Awful Traffic Shaping on Fibre Unlimited

I feared returning to PlusNet due to their terrible traffic shaping on their ADSL service which made me leave, but on the promise of unlimited Fibre having little traffic shaping which should not be noticeable unless your line is maxed (i.e everything is gold and wont be dropped and games/voip is titanium) I hesitantly returned.

Seemingly it was a mistake , whilst PlusNet may claim everything is gold - at peak times Gold doesn't seem to apply to everything.

Usenet - (yep that old service!) is strongly shaped on PlusNet fibre more so than anything else (although I guess P2P is equally knobbled by PlusNet).


I have a 80/20 service and sync around full speed 77Mb ish, usenet is usually used outside of peak periods (10pm onwards or 9am - midday) and I get full line speed - its amazing 8MB/s+ downloads - excellent.

So imagine my surprise when about 6:30pm tonight I get speeds of 1.2MB/s from usenet... ran a speed test which shows 60Mb connection so a bit low - but not bad, restart usenet - 1.2MB/s still. So I try a 1Gb download file from this site - that downloads at 8Mb/s - but usenet still 1.2Mb/s. Hrrmmmm.........

Reboot router to change pipe
62Mb speed test
7.8MB/s 1 Gig file download
2.6MB/s usenet


Something seriously wrong here - so start logging pipes and speeds.

PCL-AG08
Speed test = 60/16
1Gb test file = 8.03MB/s
Usenet = 2.93MB/s

Links:
Speedtest
pcl-ag08-1gb.png
pcl-ag08-usenet.png


PTN-AG03
Speed test = 53/16
1Gb test file = 7.22MB/s
Usenet = 1.14MB/s

Links:
Speedtest
pcl-a03-1gb.png
ptn-ag03-usenet.png


PTW-AG01
Speed test = 63/18
1Gb test file = 7.61MB/s
Usenet = 1.78MB/s

Links:
Speedtest
ptw-ag01-1gb.png
ptw-ag01-usenet.png

PCL-AG04
1Gb file = 7.54MB/s
Usenet = 1.43MB/s

PCL-AG07
Usenet = 1.41MB/s


I think its fair to say its not exchange contention as speed tests are good, and other file downloads are good.
I think it has to be usenet traffic shaping taking affect making speeds so low when compared to other downloads, the question is why? If everything is Gold - then why is usenet affected and other services are not affected?


Thoughts from others would be most useful. - but this is clearly not what PlusNet have said would happen on their unlimited service.

FWIW - the best gateway was PCL-AG06 which was an average of 4.10MB/s

Just to clarify a point - Usenet is listed as Bronze in the traffic shaping guide not Gold - but anyway - if you read posts from PlusNet reps like this one
http://forums.thinkbroadband.com/plusnet/t/4231472-r...

Then what they say is :
"With the Unlimited product, there are no rate limits, and we scale the network to support bronze queue traffic. This means your P2P should be at line rate, and game misidentification matters a lot less. "

Can you test a different usenet server to rule out server-side congestion?

You are downloading copyright protected material.

In reply to a post by 5km:

You are downloading copyright protected material.

You are making assumptions.

No I'm not. One download is Rush BluRay RIP.

Tried multiple different files from easynews - both for eu servers and usa servers - speeds are the same... so that rules out external links/servers - as they are from different server farms in different locations. All screens shots were taken from the same file download as it was the easiest - but different files and server farms tried.

In reply to a post by 5km:

No I'm not. One download is Rush BluRay RIP.

It's unlikely a Usenet download of Ubuntu would run any faster though.

Downloading and downloaded - two different things.

Pick a large file - well populated and use that as the test file - its the best way to make sure you dont have bandwidth limits are the far end - but you already know that right?

Are the traceroutes to each server completely different then?

How long have you been on this PN service now, and how has it performed on usenet until today?

Been on it about 9 months - no always been good - but then - never had time at peak to (ab)use it - generally dont get the time till 10pm onwards to use it..

PlusNet Community forums think it may be profile related fault rather than capacity as they are sure they aren't dropping bronze traffic in general so think its something affecting my account specifically.

Either that, or a specific problem just occurred somewhere.

I'm sure you would have noticed during 9 months if it was a specific restriction on Usenet. Also many others would have been screaming about it over that period.

Might want to try the thinkbradband test, first part will be slower if tere is contention. The second part which uses multiple threads can mask contentin just like the ookla test

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Might want to try the thinkbradband test, first part will be slower if tere is contention. The second part which uses multiple threads can mask contentin just like the ookla test

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results.html...

Good graphs

Most things have been rather slow today - I found resetting the router seems to have solved it.

I assume you signed up to pro to test what you saying?

its only a 1 month commitment.

Pro bumps everything to gold priority except whats already titanium stays as titanium. That should reaosnably prove what you stating, I dont disagree a lot on the congestion I have seen some but most of the congestion I have seen seems transit related rather than the gateways (on gold traffic).

In reply to a post by Tam:

I have a 80/20 service and sync around full speed 77Mb ish, usenet is usually used outside of peak periods (10pm onwards or 9am - midday) and I get full line speed - its amazing 8MB/s+ downloads - excellent.

So imagine my surprise when about 6:30pm tonight I get speeds of 1.2MB/s from usenet... ran a speed test which shows 60Mb connection so a bit low - but not bad, restart usenet - 1.2MB/s still. So I try a 1Gb download file from this site - that downloads at 8Mb/s - but usenet still 1.2Mb/s. Hrrmmmm.........

Before we relaunched Unlimited I personally did a shed load of stress testing of the traffic management profiles etc. I found that Usenet traffic, especially during peak could be very hit and miss. This was largely irrespective of the traffic management profile applied to the line (same experience on Pro). At one point I had four or five simultaneous Usenet subscriptions from different providers and the difference between some of them at certain times of the day was substantial.

Not saying there might not be a problem, but as soon as you start hitting speeds like 8MB/s there's a lot of other stuff that can influence the speed of the connection.

If you haven't already, I'd request that somebody temporarily switches you to a Pro profile to see if it helps. If it doesn't then what you're seeing is unlikely to be anything to do with our traffic prioritisation.

Rgds,

Ah yes, I remember you having problems due to the CPU not being able to handle the unpacking at the same time as the downloads I think?

I'm guessing this is the same Tam as posted on the community forums

http://community.plus.net/forum/index.php/topic,1225...

Speed went up to 7MB/s with the Pro add-on

well that's an interesting offer . Must remember that in future, for ISP debugging of performance issues.