Dutch arm of UPC throttling services

machalla

An interesting story over on slashdot. Is it a test bed for the rest of their European subsidiaries? Or does it already happen here?

Dutch UPC story

mehmeh12

Seeing how broadband rollout in ireland is already so poorly developed compared to the rest of europe, i dont think most people would notice a decrease in speed :pac:

minotour

This would explain the behaviour I am seeing. Recently got UPC 10Mb installed in D18 area. early mornings I get full speed 1.1Mb downloads, in the evenings it drops to max 275 kbps. i did suspect something like this, needed a test plan to verify, I will test it tonight after midnight

cdb

There is an interesting response to that article on slashdot.

Fun facts: If everyone in your neighborhood with a land line picked up the phone right now and tried to make a call, probably only 10% to 20% of them would succeed. If everyone in the average American suburb all hopped in their car and tried to get on the road to the nearest Interstate, it'd be gridlock. Traffic would move at speeds no where near the posted limits. We're surrounded by shared resources with capacity that reflects typical usage with a reasonable amount of head room for "normal" peaks, but is far from being able to support the maximum theoretical demand.
Airlines overbook because a certain %age of customers don't show up, and that %age is large enough and stable enough that it makes sense to do so. When too many people do show up for a flight, the airline pays penalties (in the form of travel vouchers and upgrades), so there's incentive to be conservative in the practice. Everyone benefits overall, though. More people get flown from point A to point B. If the airlines sell more seats on a given flight, then they can charge less per seat too.
ISPs are no different. They purchase bandwidth based on a model of "reasonable" network usage and how many subscribers they have. The major difference, though, is that it's very easy for someone to fall well outside the "reasonable" traffic usage. It's quite possible for 1% of the users to take up the majority of the network bandwidth. And I can see this being considered "unreasonable," and the ISP taking steps to make sure that the other 99% of users have a reasonable experience.

Is it simply the case that we expecting too much from our broadband provider as is we want to get full speeds 24/7.

I recently downgraded my UPC broadband package as I wasn't getting anywhere near what I was paying for. Since then I can honestly say it has made very little difference with my online experience while costing a bit less every month.

mehmeh12

minotour wrote: »

This would explain the behaviour I am seeing. Recently got UPC 10Mb installed in D18 area. early mornings I get full speed 1.1Mb downloads, in the evenings it drops to max 275 kbps. i did suspect something like this, needed a test plan to verify, I will test it tonight after midnight

Where is the D18 area? im not familiar with area codes in Dublin.

1.1Mb in the morning on a 10mb connection? how long have you had this?

minotour

D18 is Leopardstown/Stepaside area. Ive only had UPC for the last 3 weeks, havent given it a thorough blast yet but thats what im seeing in general

mehmeh12

3 weeks in a 1.1mb connection? god you might as well be with eircom! jasus thats bad.

Have you phone customer support over this? your barely getting a tenth of what your paying for.

vibe666

i'm a very heavy user of the UPC 20mbps cable broadband package who gets close to the 250gb FUP every month (always over 200gb anyways) and I have had no experience of throttling at all recently.

I used to get quite severe speed reductions at peak times and much lower than advertised speeds which i initially thought was throttling, but after some testing it turned out to be contention and has been recified.

there's obviously been some upgrades in my area recently though as I have had zero speed isses in the last while and even got almost top speed downloading a torrent for an opensolaris ISO at peak times one evening (see page 53 of the p2p sticky thread).

if UPC are throttling, it must be being done very selectively and only where absolutely required. contention is a much more likely explanation for what people are seeing imho, at least in ireland (for now).

and no, i don't work for them.

great

mehmeh12 wrote: »

3 weeks in a 1.1mb connection? god you might as well be with eircom! jasus thats bad.

Have you phone customer support over this? your barely getting a tenth of what your paying for.

nope he is getting what he pays for...
10mb = 1.2MB~

mehmeh12

great wrote: »

nope he is getting what he pays for...
10mb = 1.2MB~

? Explain this please.

Jumpy

8 bits in a Byte.

You have a 10 Megabit connection. Thats only 1.280 MegaBytes

mehmeh12

vibe666 wrote: »

i'm a very heavy user of the UPC 20mbps cable broadband package who gets close to the 250gb FUP every month (always over 200gb anyways) and I have had no experience of throttling at all recently.

I used to get quite severe speed reductions at peak times and much lower than advertised speeds which i initially thought was throttling, but after some testing it turned out to be contention and has been recified.

there's obviously been some upgrades in my area recently though as I have had zero speed isses in the last while and even got almost top speed downloading a torrent for an opensolaris ISO at peak times one evening (see page 53 of the p2p sticky thread).

if UPC are throttling, it must be being done very selectively and only where absolutely required. contention is a much more likely explanation for what people are seeing imho, at least in ireland (for now).

and no, i don't work for them.

Where exactly do you live? in county dublin? and how far are you from the signal source?

NinjaTruncs

In tech term you need to be very careful with capitalisation
m= milli
M = mega
b = bit
B = Byte

8 * b = 1 B

so 1.1MB = ~9Mb

mehmeh12

NinjaTruncs wrote: »

In tech term you need to be very careful with capitalisation
m= milli
M = mega
b = bit
B = Byte

8 * b = 1 B

so 1.1MB = ~9Mb

Ok i get it now. God thats really just so anal..who came up with this system?

Kensington

And 275KB/sec = ~2.2Mb/sec.

Unfortunately though, you are not paying for a 10Mb connection, you are paying for an up to 10Mb connection

minotour

Correct on the speed calcs.

Back to the topic, i will kick off a well seeded file when i get home and let it get to top speed, then pause and unpause periodically until after midnight and document the results. Ill throw up some screens tomorrow. I plan to be up late anyway because i just picked up the new Wolfnestein;)

RangeR

P2P is not a real indication of the speed that your ISP is giving you. There are too many variables. However, Vibes test on the P2P thread would be close to best for P2P.

You would be better off downloading something big from Heanet using your browser. Much less variables involved and would give you a much more accurate result.

minotour

as per the original article, they talk about capping of 1/3 of the availabel b/w during daytime hours. Im confident enough to spot the difference between a third of the speed and full speed, not exactly rocket science!

bk

mehmeh12 wrote: »

Ok i get it now. God thats really just so anal..who came up with this system?

It is because of how computers work, computers only understand two things, 0 and 1 (on and off). So computers count everything in base 2, while humans tend to count things in base 10 (probably because most people have ten fingers).

So a computer tends to count things like so:

2 ^ 2 = 4
2 ^ 3 = 8
2 ^ 4 = 16
2 ^ 5 = 32
2 ^ 6 = 64
2 ^ 7 = 128

etc.

Wcool

Reading the Dutch posts, it's funny and painful at the same time.

Painful: there are people complaining that their 90mbits connection is throttled to 30mbits (still WELL ahead of what we have here )

Funny: some people are asking the top manager of UPC what would he think of cutting his salary to 1/3 for 1/2 of the day...

I think they have a point, you pay for the connection, no throttling expected except for contention.

dub45

Soon it will all be so complicated to figure out between 'unlimited usage' and 'fair user policies' and best times of the day (if bb is hobbled during the day and then affected by contention in the evenings) there will be no time left to actually use broadband!:rolleyes:

J-blk

minotour wrote: »

This would explain the behaviour I am seeing. Recently got UPC 10Mb installed in D18 area. early mornings I get full speed 1.1Mb downloads, in the evenings it drops to max 275 kbps.

I'm in D18, on the 20Mbps package and my speeds are around ~1.5MB down even at peak hours - full speeds of around 2.3MB on non peak hours. If your connection is collapsing at peak hours, it's probably contention rather than throttling. I had similar problems with UPC when I lived in the city center, it was great off peak but collapsed speed wise in the evenings.

vibe666

mehmeh12 wrote: »

Where exactly do you live? in county dublin? and how far are you from the signal source?

I'm in a village called Johnstown on the outskirts of Navan, Co. Meath.

not sure where the connection goes to though, sorry.

mehmeh12

vibe666 wrote: »

I'm in a village called Johnstown on the outskirts of Navan, Co. Meath.

not sure where the connection goes to though, sorry.

Dam im jealous. I live in south dublin but i can only get ntl tv service where i live.

whosedaddy?

why not identifying the the 1% and cripple them... that would be too easy of a solution wouldn't it.

Seriously tho, I havent read through any UPC T&C ever, but wouldn't their behaviour allow disgruntled subscribers to terminate the contracts? UPC not providing the agreed service ?
The "up to X Mb" clause is for technical reasons as they can't guarantee your line can take the speed and shouldn't be relevant in this case. In particular as throttlling the offender is possible and less intrusive for the other users.
Or do they have a user protection clause....
on the other hand many users might not even notice as HTTP traffic is not throttled.

RangeR

The root of the problem is the misleading advertising the false promises the over inflated expectations that the ISP's give potential customers just to win them over. Be under no illusion, they all do it. and it's not just ISP's. EVERY business does it in one shape of form.

Customers are given the impression that they are getting a 5MB, 10MB, 20MB product were in reality we know that it's UP TO only. [Yes, sometimes the sales rep states that it's MegaBytes and not MegaBits. Huge difference]

BaconZombie

mehmeh12 wrote: »

Ok i get it now. God thats really just so anal..who came up with this system?

vibe666

blame geeks.

te geek will inherit the earth, simply because it's going to get so complicated before too long that nobody else will have a clue what's going on and mass Idiocracy will reign supreme!

dub45

whosedaddy? wrote: »

why not identifying the the 1% and cripple them... that would be too easy of a solution wouldn't it.

Seriously tho, I havent read through any UPC T&C ever, but wouldn't their behaviour allow disgruntled subscribers to terminate the contracts? UPC not providing the agreed service ?
The "up to X Mb" clause is for technical reasons as they can't guarantee your line can take the speed and shouldn't be relevant in this case. In particular as throttlling the offender is possible and less intrusive for the other users.
Or do they have a user protection clause....
on the other hand many users might not even notice as HTTP traffic is not throttled.

Unfortunately it is usually very difficult in any company's terms and conditions to find what exactly are the company's obligations!!! And in spite of the fact that UPC have 22 pages in theirs plus various addendums it appears that they are far more about the customers obligations than UPC's!!

I can never understand why companies are not required to summarise their own obligations at the beginning of any contract plus provide a list of any likely financial charges which the customer may incur in the course of the contract. For example UPC's terms and conditons refer to a price list for various charges mentioned throughout the 22 pages. As far as I can see that Price list is not available on the UPC website and I have asked them by email for its locaton - of course I am still waiting.

If a person exceeds their 'unlimited' download limit UPC reserves the right to change them a product which they do not give the cost of!!!!!:rolleyes: