eircom - odd evening speeds to non Irish sites

ArthurG

I posted yesterday about some slow speeds on eircom 8 meg NGB on the Lucan village exchange. Well this morning all was well, full speed, happy days.

Then late this afternoon same thing happened - some sites (Apple, MS) slowed down. Really odd thing was that trying to download from heatnet (a random large iso to test speed) works at full speed (was getting >800kbps). iTunes was crawling along at 20 - 50kbps, a download from MS was going at about 15kbps. eircom speedtest reported full speed (close to 8Mbps), which I don't take as gospel, but is in line with the heanet download speeds. youtube seems fine.

Rang eircom, who claim it is a problem with Apple. Despite my protestations, they weren't for moving. They recommended I keep an eye on it and call them back if its still a problem.

Am I going mad?. Why would I get good speeds to Irish sites and not MS/Apple??.

Any advice?.

Cheers!

Resi12

Well Youtube isn't an Irish site so perhaps it really is just iTunes being a div for the day.

ArthurG

If it was just iTunes the once, I'd agree. However it was the exact same yesterday which makes me suspicious. Not sure about youtube, didn't try it yesterday. MS has behaved the same too.

Praetorian

I'm experiencing that too. 50 kilobyte per second downloads from a number of foreign sites that are normally lightning fast. Quite frustrating when trying to stream video, / download / even page loading is slow. Then some sites are loading / downloading / streaming perfectly. Speedtest sites are performing well.

Below par service from Eircom, quite annoying considering I pay €70 per month for this.

ArthurG

Is that a recent development for you? Are you in Dublin?

Cheers!

Praetorian

I'm in Dublin, it's going on a few weeks, some evenings. Well I'm not there during the day, so it could be all the time.

VampiricPadraig

YouTube has been slow over the past couple of days (They have been doing maintaince (as usual))

But some sites are just hosted on really bad servers!

Baneblade

could be a routing problem on the internet outside eircoms control

you could try to pin or trace route to some of the affected sites to see where the problem starts
but since heanet and irish sites are ok it would look like the problem is not on eircoms side

rsynnott

Are you using Google DNS or OpenDNS? This can confuse certain content distribution networks (used by Apple and Microsoft, for instance) and cause them to assign you to a node that you don't actually have decent connectivity to.

ArthurG

Using Google DNS atm. Will try some tracerts when I'm back home on Friday.

Would you recommend changing to OpenDNS?.

This may have been going on longer than the last few days, but its only the last few days I've been seeing the problem.

By the way, in case its relevant, I don't use the eircom netopia router, have a Netgear replacement which works fine.

Moonbeam

do a traceroute to a few of the sites you are and are not having issues with and take a look at the path.

eg

traceroute www.heanet.ie

Baneblade

try using eircoms dns to see if there is any difference
that will either confirm or rule out the point made by rsynnott