EE offnet throttling down to 2Mb 4:30pm-1am / 1:30pm-1am

Finally I thought I would delve a little deeper into why my internet connection was becoming virtually unusable, iPlayer being just about watchable (on the lowest settings) in the evenings if no other member of the household so much as loaded a web page.
I had noticed initially that round when the school bus arrived the connection became worse and everything slowed to a crawl and put it down to an overloaded exchange so the other evening I thought I would do a speed test and opened IP Ookla, this showed around 5Mb, not far off the max I have recorded of 5.8Mb, nothing really appeared amiss there.
I checked my router realtime chart (I have and Asus running tomato firmware) and there was no other traffic leaving the network other than few Kb, then checked a download and was only able to get around 170-200KB, veryfied on the router chart, hmm.
I then loaded up think broadband tester alternative and saw something quite different - tbb download showed similar results to ookla BUT httpx6 was a completely different story, the needle hovered around 1.8Mb, what the is going on.
The tbb speedtester flagged up that it may be my AV software, not convinced, I checked with other devices and got the same results.
Over the next few days I ran both speed test and compared them to the updated EE taffic management policy(originally signed up with Orange and was told there was no traffic management other than p2p).
From 4:30pm to 1am in the week ie peak time, there has been an abrupt change in the httpx6 results with speeds dropping to 1.8Mb, outside peak time then back to 5Mb and higher.
Checked again over the weekend and found the same pattern except now coinciding with the EE weekend traffic management policy.

I then phoned EE India and lost some time I shall never get back followed by a call to the chocolate teapot AKA OFCOM. I managed to extract a number that got me through to Darren at EE and after discussing the results I had found, he said he was surprised it had dropped quite so low but there was naff all to be done about it and was not willing to discuss the traffic management policy in any detail although did re enable fastpath as requested.
I did some more checks and no further improvement so have voted with my feet and am leaving EE.

So to sum up it would appear that in my case my up to 8Mb connection, even though comfortably able to sync at over 7Mb is being nobbled intentionally be EE to 2Mb or below.

A quick question to anybody who may know - do the ookla speedtest and the tbb httpx6 test both use http on port 80?

Edited by deleted (Fri 22-Jan-16 10:52:31)

What does http://labs.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest show?

This does not use flash so also rules out that as an issue.

Our http download testing is across port 80 on both the flash and newer test, the tbbx1 is a custom protocol across TCP port 8095

You can make the new tester use SSL https://labs.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest to see if secure over TCP port 443 makes a difference.

Just ran the tests in the links you posted and I'm getting the same result with both, around 1.9Mb, Ookla is showing around 6Mb.
Also just ran the BTwholsale test and that is showing around 1.6Mb with a profile of 6.5Mb.

Also just tried this again:
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results.html...

The 20MB download test file on port 80 is downloading at between 80 - 180KB/s

Whatever refinements of the speedtests you employ EE will still continue to throttle speeds during peak times at their "off-net" exchanges.

Hi spl,

I'm also with EE and have exactly the same problem as you, in the morning I can get up to 6mb but trying to watch video in the evening ee throttles me down to about 2mb. A while ago I did some tests and discovered that the speed is a combination of problems, firstly being 'out of their area' aka an exchange with no llu providers which means that throttle basically everything you do and secondly their terrible network which is horribly congested during the evenings.

When I do a speed test in the morning I get a solid reliable result:
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results.html...

However in the evening it fluctuates massively:
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results.html...

The only thing we can do to fix it is move isp asap, my current contract ends this summer.
OR you can wait a few months/a year for bt to fully take over ee and move to one of their packages.

The tbb tester also told me that there was a computer/software problem, which is definitely not true. I used ssd and disabled my anti virus while doing the tests.

Its odd how similar our internet connections are actually, we both get around 5mb and are stuck on old adslmax exchanges, both get throttled by ee and the tbb speed test is wrong about a pc problem, and finally both of us also started on orange but got moved to ee when they were bought.

I hope I cleared some things up for you,
Joseph

So the throttling they are using carefully or deliberately perhaps leaves Ookla looking OK but affects HTTP the most commonly used protocol.

Time to move provider to one who does no traffic management or if they do it is not so harsh

The logic for the messages in the flash test is not perfect, hence why we 'suggest' rather than say with 100% certainty that the issue we think it may be is the problem.

If we were to update now would probably add an EE specific message about possible traffic management.

Hi Andrew (MrSaffron) hopefully I have addressed this in my post:

'So the throttling they are using carefully or deliberately perhaps leaves Ookla looking OK but affects HTTP the most commonly used protocol.

Time to move provider to one who does no traffic management or if they do it is not so harsh@



Thanks Joseph, it would be interesting to see some more results from EE 'out of area' aka off net / non LLU exchanges, just to check we are not on the same exchange - I am on one with a 01691 telephone code.
I have been on a rolling contract for a while now so have already voted with my feet and only have a week left with them, all going well.
EE refer to the speed changes as 'traffic management' but from my testing, a more accurate term would be 'Traffic Capping', there is no way I can get over 2Mb/s during the times that they say they are 'Managing' the traffic, except that my son is able to download a 3 GB game update on Steam, that is not throttled / capped and was going at full speed when the HTTP was down to 2Mb/s (paused download for speedtest).
It's looking to me like they have a completely messed up system.
Even with it being so screwy, they still have all the most common types of usage listed as traffic managed and a catch all of all unknown traffic, will be included - I quote from EE:

'We do traffic manage our off-net broadband services at peak times, which may mean slowing down some services that consume a lot of bandwidth but are less time critical, like file sharing. Typically our peak hours are weekdays between 4.30pm and 1am, and at weekends between 1.30pm and 1am. During this time you may find that we manage the following types of traffic:

P2P / Newsgroups
Web browsing
Web downloads
Streaming
Unknown traffic'

So they 'try to cap pretty much everything anybody wants the internet for, at the time that the majority want to use it and then try to 'CAP' it to 2Mb/s about a third of what my line is capable of.