speed on limewire/azureus etc....

So I did and everything was cool. But now I cant use limewire/frostwire. Azureus is okay but not brilliant. DLs start on frost wire and then the speed drops and then they just stop.

It happens on Winmx too so it must be throttling. Anyone have any solid info? IF this is the case I am changing asap. Kunts.

CyberGhost

Hi, I want to bring this topic up cause ntl have become real ***holes!

They screwed something up, they are blocking imagevenue...

Go to this page...
http://www.aclasscelebs.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=28934

Are all the pictures showing up?

No?

try it through a proxy(http://www.the-cloak.com/) they will then.

christophicus

Just to comfirm once again that NTL is indeed still shaping or at least I would recon so. When I start downloading a torrent, if it is well seeded then the speed will go up to around 400KB/s maybe faster i'm not sure, and then plummet to between 0-10 KB/s.

CyberGhost

Have any of you guys received those "love" letters lately?

Cause I haven't one more proof that they probably implemented a throttling system.

I have the same simptoms as Chris. Also, Emule drops connections left and right, it won't stay connected more than a minute.

LFCFan

I got a letter saying I'd been downloading too much blah blah blah (they give you a 40GB cap and then say to only download 1GB a day. Someone should explain that there are not 40 days in a month). Since then my torrent download speeds have been pathetic. Used to get 500Kb/s easily, now I'm lucky if it hits 50Kb/s. I've done speeds checks and I've been getting 6Mbits+ but torrents are still slow