Irish Broadband Throttling BitTorrent?

clansman

we called IBB about this and told us to do a few tests and to send the results to them, we got packets loss, time outs and even over 200ms on some pings. i'll post up the test they told us to do and the results we got to night.

when we did a speed test with blacknight we got 2.8Mb down and about 700Kb up,,,,

have IBB shaped uploads on torrents?

MrVestek

Well even if they had shaped uploads on torrents that wouldn't effect a blacknight speedtest as it wouldn't be using bittorrent traffic or common bt ports to transmit and receive data.

MrVestek

pete wrote: »

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=54415328&postcount=148

Is there some part of that direct quote from IBB's commercial director that's hard to understand?

Commercial director? Erm... forgive me if I'm wrong as I'm not too sure but does a commercial director have anything to do with setting up the network or monitoring how it works or it's technology or anything like that? I would have thought, based on his title that he'd just be dealing with the media and planning advertising campaign or something like that. He could have just been misinformed.

pete

Achilles wrote: »

Commercial director? Erm... forgive me if I'm wrong as I'm not too sure but does a commercial director have anything to do with setting up the network or monitoring how it works or it's technology or anything like that? I would have thought, based on his title that he'd just be dealing with the media and planning advertising campaign or something like that. He could have just been misinformed.

or maybe he doesn't even work for them, isn't even a customer of theirs and doesn't know what he's talking about?

clansman

Nehaxak wrote: »

Nah, your ping times should be standard at least below 10ms before they hand off outside of IBB.

Do a tracert to www.bbc.co.uk and post the results (you can delete the private IP info relating to yourself) - you should get a standard response from that BBC site of usually 20ms and your hops between masts should be under 10ms each.

>tracert www.bbc.co.uk

Tracing route to www.bbc.net.uk [212.58.253.72]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 11 ms 1 ms 3 ms xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
2 84 ms 78 ms 82 ms CK04-fe-0-0-1-178-spurhill.irishbroadband.ie [87
.192.69.193]
3 * 90 ms 91 ms DN05-ge-1-3-0-25-esb.irishbroadband.ie [89.127.1
92.133]
4 89 ms 88 ms 75 ms DN07-ae0-2-ibis-gw-2.irishbroadband.ie [89.127.1
97.5]
5 111 ms 101 ms 89 ms 80.253.101.161
6 94 ms 110 ms 88 ms 212.58.238.129
7 81 ms 101 ms 92 ms fe0-0.rt0-frontpost.prodgw.bbc.co.uk [212.58.239
.222]
8 83 ms 78 ms 113 ms www3.cwwtf.bbc.co.uk [212.58.253.72]

Trace complete.


not so good

also i was dl with utorrent about 2.5Mb today between 10:00 and 13:00

Nehaxak

Did you run that tracert with Utorrent running in the background ?
If you did then try it again without anything else running, especially utorrent as it has a tendancy to take over your connection.

If you weren't running utorrent at the time then yeah, that's pretty bad - but, the ping times seem steady enough so I reckon you should try play about with something like the TCP Optimizer tool available from http://www.speedguide.net/downloads.php and use it to lower your MTU.
Use the www.bbc.co.uk site to run a MTU check via the TCP Optimizer programme and it should tell you what you should set your MTU at as a recommendation.

Your response on the first link, ie., your router or network card, should be 1ms or 3ms steady, never really above that and I know it's only 11ms but still, it might be an indication that something else is going wrong at your side.

Another thing you could do is look under the antenna installed by IBB, there are a number of lights underneath showing signal strength. If those lights are below 3 green then the antenna is either pointed incorrectly or you are so far away from the your nearest high site at spurhill that it is effecting your connection badly.

You could also run a pathping to the same BBC site and see what results come back - if you see a lot of dropped packets on the IBB links then it's a bigger indication that something is wrong with your connection to them.

Try sort out your own side first though, make sure all is ok at your end firstly.
Things like updating the drivers on your network card for a start maybe.

TCP Optimizer though, play about with that a bit as it can might be able to help you get a better connection.

clansman

i havent tried that program yet as we call IBB and they said that we wont be able to get better than ~100ms on our second hop to suprhill.. from tracert the problem seems to be the distance spurhill all tracert's i do have an average of 100ms. we havent checked the lights on the antenna yet, but if IBB say that ~80ms is the best would they be breaking the contract... as we will never get a upload speed of 3Mb, or am i totaly wrong?

Nehaxak

Dunno about breaking the contract, you'd have to go through the Terms & Conditions with a fine tooth comb to pick out any small print there that might excuse them due to problems like this.

To be honest though, you have a fair enough case to cancel service without having to be penalised for the rest of your contract period if you pushed it enough with them.

My first thoughts though would be for you to lower your MTU and see if that helps you a bit. Might help to bring down your response times.

clansman

we got on to IBB today and they said that there is some latency problem, so they are doing some survey tomorrow to see if we can be put on a VL service. i have no idea what vl means. i'll let ya know as soon as i do we they call tomorrow..

MrVestek

pete wrote: »

or maybe he doesn't even work for them, isn't even a customer of theirs and doesn't know what he's talking about?

Yeah fair enough I understand what you're getting at. For instance when I used to work in peats the managers in head office for instance would make claims about a certain product that we as employees knew it couldn't do or at least not correctly as they weren't very technical in nature, could be the same thing is all I was saying, or at least something similiar.

Rattlehead_ie

>tracert www.bbc.co.uk

Tracing route to www.bbc.net.uk [212.58.253.72]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 11 ms 1 ms 3 ms xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
2 84 ms 78 ms 82 ms CK04-fe-0-0-1-178-spurhill.irishbroadband.ie [87
.192.69.193]
3 * 90 ms 91 ms DN05-ge-1-3-0-25-esb.irishbroadband.ie [89.127.1
92.133]
4 89 ms 88 ms 75 ms DN07-ae0-2-ibis-gw-2.irishbroadband.ie [89.127.1
97.5]
5 111 ms 101 ms 89 ms 80.253.101.161
6 94 ms 110 ms 88 ms 212.58.238.129
7 81 ms 101 ms 92 ms fe0-0.rt0-frontpost.prodgw.bbc.co.uk [212.58.239
.222]
8 83 ms 78 ms 113 ms www3.cwwtf.bbc.co.uk [212.58.253.72]

Trace complete.
CLANSMAN:

Going on your traceroute, you did this traceroute with a router in between you Alvarion PoE unit and your PC. This caused at least a hop time of 11ms
This is your 1st port of call, directly connect and run traceroute again using your PC while it is directly connected. I know 11ms may not be much but if you take into account your timing too your gateway

2 84 ms 78 ms 82 ms CK04-fe-0-0-1-178-spurhill.irishbroadband.ie [87
.192.69.193]

that would mean your timing would be around the 70ms mark.

Now on top of that the Agent said you were "possibly" being changed too VL. That would indicate that you are currently using what they call BreezeMax I think. BreezeMax is a WiMax product so timing of about 70ms is to be honest not bad. So to answer your question is no IBB are not breaking their contract.

barry181091

Hey Guys,

Is this still going on ? I have terrible internet speed Its grand in the morning but then terrible .... Right now according to Speedtest. I get 148ms ping for the Dublin server , 400kbps d/l and 200 kbps upload. :eek: It should be at 2mb :eek: Whats going on ?

I dont do much with torrents, but I do use usenet ALOT, and thats not capped at all..... I can get 215KBps for binaries and a tenth of that for the net, That doesent make much sense, Unless they are capping me but they cant cap newsgroups somehow

Barry

Ps; Im using 2mb dsl.

thebman

Had huge problems with IBB tonight. I was tried pinging from my router and got timeouts to pretty much every website I tried. Google, Microsoft, Boards.ie, eircom.net etc... I recieved two packets from all these ping tests and both of them had over 300ms pings.

Traceroute was weird too.

Speeds were at dial up during this period. All seems to be fine now but they had big problems today it seems in Maynooth at least.

Scratch that, its only a bit better. 60KB/s at 1am in Maynooth. Normally get 240KB/s around the clock. We aren't being limited, at least we weren't before Xmas and nobody was here over Xmas as its a rented house.

Dara Robinson

prof_darkins wrote: »

I think IBB have finally started to throttle BT traffic. My HTTP traffic is running at top speed, the blackknight speed test giving me the full 3 meg either way, however, my torrent download speeds will not get about 50k, except for the odd burst up to 150 that lasts maybe 20 seconds as a peer connects un filtered. I am just posting to discover if anyone else is having this problem.

my understanding is that as long as you encript it they cant even tell what it is so they cant limit or restrict it at all

ntlbell

That's great, a number of things.

Don't claim to be here in an "unofficial" capacity and then make clear cut statements like the one above.

Secondly don't tell lies.

I know personally a number of people who admin the IBB network.

I've also done enough of my own testing to know IBB do _shape_ traffic.

now...state your opinions in an unoffical capacity or post officially and stop the lies, or don't bother posting at all.

po0k

What about the number of connections/flows?
Torrents [can] use an awful lot of network resources other than bandwidth.

fkm

Without question, something being done regarding BT downloads with IBB.

Speeds have completely collapsed so I decided to test torrents with Eircom broadband (on same PC with same router ports forwarded), and surprise surprise, speeds went from 1-2 kBps to 30-40 Kbps for the same torrent.

Heard IBB have implemented a Quality of Service allocating traffic priority, which would seem to contradict posted suggestions that no traffic shaping is occurring.

Blaster99

So the network is just broken, then?

Peanut

Sounds reasonable, if a bit odd..

btw by numerous I was also thinking of the customer support calls mentioned earlier in the thread, and other articles referred to such as this one from the director of customer service at the end of 2006, "‘‘I don’t know of any customer that we’ve written to because we have people managing it,” she said. ‘‘We just manage their traffic down."

RuggieBear

i'm on the breeze 2mb product and it is awesome for torrents.

Perhaps it is a contention issue as i believe there are fewer people on my mast.

thebman

I get very weird transfer over bittorrent with IBB. It used to be great, getting full speed with it but now they crawl and sometimes get the odd spike of speed which is weird because nothing changed on my side at all. Its the same router with the same ports open as it always was.

Its clear IBB are doing something and not just to heavy torrent users because I'd use torrents maybe once a month or so at max so its now across the network.

Still getting a crap service in Maynooth ATM too.
541ms pings make Xbox Live play impossible.
546kbps down
566kbps up

on a 2Mbps package! Not good enough, when are the problems going to be sorted? Are IBB actually doing anything? Anytime IBB are rang they lie about this problem too. One of the guys in the house rang and for about a week was told, it was the router not IBB and he reset the router when he hadn't any of the IBB settings to put back in.

I had to restore it from a backup which luckily I had albeit an old one so I had to update some settings but it was incredibly dishonest to ask the user to do this. What if they didn't have a back up? Or weren't aware that reseting the router would loose all their settings? IBB should not be telling customers to do that over the phone when they know its not the problem. Don't say you didn't know there was a problem at the time because if that was the case, you would have said to bypass the router and plug directly into the modem like you have done anytime in the past with an older router we had that was actually causing the problems.

When I reset the router, I got him to try plug his laptop in, bypassing the router so he had a direct connection to IBB and the problems were still there. Unbelievable considering we pay more than we would if we were in a normal European country for this service.

Rattlehead_ie

Blaster99 wrote: »

Yes... that's his whole point. When he encrypts the traffic over your network then torrents improve significantly in performance.

I think his point here was thats the data could possibly being throttled from both sides i.e. the torrents end. By you setting up a 3rd party ssh tunnel, you are obviously changing your ip address. So if the torrent tracker has for some reason (leaching) either blocked or throttled your specific IP or the IBB Range of IPs that your in you will get a slow down and it won't be due to IBBs network.

Blaster99 wrote: »

Debatable if anyone cares. Can you solve any issues for anyone, like the guy with the 500ms+ latency on your perfectly working network?

I also think he said that there are some issues with interference on the IBB network, he never said that it was perfectly working. I'd love to see any ISP stand by their network and go "Our network is perfectly working".

Note Im not defending this guy, nor am I defending IBB, but he is right in the case that just cause you encrypt the connection and speeds increase does NOT mean that the ISP are to blame.

Protocol7

To be honest I don't know how to test for shaping but my IBB DSL line went to crap around the middle of last week. BT speeds have never been as good as they were on Digiweb, but I don't mind. I'm a patient guy after all and I could never go back to Digiweb's rolling 30-day traffic cap. But it's practically flatlining since around Wednesday or Thursday. Up and down. And not just BT. Other p2p stuff I've tried is in the same boat. HTTP and FTP seem to be fine, so everything checks out if you do a test at speedtest.net etc. That should rule out network congestion or contention.

By way of a short test, I changed the port on one program to 80 and opened my HTTP ports in the firewall. And it started up working (peer connected and sent at around 30k/sec). Changed it back to another random port. Dead again (slow connecting, lots of peer connection errors and transfers timing out). Back to 80 and it worked again.

My billing period is up in another week or so, so I'm hoping it will resolve itself after that. This scenario is what I'd expect if I was overusing the service and was being throttled. However I haven't heard anything from IBB about this. No warning or anything. When I rang tech support, they said they didn't do that at all. TBH I don't know how much I've used this period but I have a feeling it was more than last month. Nothing in the terabytes though .This is only my second month with IBB so it's a worrying development to what was otherwise a good move.

Rattlehead_ie

for someone who doesn't know how to test you did fairly good work. The only issue I'd have with testing it on their DSL service is that again this is a resell of Eircoms BitStream service so yours dealing with 2 networks here, whether or not the portion that Eircom have on this type of connection has the ability to throttle I'm not sure.

Protocol7

So basically Eircom control traffic on IBB's DSL lines? I know Digiweb's DSL was also a Bitstream resell but both lines operate quite differently. There was no whiff of shaping on Digiweb while there clearly is on IBB. However, Digiweb had that restrictive traffic cap so I guess shaping would be necessary on the IBB line when people were told they had no monthly download cap.

I couldn't find a good guide on line attenuation and noise values. I have the 3meg package and my values are:

Line Attenuation: Downstream = 31.0 db Upstream = 15.0 db
Noise Margin: Downstream = 15.0 db Upstream = 18.0 db

I doubt there's anything wrong there. As I said, "regular" traffic is unaffected.

Also, how reliable are those online port checkers? Say, for example I use one to check if my bt port is open. It will report that it's closed. Even though I have it open on the firewall. Wait 10 or 20 seconds and try again and it's open. Try again after a wait and it could be closed again. I would have though that if the port was open it would stay open. Could this be a sign of shaping?

As I said before I haven't had a problem with the shaping but right now it's gone beyond that and my line is all but unusable. I've had to stop all p2p use for now and just hope it returns to normal when this billing period ends because if it doesn't I'll have to look elsewhere. I paid for a dsl connection not a couple of approved protocols. Net neutrality isn't just a buzzword.

Cabaal

IBBGuy, banned for breach of charter!

Bros123

Well just moved from 2Mb to 3Mb with Irish Broadband and on 2Mb I was getting up to 230kbs and with my new 3Mb connection speed has gone to 140kbs for the same well seeded torrent:rolleyes:
Maybe new connections are getting a little something extra thrown in (or taken away).http://boards.ie/vbulletin/attachment.php?attachmentid=50977&stc=1&d=1202515644
utorr.JPG