Many sites extremely slow/unusable (past week on eFibre)

Doodah7

How are people finding Eircom speeds lately. Mine were fine generally for the past while but last night the web was completely unusable, EXCEPT when I used a VPN.

I rang to complain and the Eircom 'tech' said that a) I am not guaranteed fast internet even though I pointed out I am on a 92Mbs line!!  b) it was probably the websites that I was visiting that were running slow (like ALL of them...) and c) all his diagnostic tools were offline so he couldn't run any checks. He wasn't remotely interested when I pointed out that my service was fine through a VPN so it wasn't my connection or router.

NOT GOOD ENOUGH EIRCOM!

If we had US style laws, Eircom would have been the subject of a class-action suit at this stage for breach of contract as the service is not fit for purpose.

eircom: Alan

Hi All
 
Thanks for your feedback so far it's great to see some people are reporting better speeds and notable improvements.


I can confirm that I've been advised further capacity has been added to our international services.
 
Additional capacity to Amsterdam came online over the weekend and performance statistics are already beginning to display improvements
Further work will be implemented over next few weeks and I hope to see more posts confirming this.
 
Thanks
Al

dalta5billion

eircom: Alan wrote: »

Hi All
 
Thanks for your feedback so far it's great to see some people are reporting better speeds and notable improvements.


I can confirm that I've been advised further capacity has been added to our international services.
 
Additional capacity to Amsterdam came online over the weekend and performance statistics are already beginning to display improvements
Further work will be implemented over next few weeks and I hope to see more posts confirming this.
 
Thanks
Al

Hi Al.

The additional AMS-IX capacity is welcome, and I've noticed a big improvement to sites that peer there.

What concerns me is reduced download speeds from INEX peers that aren't speedtest.net servers, which Eircom still haven't addressed. This seems (and I stress seems since I am open to being told otherwise) like Eircom is deliberately prioritising speedtest.net servers in order to cover up congestion on its network.

You see, without Eircom giving a reason as to why this prioritisation exists, the only conclusion we can make is they don't want to give us a reason. And that would stink.

Dom1978

Finally got an "answer" to the slow performance in my apartment.....call from support 
"We've verified theres an issue in the exchange" 
Ok, is there an exact time frame in which it will be fixed? "No"
Ok, will you contact me to let me know its resolved? "No"

That was on Monday, its same slow speed today. 

doctorg

dalta5billion wrote: »

Hi Al.

The additional AMS-IX capacity is welcome, and I've noticed a big improvement to sites that peer there.

What concerns me is reduced download speeds from INEX peers that aren't speedtest.net servers, which Eircom still haven't addressed. This seems (and I stress seems since I am open to being told otherwise) like Eircom is deliberately prioritising speedtest.net servers in order to cover up congestion on its network.

You see, without Eircom giving a reason as to why this prioritisation exists, the only conclusion we can make is they don't want to give us a reason. And that would stink.

thats why you don't use speedtest.net !

http://www.boards.ie/ttfthread/2057337839

dalta5billion

Alan, any response?

Doodah7

Pure and utter sh1t last night. eFibre was completely and I mean completely unusable last night through Eircom servers. Switch on a VPN and lightning speeds.

Google.ie was the only site that would load. Tried three devices and connected Macbook Pro with an ethernet cable directly to the router...no difference.

Rang customer support and gave up after over 45 minutes on hold...

darrenmck10

Same here, eFibre was totally unusable for me last night during the hours of 8pm-11pm. Tried ringing up but got no answer.

phonypony

Yup, there has been absolutely no improvement in the service. Sick of trying to watch youtube videos in 144p. The 'additional capacity' isn't doing much, is it? I think Eircom needs to adjust bills for November and December accordingly, it will save them a lot of headaches with complaints, because we are not getting what we are paying for!

Doodah7

Credit where credit is due, internet speeds were splendid last night. Even downloading apps from developer websites which is usually a no-no worked without a hitch.

All I need now is consistency of service...

gramo

I haven't paid my last two bills and am practically begging them to ring me to discuss cancelling my account without penalties. There ccm@eircom.ie reply's say they don't know when the issue is resolved and to contact technical support..

Has anyone else held off on paying there bill??

eircom: Alan

tallpaul wrote: »

Credit where credit is due, internet speeds were splendid last night. Even downloading apps from developer websites which is usually a no-no worked without a hitch.

All I need now is consistency of service...

That's good to hear tallpaul

Works remain ongoing but as soon as I have a further official update I'll let you know.

Thanks
Al

dalta5billion

eircom: Alan wrote: »

That's good to hear tallpaul

Works remain ongoing but as soon as I have a further official update I'll let you know.

Thanks
Al

Alan,

I'll ask again, as you're ignoring it,

Any comment on the prioritisation of certain INEX peers?

eircom: Alan

dalta5billion wrote: »

eircom: Alan wrote: »

That's good to hear tallpaul

Works remain ongoing but as soon as I have a further official update I'll let you know.

Thanks
Al

Alan,

I'll ask again, as you're ignoring it,

Any comment on the prioritisation of certain INEX peers?

Hi dalta5billion



Eircom does not carry out any traffic prioritisation of the type you are referring to. The INEX infrastructure has two separate LANs, and we connect to both. At peak times, the performance of a given flow may vary depending on which LAN our peer network sends the traffic down to us.

As part of the upgrade programme referenced elsewhere on this forum, we are currently in the process of adding network capacity which will ensure all traffic, regardless of route, has the same performance. I will of course update this thread when this is done.

Thanks
AL

dalta5billion

eircom: Alan wrote: »

Hi dalta5billion



Eircom does not carry out any traffic prioritisation of the type you are referring to. The INEX infrastructure has two separate LANs, and we connect to both. At peak times, the performance of a given flow may vary depending on which LAN our peer network sends the traffic down to us.

As part of the upgrade programme referenced elsewhere on this forum, we are currently in the process of adding network capacity which will ensure all traffic, regardless of route, has the same performance. I will of course update this thread when this is done.

Thanks
AL

Al,

Thanks for replying, just to translate, you're saying that at least one of Eircom's ports at INEX (connected to either LAN #1 or #2) is congested at peak times? And how long have Eircom been ignoring that for? It's disgraceful.

Christ, a bit of transparency would go a long way. At least TELL US when Eircom's links are congested, and where. Users shouldn't be the ones to have to hold Eircom to account. It doesn't take weeks to "investigate" when Eircom clearly already know links are saturated.

eircom: Tony

dalta5billion wrote: »

eircom: Alan wrote: »

Hi dalta5billion



Eircom does not carry out any traffic prioritisation of the type you are referring to. The INEX infrastructure has two separate LANs, and we connect to both. At peak times, the performance of a given flow may vary depending on which LAN our peer network sends the traffic down to us.

As part of the upgrade programme referenced elsewhere on this forum, we are currently in the process of adding network capacity which will ensure all traffic, regardless of route, has the same performance. I will of course update this thread when this is done.

Thanks
AL

Al,

Thanks for replying, just to translate, you're saying that at least one of Eircom's ports at INEX (connected to either LAN #1 or #2) is congested at peak times? And how long have Eircom been ignoring that for? It's disgraceful.

Christ, a bit of transparency would go a long way. At least TELL US when Eircom's links are congested, and where. Users shouldn't be the ones to have to hold Eircom to account. It doesn't take weeks to "investigate" when Eircom clearly already know links are saturated.

Hi daltabillion

we have not ignored the issue and have made numerous posts and replies here on Boards.ie and on our own online community around this issue and work being done to improve service. As Al advised above and we have posted earlier, "we are currently in the process of adding network capacity which will ensure all traffic, regardless of route, has the same performance".

Tony

dalta5billion

eircom: Tony wrote: »

Hi daltabillion

we have not ignored the issue and have made numerous posts and replies here on Boards.ie and on our own online community around this issue and work being done to improve service. As Al advised above and we have posted earlier, "we are currently in the process of adding network capacity which will ensure all traffic, regardless of route, has the same performance".

Tony

Tony,

Look back at the history of this thread Tony. We've been reporting this for 2 months. Eircom reps claimed that there had to be an "investigation". You're really telling me it takes weeks to bring up a graph for a port?

dave_t

Hi Eircom reps,

What is the expected/planned/ball park date for completion of the upgrade works?

Hank Scorpio

Latency is still unstable to Holland France Germany etc nightly



inetnum: 86.46.0.0 - 86.47.63.255
netname: EIRCOM
descr: Eircom
descr: IP network infrastructure (ADSL Pool Addresses)
descr: Ireland
descr: ** Send spam/hack/virus complaints to abuse@eircom.net
descr: ** Complaints sent to the contacts listed below will not be
descr: ** acted on!
country: IE
admin-c: EN369-RIPE
tech-c: EN369-RIPE
status: ASSIGNED PA
mnt-by: TE-MNT
source: RIPE # Filtered

role: Eircom Networks
address: Eircom
address: Bianconi Avenue
address: Citywest, Dublin 24
address: Ireland

nickhilliard

dalta5billion wrote: »

Thanks for replying, just to translate, you're saying that at least one of Eircom's ports at INEX (connected to either LAN #1 or #2) is congested at peak times? And how long have Eircom been ignoring that for? It's disgraceful.

Christ, a bit of transparency would go a long way. At least TELL US when Eircom's links are congested, and where. Users shouldn't be the ones to have to hold Eircom to account. It doesn't take weeks to "investigate" when Eircom clearly already know links are saturated.

There's no need to bite Alan. He's being helpful.

The reason it takes time to handle capacity issues is that you can't just look at a port graph on a whim, decide there's a problem, wave a mouse around on Elara's web site, pick up the delivery from office reception the next morning, jam it into a rack and have the problem disappear within 24 hours. Typical lead times on high end networking kit normally runs into months. Same for metro and medium-haul transmission kit. Same for dwdm transceivers in anything other than tiny quantities. All of these components are made to order.

Design work to decide what to buy will add on a good chunk of time before that; same with procurement. Installation work to build out and configure this kit takes time after delivery - sometimes many months if it's significantly different to older / existing kit. In case there's any confusion, the term "copious free time" did not ever apply to network service provider engineering departments.

Did I mention this kit is expensive? Budgetary planning for this needs to take place the year before so that you can request and be assigned budget for growth estimates. Realistically, planning for upgrades that might have been needed in October 2014 would need to have taken place in early autumn 2013, assuming a financial year aligned with the calendar year.

Let's say that your new whizzbang service does better than expected and you get X% more upgrades, each of which has Y% more traffic over each of those new links, and this puts your throughput requirements far beyond your traffic projections from 15 months before, and this blows through the extra overhead capacity that you had in place as contingency. Check out the lead times above for how to resolve this.

Capacity planning is not trivial.

-nick

nickhilliard

nuxxx wrote: »

Latency is still unstable to Holland France Germany etc nightly

0% packet loss and < 2% jitter to the end host is "unstable"?

-nick

Hank Scorpio

nickhilliard wrote: »

nuxxx wrote: »

Latency is still unstable to Holland France Germany etc nightly

0% packet loss and < 2% jitter to the end host is "unstable"?

-nick

Its 25ms during the day and unreliable, so yes its unstable. The ping fluctuates rapidly. After I posted it was 80ms for an hour. Also on your previous post this has been going on since September of last year, do you think that's acceptable?

It being constantly 52 instead of up and down would be more enjoyable.. It ruins online gameplay

nickhilliard

nuxxx wrote: »

Its 25ms during the day and unreliable, so yes its unstable. The ping fluctuates rapidly. After I posted it was 80ms for an hour.

I just ran some tests from a server inside transitip.net which is connected to the same router as 77.72.146.181. The response time over 15 minutes of pings to the end-host showed rtt varying between 0.3ms and 38ms. Without prejudice to anything that's happening at the end of your dsl link, this suggests at least some congestion at the remote end.

-nick

Hank Scorpio

nickhilliard wrote: »

nuxxx wrote: »

Its 25ms during the day and unreliable, so yes its unstable. The ping fluctuates rapidly. After I posted it was 80ms for an hour.

I just ran some tests from a server inside transitip.net which is connected to the same router as 77.72.146.181. The response time over 15 minutes of pings to the end-host showed rtt varying between 0.3ms and 38ms. Without prejudice to anything that's happening at the end of your dsl link, this suggests at least some congestion at the remote end.

-nick

It's not congestion at the remote end, if you want clarification i`ll post more graphical traces

dalta5billion

nickhilliard wrote: »

There's no need to bite Alan. He's being helpful.

The reason it takes time to handle capacity issues is that you can't just look at a port graph on a whim, decide there's a problem, wave a mouse around on Elara's web site, pick up the delivery from office reception the next morning, jam it into a rack and have the problem disappear within 24 hours. Typical lead times on high end networking kit normally runs into months. Same for metro and medium-haul transmission kit. Same for dwdm transceivers in anything other than tiny quantities. All of these components are made to order.

Design work to decide what to buy will add on a good chunk of time before that; same with procurement. Installation work to build out and configure this kit takes time after delivery - sometimes many months if it's significantly different to older / existing kit. In case there's any confusion, the term "copious free time" did not ever apply to network service provider engineering departments.

Did I mention this kit is expensive? Budgetary planning for this needs to take place the year before so that you can request and be assigned budget for growth estimates. Realistically, planning for upgrades that might have been needed in October 2014 would need to have taken place in early autumn 2013, assuming a financial year aligned with the calendar year.

Let's say that your new whizzbang service does better than expected and you get X% more upgrades, each of which has Y% more traffic over each of those new links, and this puts your throughput requirements far beyond your traffic projections from 15 months before, and this blows through the extra overhead capacity that you had in place as contingency. Check out the lead times above for how to resolve this.

Capacity planning is not trivial.

-nick

Nick,

My reference to "how long does it take to pull up a graph" refers to Eircom's transparency during this period. Eircom's reaction when we began complaining about 64 KB/s downloads over the Level3 link was "what congestion? plz send us traceroutes". That's disrespectful to customers when clearly they knew *exactly* what was happening. Also, for speeds to get as low as they did, I can only assume that it was maxed out for months prior to us noticing it.

As for capacity planning, who exactly would be surprised at a 100% uptake in eFibre when you're giving out free upgrades of up to 20x improved download speed? Eh no thanks I love my 2 megabit ADSL, wouldn't leave it for the world.

nickhilliard

dalta5billion wrote: »

As for capacity planning, who exactly would be surprised at a 100% uptake in eFibre when you're giving out free upgrades of up to 20x improved download speed? Eh no thanks I love my 2 megabit ADSL, wouldn't leave it for the world.

With hindsight, anyone can talk authoritatively. Take a look at some of the network maps on the Eircom Wholesale web site. It's not just a matter of ordering another X gigs of capacity off a single transit provider in Dublin. That's easy and can be delivered quickly. The thing that takes time is building out additional national infrastructure to deliver that bandwidth to peoples' homes around the country.

It's the same issue as adding more lanes on the M50. Unless you also upgrade all the intersections and the access roads quite some distance away, you'll only end up making a larger car park.

-nick

dalta5billion

nickhilliard wrote: »

dalta5billion wrote: »

As for capacity planning, who exactly would be surprised at a 100% uptake in eFibre when you're giving out free upgrades of up to 20x improved download speed? Eh no thanks I love my 2 megabit ADSL, wouldn't leave it for the world.

With hindsight, anyone can talk authoritatively. Take a look at some of the network maps on the Eircom Wholesale web site. It's not just a matter of ordering another X gigs of capacity off a single transit provider in Dublin. That's easy and can be delivered quickly. The thing that takes time is building out additional national infrastructure to deliver that bandwidth to peoples' homes around the country.

It's the same issue as adding more lanes on the M50. Unless you also upgrade all the intersections and the access roads quite some distance away, you'll only end up making a larger car park.

-nick

Nick,

Eircom's core "NGN" doesn't appeared to be congested. It's Eircom's interconnects that are congested! Hence the upgrades from 10 Gbps to 20 at AMS-IX. (we're still waiting on more Tier 1 capacity). I somehow doubt Level3 has run out of capacity.

Regardless, Eircom should be properly informing its customers of what the hell is going on. A simple "hey, X Y and Z interconnects are congested affecting popular sites a.com b.com, we're working on it" would suffice, instead of weeks of playing dumb.

nickhilliard

nuxxx wrote: »

It's not congestion at the remote end, if you want clarification i`ll post more graphical traces

rather than looking at a set of individual disparate traceroutes, I collected several hours worth of RTT data this evening from several locations around amsterdam with direct core connectivity into ams-ix. The data was gathered by running continuous pings at 1 second intervals from some hosts in amsterdam to www.eircom.net and to 77.72.146.181. The data path in all situations was checked to ensure it was symmetric; i.e. the outbound path was the same as the reverse path, namely directly over ams-ix.

A couple of observations:

- Packet loss between end hosts in all cases was 0%.

- rtt from luna.nl to eircom's core infrastructure between 20:30 and 23:30 was solid. The average latency was 16.5ms, with a standard deviation of 2.2ms. The minimum measured rtt was 16.4ms, which over the sample period, can be assumed to be the transmission latency, i.e. the optimum.

- For transip.net, the measured minimum rtt was 16.4ms, which shows that this network has an almost identical optical network path length to Eircom as Luna above. The host 77.72.146.181 was connected to the same router as the server which was used for measurements.

- for local connectivity within transip.net measured between 17:00 and 19:00, there was high jitter. E.g. the worst case jitter was measured between 18:35 and 18:50 showed a standard deviation of 9.71ms with an arithmetic mean latency of 1.73ms (that is seriously not good for local connectivity).

- for off-net connectivity from transip.net to Eircom, there was similarly high jitter with significant variation in rtt, depending on the time. Overall, the mean rtt to eircom over two hours was 20.77ms with a stddev of 6.44. As before, the worst case rtt was measured between 18:35 and 18:50, which showed mean latency of 30.59ms with a stddev of 8.67ms.

- the rtt jitter (i.e. stddev) on transip.net matched time-wise for pings to eircom and pings to 77.72.146.181.

Interpreting this data for the sample period:

- the luna.nl data shows clearly that there is no congestion between ams-ix connected hosts through to eircom's core infrastructure.

- there is internal congestion in transip.net.

- either transip.net is congested to ams-ix or else the router that 77.72.146.181 is connected to is buffering packets due to router overloading if their router is a software-forwarded unit. It looks like a combination of both to me, and the numbers do not paint a rosy picture.

So yeah. There is enough congestion at the remote end to account for your numbers, but the path between ams-ix and eircom's core network is fine.

-nick

dalta5billion

I'm downloading at full speed from a host which appears to go through a Eircom-Level3 peering tonight. Touch wood.

Downloading from HEAnet and anything hosted by Blacknight is still a pain however.

sfag31

This is happening in my house too.
[font=Arial, sans-serif, tinymce-small]I get buffering on iplayers, and using the xbox, even though I have 35mb download speeds?[/font]
[font=Arial, sans-serif, tinymce-small]Xbox gameplay is affected when I simultaneously watch videos elsewhere in the house.[/font]
[font=Arial, sans-serif, tinymce-small]Streaming HD video (on youtube) content also is prone to buffering.[/font]
[font=Arial, sans-serif, tinymce-small]Surely the point of fibre optic broadband is to stop buffering. [/font]