Fascicle PlusNet traffic shaping again

So, remember when Fibre unlimited first came out and PlusNet tried for months to tell everyone that although there was traffic shaping it was for our own good and all our traffic would be treated as gold, no matter what it was you would be able to go full speed on any protocol but if and only if your _own_ line was being utilised for multiple usages, then that traffic would be shaped, therefore if someone was watching iPlayer and someone was downloading a torrent, the torrent would be slowed for the greater good of the iPlayer stream ..

Step forward 1 year, and a speed test will show full 78Mb speed tests, yet Usenet is less than 10Mb, torrent is 13Mb and an apple iOS upgrade is 22Mb .... switch back to a speedtest and boom 78Mb...


Why why why is this happening, no one else in the house, nothing else going on, line is obviously capable of achieving full speed as the speed test results show ...

So yet again the PlusNet traffic shaping that will *not* affect my traffic is indeed affecting my traffic.


The above was on gateway - pcl-bng01

I've now disconnected and reconnected to gateway ptw-bng01 - and all is fine everything is full speed .. but why am I having to jump gateways to find a good one?? Not good at all PlusNet not good....

something weird is currently going on, but not sure what yet tho.

Without a doubt is currently some bad endpoints but is unclear if the cause is plusnet or BTw.

Also before christmas, I found if single threaded tested fast, then it reflected real world performance, now I can speedtest at full speed (after hopping to get good endpoint) but certian types of usage are slower when they previously were not. However this could be down to peering/transit issues, never easy to diagnose without full info.

PSN has always been slow tho, I only get linespeed via a proxy. I think xbox live is also slow, but since moving to plusnet I have not done any large downloads on xbox live so am not sure on that one.

The fact that your speed is going back to normal after jumping gateway makes it *very* unlikely to be traffic management. Knowing how this is set on the Unlimited accounts, I'm confident that traffic management is not the cause of your issues.

I'm going to pass the information on about the gateways you were connected to through to our team here for more investigation.

investigation's into peak time issues that range from a visible increased latency & jitter on the ping monitors to packet loss and reduced throughput single threaded in particular,Have been ongoing for far too long and as yet no conclusive answer's i have seen single threads lower than 10mbps which is very poor, Why should any one have to repeatedly swap gateways ?

Edited by tommy45 (Wed 21-Jan-15 19:58:16)

Chris i disagree, it is network management that is the cause.

I'd suggest the overall gateway is congested, thus the overall gateway network management is having to apply shaping to certain protocols to ensure that there is sufficient bandwidth is available to things that need it.


If it was congestion without network management then *everything* would have been slow, but a speed test showing full speeds, whilst other services showing a slowdown (even http for usenet) shows that its network management causing this.

From outside and with no axe to grind in any direction my presumption is

1) If a gateway is at capacity or near, then priorities start to apply for specific traffic types
2) This can be viewed as good as will help to avoid time sensitive stuff having a very bad time
3) Unmanaged congestion can be a real pita

Hitting congestion sometimes is always inevitable, unless an ISP runs at 1:1 contention all the time e.g. presumes that every FTTC user will have the full 76 Mbps available to them.

Balancing this perfection against cost and user experience is a balancing game, and it might just be some gateways are just getting the balance a little wrong.

Its happened before, it will happen again.

The problem is that if a specific gateway is affected, then in theory it should impact all users on that gateway. This doesn't seem to be happening though.

I kinda agree Mr S.

Issue i have though, is that if there is congestion due to over-subscription of the user-base on the gateways, then managed contention should be allowed to come into force, so that everyone still has equal bandwidth allowances although may be lower than line speed at peak time. Quite happy to go from 78Mb to 50Mb for example but everything should still be 50Mb .. not some traffic types down into almost single figures.

What I disagree with is that PN decide "oh its that traffic we will slow it" why am I sat waiting 24 minutes for iOS 8.1.2 update to download when it should be 3 minutes max just because plusnet have set those speed limits. If it is congestion then the overall "gold" traffic should be rate limited too so that everything still has same performance speeds, just lower than the off-peak line limits (i.e. contention!)

On Apple, they've moved most of their distribution over to their own CDN network. It might be related or unrelated, but Apple have a fair bit of work to do to catch up with Akamai. I've yet to be able to get fast updates (and this includes with another ISP in a different country).

Are the gateways segmented within themselves?

It could just be a bug in a bit of software too.