UPC Slow Peak times

mark17j

I'm a new UPC customer and since my broadband was installed every evening around This time (5 -8ish) I achieve these very slow speeds...sometimes I can't even browse, other times of the day my speed is great achieving over 21mb down and 2.5 up... Question, is this peak time traffic to be expected every evening from now on?
Have others experienced similar with their UPC connections at these particular times?
Do UPC expect people to just put up with it ?????

mark17j

seems allot better now

Brian_Malone

They're just awful. So bad...I'm drained. The worst customer service experience of my life...

collier

Brian_Malone wrote: »

They're just awful. So bad...I'm drained. The worst customer service experience of my life...

This is only your opinion, I have actually found them to be very helpful.

Brian_Malone

It's not my opinion, it's a statement based on my experience. I'm not just looking into my heart and inventing a response. This is my first hand experience of their incompitence.

In the last 8 weeks I have had 10 plus phone calls and 2 technicians visits. Only 2 of the people I spoke with were capable and willing to help. The rest, useless.

collier

Brian_Malone wrote: »

It's not my opinion, it's a statement based on my experience. I'm not just looking into my heart and inventing a response. This is my first hand experience of their incompitence.

In the last 8 weeks I have had 10 plus phone calls and 2 technicians visits. Only 2 of the people I spoke with were capable and willing to help. The rest, useless.

You can't just make defamatory comments about a company on a public forum. Thus what you are saying is your opinion on your experience. Have you tried contacting their customer service manager before you posted here.

From my own experience they have always been very helpful and polite and I have contacted them for various reasons, all of which where sorted that day or the next working day.

Brian_Malone

o·pin·ionNoun/əˈpinyən/
1. A view or judgment formed about something, not necessarily based on fact or knowledge.

My statement is based on fact! This has been the worst customer experience of my life, as judged by me ie: the person living my life and therefore best placed to make this statement.

Brian_Malone

Suspicious amount of UPC related content in your posts...

collier

Brian_Malone wrote: »

o·pin·ionNoun/əˈpinyən/
1. A view or judgment formed about something, not necessarily based on fact or knowledge.

My statement is based on fact! This has been the worst customer experience of my life, as judged by me ie: the person living my life and therefore best placed to make this statement.

You have not stated the issue therefore can only be judged by onlookers as an opinion. I am trying to say that its your personal experience and can often differ from the majority of their other customers, you may just be an unlucky one. In my opinion I cannot fault them. You should however contact their customer service manager if you feel you weren't dealt with satisfactory, ranting on a public forum wont solve anything.

collier

Brian_Malone wrote: »

Suspicious amount of UPC related content in your posts...

Yes because I am a happy UPC customer and like to give technical advise to people relating to Networking/Operating Systems/etc.... you have looked at my profile so you may have seen I am a Software Engineer, so I am pretty well qualified to give that advice.

Brian_Malone

I don't feel I have been ranting, I have actually been pretty restrained.

My advice to anyone weighing up their options would be to give Eircom their custom.

Your opinoin cannot fault them, my experience can.

jor el

Brian_Malone wrote: »

Suspicious amount of UPC related content in your posts...

Keep your unfounded suspicions to yourself, and off the thread.

collier

Brian_Malone wrote: »

I don't feel I have been ranting, I have actually been pretty restrained.

My advice to anyone weighing up their options would be to give Eircom their custom.

Your opinoin cannot fault them, my experience can.

I have moved from eircom to UPC because of a billing issue which they where reluctant to resolve, have nothing to fault since.

jor el

Brian_Malone wrote: »

Your opinoin cannot fault them, my experience can.

Both of you are stating your opinion based on your experience.

Brian_Malone

I can empathise with your Eircom situation. It seems we've both had entirely opposite experiences.

collier

Brian_Malone wrote: »

I can empathise with your Eircom situation. It seems we've both had entirely opposite experiences.

To be honest I think anyone can have unlucky experiences with any company. I just hope I haven't spoken too soon

dartstothesea

Horrible speeds at various hours of the day for me lately.

Getting pretty sick of how unreliable the service is. I can't remember the last time I've seen anything close to the 20MB (and now 25MB) I'm supposed to be getting.

mark17j

Morning speeds are always good for me, but come This evening at some stage I expect to achieve 1mb down or under for a few hours.

Mavvvy

I know your pain, have had multiple engineers out to investigate the issue, but the problem is not domestic or near my local exchange. The closest i've come to figuring it out is through running multiple tracers to different countries. Note i'm currently in work so I am unable to post the actual tracers.

I'm no network expert at all and my conclusions below are based on a very loose understanding of what the results of my tracert's have displayed.

It seems some, but not all connections out of Ireland get bottlenecked at peak times, and which one you get stuck on is a bit of luck of the draw.

One particular "backbone" into london the UK the DBN-London aorta.net connection can reach pings of 168ms at peak times together with packet loss. While at the same time a connection to Edinburgh will net you a ping of 33ms.

Funnily enough a connection to Germany passing through london at the same time returns a ping of 38ms.

To be fair to UPC ,my experience has improved alot in the past two weeks, but note this has been a recurring/disappearing issue I have had since I first became a UPC/NTL customer 5 years ago.

Regards,

Mavvvy

Cuddlesworth

Its pretty obvious your both hitting serious contention in your area. Consider upgrading to the 50mb, it has a low user base and tends to get far better speeds at peak times.

Mavvvy

Cuddlesworth wrote: »

Its pretty obvious your both hitting serious contention in your area. Consider upgrading to the 50mb, it has a low user base and tends to get far better speeds at peak times.

That's what I thought when I switched to 50mb. Out of curiosity, how could local contention not be reflected in pings to the local exchange?

What I mean is, I get a low pings to all hops domestically in Ireland, its only when it goes to certain places overseas that the issue becomes visible.

For example for a week about a month ago I could not connect to a server which I rent in London with a few mates. Everyone else could connect, some in Ireland on connections from different providers. However I could not even get a ping from the server in question. Its this point here that led me to running the tracers in the first place to find out what was going on.

That said its all back to relative working order now, although with a bit of packet loss after the connection went down overnight on Tuesday.

Baffling

collier

It would seem that UPC should get more peers on board this would help connecting to sites not hosted in this country.

mark17j

For the last hour this is how my (Wired) connection is - MORE LATE EVENING Congestion...



Great speeds during the day but by evening this is what I have to look forward too - shudda stuck with my crappy 3mb dsl provider - at least it was congestion free.

mark17j

Still similar results 8.46am
Is there anybody else around Dublin west experiencing similar.. or any other parts of Dublin?
I reboot, reset modem twice now, no difference..
Thanks



Edit, it's struggling to improve

Mavvvy

@mark17j

I'm still having the same problems and for the past 3 weeks. Its getting stupid at this stage after being on to them multiple times.

Like I have said in other posts and what Colliers observersation is, it seems UPC either doesnt have enough peers or they are throttling customers through certain congested backbones. In the example below you can see how at the same time in the day you can get two very different sets of service from UPC.



To a server I rent in the UK @2:55PM Today

C:\Users\>tracert 109.70.148.51

Tracing route to server.gamingdeluxe.co.uk [109.70.148.51]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 9 ms 8 ms 26 ms MyIP
2 9 ms 25 ms 9 ms 109.255.249.222
3 11 ms 9 ms 10 ms 84.116.238.58
4 84 ms 84 ms 84 ms dbln-t2core-a-ae-0-0.aorta.net [213.46.165.2]
5 97 ms 99 ms 100 ms ldn-bb1-link.telia.net [80.91.249.135]
6 156 ms 90 ms 92 ms ldn-b5-link.telia.net [80.91.247.90]
7 97 ms 96 ms 94 ms telia.killercreation.co.uk [213.248.66.62]
8 109 ms 105 ms 104 ms 217.146.94.6 [217.146.94.6]
9 105 ms 105 ms 101 ms server.gamingdeluxe.co.uk [109.70.148.51]



To a friend of mine in the UK @2:55PM


1 9 ms 9 ms 9 ms MyIP
2 27 ms 9 ms 10 ms 109.255.249.222
3 39 ms 54 ms 56 ms 84.116.238.58
4 22 ms 24 ms 25 ms uk-lon01b-rd1-xe-1-2-0.aorta.net [84.116.134.134
]
5 23 ms 24 ms 24 ms 84.116.134.30
6 41 ms 25 ms 24 ms ae1-scr010.the.as13285.net [195.66.224.136]
7 25 ms 24 ms 24 ms host-78-144-0-171.as13285.net [78.144.0.171]
8 28 ms 24 ms 24 ms xe-11-0-0-bragg001.log.as43234.net [78.144.2.134
]

Basicly if you get stuck on the dbln-t2core-a-ae-0-0.aorta.net (whatever the hell that is, although I did google aorta and it seems at some point they were subcontracted to UPC) your boned.

I'm really sick of this.

Regards,

Mavvvy

porkchop34

@Mavyyy

I have the exact same problem,The throttling stops at around 10.30pm and starts around 6pm or shortly after.

I am a gamer and my pings are usually 30ms to UK servers then they go to 130ms during these times.

I am on the 100mb In Dun laoghaire Area and have been having these problems for a few weeks now.

By any chance are you using the white Thomson router.

Mavvvy

@porkchop
I am indeed using the Thomson Porkchop, good to know for sure its not an isolated issue. But its freaking nuts that its only ever the dub aorta route. Maybe the ldn-dub one is reserved for 100mb users and the rest on the non-peak times.

But my god is this terrible service.

dolallyoh

What transmit power settings are your modems using at good times and bad times.

Anything over 53 is bad.

Tempting to have a good old rant about the customer service but I will restrain myself ;-)

Mavvvy

dolallyoh
If i'm looking at the right reading, upstream and downstream hovers around 40db.

porkchop34

@dolallyoh

Same here about 41 around there.

Also having a seperate issue of the router restarting itself when certain wireless device connect to it.

I rang UPC a few times b4 regarding it but this ping issue with it just messes up my windows sharing within my network just causing massive issues altogether.

That aorta thing is the same with me 100ms+

mark17j

Hey Mavvy, Good to hear i'm not the only one experiencing these issues
Connection was stable enough during the day, achieving speeds upto 21mb -Slowing down considerably now achieving 7mb max with upload fine.
I expect by 10pm I will not be even able to load a web page as per usual.