Has Utility Warehouse started draconian traffic shaping?

Email to Utility Warehouse today after I noticed a very sudden change in BB behaviour yesterday...

"Contacted support yesterday with terrible BB performance of 89kbps downstream! Looks to me like new traffic shaping as bigger downloads slow to a crawl and make even browsing unusable. Is UW BB provider traffic shaping? If yes it's totally unacceptable & will need to change after many years with you. As a gold customer I am V unhappy. It is not the router nor the connection - something is affecting the network further up the food chain. Please let me know what's going on."

Any other UW customers on here getting the same thing? It seems fine if you're browsing or using email but the moment you try to download a file of any size -- e.g. 100mb+ -- it starts at a good lick then drops to a few bytes a second or even stops entirely! Infuriating...

It also seems to have affected VOIP phone service which we've had for maybe 6 years with mostly no problems.

It could just be congestion, assuming you have checked your modem is still connecting at a sensible speed.

Is this 89 kilo bits per second using a HTTP web download or a p2p protocol?

Our speed tester at http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest.html will usually give a bad result for tbbx1 and a much better one for HTTPx6 if the issue is a plain congestion one.

http. I hardly ever download anything using P2P or torrents, etc.

Cheers

R

In which case check the connection speeds and what the test shows, since it uses multiple threads it can show some interesting info by looking at the resulting graph

Check using what -- speedtest.net? Tried that - not very good. I got about 4Mb downstream at 9am today but checking it now at 2pm it wouldn't even load! Tried four times and it keeps coming back saying 'Configuration Load Failed'. I've never seen that one before today...

That's despite my Netgear DGN2000 Router giving me the following:

Modem Status Connected
DownStream Connection Speed 5536 kbps
UpStream Connection Speed 448 kbps
VPI 0
VCI 38

It's literally unusable. I'll be impressed if I can post this given the almost dead stop we've come to

R

Quick update - on the 5th attempt speedtest.net did work and even gave me a figure of 1Mbps downstream. In my current circumstance that's a positive luxury!!

R

In reply to a post by ralphaverbuch:

Check using what -- speedtest.net?

[cough]
Maybe the link here?

I mean the tester at http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest.html

Which gives graphs of what the throughput was like http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results.html... and from those you can often get an idea of what the connection is up to.

As you look like you may be on IPStream Max wholesale product, then another option is that your IP Profile setting is low, due to low speed incident in the last few days.

Run the test at http://speedtest.btwholesale.com/ click through to the Further Diagnostic Results to get the current IP Profile for your connection.

I'm guessing that if this were a medical problem the patient would be put on emergency life support?

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/button/13633...

R

Congestion seems most likely thing from that graph

It could be the exchange, but more inclined to suggest it is utility warehouse or their provider.

http://www.speedtest.net/android/399396866.png

I couldn't actually believe this result when I saw it. I did this before 8am yesterday.

I got better performance on ISDN in 2004 or even my last dial-up modem!

Sad reality is that as we all increasingly use and rely upon bits and bytes in our daily lives the shiny new DSL infrastructure of 2004/2005, which promised us blazing speeds of 8MBps downstream, are just a distant memory.

The infrastructure, outside of big cities, is patently incapable of supporting current demand. We used to get pretty decent performance on our 8 MB DSL line back in 2005, but now that everyone and their dog is sharing the pipe, the pipe's not up to to the task. Given so many of us also spend some, or all of our time working from home, it's a perfect storm. This last week the cracks have really begun to show...

If I thought I could be confident that moving to a different ISP would make a whit of difference I'd move in a heartbeat but a next door neighbour is on a different mainstream ISP and is in just as bad a situation!

Is this the lot of someone living 15 minutes drive from Scotland's capital?

http://www.samknows.com/broadband/exchange/ESPCD





Ralph

Change provider to one where broadband is a key product rather than just another commodity

UW is cheap because does mot buy much capacity

OK

Given I'm on a rural exchange that's not even slated for an upgrade at the moment you'll understand, I hope, my scepticism that things can be improved by changing provider on what will still be a BT wholesale non-unbundled exchange... but what have I got to lose?

With a budget of about £20 p.m, (maybe a little more) who would you recommend?

Cheers

Ralph

If unlimited is important, then BT or Plusnet

While the connection speed is limited to probably just ADSL at the exchange, the throughput can vary between providers. One clue is to ask around and see what others have, or just use maps.thinkbroadband.com and enable the speed test layer - tests are no more than a few months old.

A Quick and simple way to TEST if your traffic is being shaped

If it seems like your connection is being throttled by your ISP you can easily take a test across multiple protocols (HTTP / BitTorrent/ P2P) on this website.
The test system can be found on the Max Planck Institute - For Systems Software Its called Glasnost
http://broadband.mpi-sws.org/transparency/bttest.php.

This will try to determine if you are being effected by such techniques.

I Hope this goes some way to putting your mind at ease/or not ?

Give it a try to see for yourself.

Thanks

I Changed the router to the first phone port and used a new filter. It does appear to have improved the headline numbers but the date download is still very slow in practice on real world sites...

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/button/13637...

Ralph

The SO is on a rural exchange http://www.samknows.com/broadband/exchange/NDGOU and she's about 2km from the exchange as the crow flies. Connection speed is a little under 6Mb and with a 5Mb IP profile she's getting download speeds of just under 5Mb regardless of the time of day. She's with Plusnet and paying £17/month I think.