ISP rant

[poppo]

Here is an example. First from 3:00pm and second at 6:00pm. Uploads are capped at 1Mbps. In the past, the uploads stayed fine even when the downloads slowed. But this time it's affecting both.

[poppo]

The biggest thing they look at when people have problems is ping and jitter. If the jitter is high, it is a sign of a signal issue. Mine remain fine even during the slowdown and are actually excellent for a WISP. This was at 6:00pm after the speed took a dump.

[StatFreak]

Seriously, is it possible that they set up high traffic bandwidth throttling on their end without telling anyone?

It may be throttling related, but I don't do any streaming or anything other than if someone posts a youtube video or something here. My usage is less than 300MB per day (and that is spread out over the whole day because I'm retired). But again, they may have something mis-configured. Unfortunately every time I try to suggest something like that to them, I get told I don't know what I'm talking about. 

I didn't mean that they necessarily set up selective throttling for those using a lot of bandwidth, which is the more common practice, but that they might have purposefully or accidentally set throttling on all accounts when the overall traffic level increases. That would seem to fit the behavior you describe.

As you suggest, it might have been a mistake they made when they configured the new equipment, or they might have done it purposefully and are making BS excuses when customers complain. I wouldn't put it past them if they are a mom and pop operation; they may be trying to penny pinch their overall bandwidth use to save money and increase profits.

[poppo]

As you suggest, it might have been a mistake they made when they configured the new equipment, or they might have done it purposefully and are making BS excuses when customers complain. I wouldn't put it past them if they are a mom and pop operation; they may be trying to penny pinch their overall bandwidth use to save money and increase profits.

They are pretty bad, but I doubt they would have done it on purpose. The announced that the upgrades would improve speeds and they would have everyone up in arms if it actually made things worse. And everything was fine after the upgrades until they replaced the failed equipment.

I'm hoping more people will notice and call. Unless it is just mine that is FUBAR.

[Buzz]

Must be modern terminology, I have never seen an "a" in FUBR !    Maybe it's just plain Ol   SNAFU

[poppo]

Must be modern terminology, I have never seen an "a" in FUBR !    Maybe it's just plain Ol   SNAFU

Actually old termonology.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FUBAR


Just about that time.

[brichter]

I didn't mean that they necessarily set up selective throttling for those using a lot of bandwidth, which is the more common practice, but that they might have purposefully or accidentally set throttling on all accounts when the overall traffic level increases. That would seem to fit the behavior you describe.

As you suggest, it might have been a mistake they made when they configured the new equipment, or they might have done it purposefully and are making BS excuses when customers complain. I wouldn't put it past them if they are a mom and pop operation; they may be trying to penny pinch their overall bandwidth use to save money and increase profits.

This^^^

They set limits on all users when they oversubscribe a link, so that nobody loses service altogether. Instead, everyone gets a piece of the very small pie.  

After all, they don't guarantee upload or download speed, so you can't complain if it slows down. If you lose service altogether, then you could complain and they'd have to compensate you for the outage.  

[brichter]

Fubar

[poppo]

They set limits on all users when they oversubscribe a link, so that nobody loses service altogether. Instead, everyone gets a piece of the very small pie.  

No. Did you read the whole thread? They did system upgrades over the weekend specifically to give MORE bandwidth. And it was working great until they had a piece of equipment fail on the tower. After the link on the tower was replaced, THEN the speed problems started.

[brichter]

Yes, I read the whole thread.  

Installing/upgrading equipment to increase speed doesn't preclude them from implementing throttling. They can either implement throttling across the board, use time-based restrictions, or just throttle the heavy users. As Stat already said, they could have either done it accidentally or on purpose, but there's nothing they could have misconfigured that would only cause slowdowns in high usage periods except for throttling.

I do have a very small bit of knowledge about the subject...

[StatFreak]

...

I do have a very small bit of knowledge about the subject...

   



SF

[poppo]

Installing/upgrading equipment to increase speed doesn't preclude them from implementing throttling.

No it doesn't. But they can't legally change the terms of the service without notice. And the notice they gave was the exact opposite - that they were increasing the BW to relieve the existing slowdowns (which were not that bad).

And if that was the plan, they would not have given everyone better speeds for a few days and then chopping it to 1/4 of what it was before the upgrades. That would make no sense and would open them up to a lawsuit.

I'm 99.999% sure they just have something screwed up. They have done it before.

[poppo]

...but there's nothing they could have misconfigured that would only cause slowdowns in high usage periods except for throttling.

Sure there is. A mis-configured managed switch or router can cause all sorts of bottlenecks when traffic gets heavy. And if they did implement throttling why not just tell me that is what they did?  What could I do other than cancel the service, which I can do at any time since the contract is month to month?

But I'll ask them outright and see what they say.  

From their TOS

• Company Changes in Service and Charges

o Subject to applicable law, we have the right to change our service and equipment, prices and fees at any time. We may also rearrange, delete, or add to our services provided. If the change affects you, we will notify you of the change and its effective date. The notice may be provided in your monthly bill or by direct electronic-mail notification. With the exception of the Contract Account, if you find the change/s unacceptable you have the right to cancel your service. However, if you continue to receive service after the effective date of the change, we will consider this your acceptance of the change.

No such notice was given. If it was, I'm sure they would have reminded me of it when I complained.

[brichter]

Installing/upgrading equipment to increase speed doesn't preclude them from implementing throttling.

No it doesn't. But they can't legally change the terms of the service without notice. And the notice they gave was the exact opposite - that they were increasing the BW to relieve the existing slowdowns (which were not that bad).

And if that was the plan, they would not have given everyone better speeds for a few days and then chopping it to 1/4 of what it was before the upgrades. That would make no sense and would open them up to a lawsuit.

I'm 99.999% sure they just have something screwed up. They have done it before.

Go read my post again... 

[poppo]

Go read my post again...  

I did but I'm  

I know these folks are screwed up, but I can't imagine they would have intentionally done something like this. It just makes no sense. And as I already mentioned, even if they did implement throttling, they would/should have just said so. Instead, everything they said was totally contrary to that. Why blame it on 'atmospheric' conditions? Most of the people live close enough to the tower not to be able to get away with that excuse. And throttling everyone to 200Kbps is a bit extreme no matter how you look at it.

Oh, and when you call the tech support line, one of the things they have you do is run a speed test. Why would they have issued me a ticket number when I called about it if was 'normal'?

If this was a throttling issue either intentional or accidental, the response should have been:

We implemented throttling and if you don't like it cancel.

or

We implemented throttling and we will check to see if it needs to be tweaked.

Either would have been a lot simpler and faster then all of the back and forth communications that have been going on over this.

[brichter]

...but there's nothing they could have misconfigured that would only cause slowdowns in high usage periods except for throttling.

Sure there is. A mis-configured managed switch or router can cause all sorts of bottlenecks when traffic gets heavy. And if they did implement throttling why not just tell me that is what they did?   What could I do other than cancel the service, which I can do at any time since the contract is month to month?

But I'll ask them outright and see what they say. 

From their TOS

• Company Changes in Service and Charges

o Subject to applicable law, we have the right to change our service and equipment, prices and fees at any time. We may also rearrange, delete, or add to our services provided. If the change affects you, we will notify you of the change and its effective date. The notice may be provided in your monthly bill or by direct electronic-mail notification. With the exception of the Contract Account, if you find the change/s unacceptable you have the right to cancel your service. However, if you continue to receive service after the effective date of the change, we will consider this your acceptance of the change.

No such notice was given. If it was, I'm sure they would have reminded me of it when I complained.

So here's the problem, Poppo.

From their TOS:

Subject to applicable law

That phrase is there to protect them, not you.

They don't need to notify you of ANY changes unless specifically required by law. And, they could implement throttling at any time and not be required to tell you in any state, county, or city because they don't GUARANTEE your service level. If they did guarantee your service level, then in certain locations (subject to applicable law) they would be required to tell you, and in other areas, not required (subject to applicable law). But the only accounts that come with guaranteed bandwidth are business accounts, and at $50/month, you're not on a business account.

The reason they wouldn't notify you of throttling is that customers don't like to be told that their service is being limited in any way. That's just the way we are, we want it all and we want it free (or as cheap as possible). 

Comcast went through this a few years back, there was so much P2P file sharing occurring on their network that their customers were experiencing massive slowdowns during peak hours and Comcast took steps to reduce this. Their first implementation was to throttle BitTorrent traffic, but their customers complained so they stopped that method and throttled the heavy users instead. The FCC ruled against their throttling of BitTorrent users, but that decision was overturned in appeals court, the court told the FCC that it was Comcast's network, and they could throttle traffic as they see fit to supply acceptable service to their customers. The complaint that Comcast was legally required to disclose the throttling was thrown out as well, since their SLA did not guarantee bandwidth.
More information on that subject can be found heer:
http://www.zeropaid.com/news/88573/comcast-prevails-in-bittorrent-throttling-case/


A misconfigured switch or router would set off alarms throughout your ISP's system, all their tech guys would know about it within minutes of it occurring. A managed device is exactly that: Managed. It's not like they throw some device up on a tower without using SNMP to monitor the device and send informational status messages as well as varying levels of alerts and alarms about issues in real-time, that would be an unmanaged device. Those messages are dealt with on the server side according to the level of importance of the message (which is user-configurable, usually on the device side), anywhere from discarding it, to logging it, to sending emails or pages to their whole staff the moment a problem is detected if it's serious enough.

<edit>

Just thought of a good analogy:

SNMP is the network world's version of player tracking systems. Just like ACRES or Mastercom or any of the other systems out there sends notifocation of issues and status of slot machines out on the floor to casino personnel, SNMP performs the same function. But instead of having many disparate systems to accomplish the same goal, SNMP has become the de facto standard in the networking world. There's not a single networking equipment manufacturer in the world that doesn't offer SNMP on their managed devices. Some may implement different proprietary protocols in addition, but none of them would be given a second glance if they didn't support SNMP.

[poppo]

Well, I'm still not buying it. These folks have had things screwed up for several days/weeks in the past, before they could figure out what was wrong. While I understand where you are coming from, it just doesn't make sense that they would not just tell me that is what they were doing and just tell me to pack sand. I've been a thorn in their side since the beginning due to the problems they were having then (first to do the intial install, then having to move that to the mast, then having to re-point to another tower due to issues on the first tower). I would think they would have jumped on the opportunity to get rid of me instead of making things up.

But, IF that is what they did, then they may be in for a big backlash once more people start to notice. It was only a couple of hours before I noticed and I was on them (especially after several days of great speeds).  And I'm by no means a heavy user. Throttling should not affect simple web browsing. I get pages that won't load without refreshing or that take as long as dial-up when things are at it's slowest.  

If nothing else, maybe they will re-think their stratagy. Word travels fast around here.

I sent the owner an e-mail and outright asked him if this was a throttling issue. So we shall see what he says.

[jay]

You can do a couple of things to test if the throttling is in place.


Typically if throtlling was in place it could be at a couple of places.
THe first thing to understand is that you are dealing with a company that is making its money by servicing rual customers and not one of the major telcos.
The company you are dealing with is most likely buying bandwidth from a major company known as a Tier1 ISP, Tier1 companies connect directly to the internet.

You--))        ((----Receiver ---------active ISP equipment ---- Router/firewall ----Link to Internet---------Tier1 ISP ----------- Router/Firewall ------ Internet ---- Google (8.8.8.8)

The throttling would potentially be occuring between your ISP and their link to the Internet. In which case this would happen at their router or firewall.
Or if your ISP is drawing too much bandwidth as sometimes happens then the throtelling will happen at the gateway of the Tier 1 company.

The first thing to do is establish a baseline to the outside world. I usually use google.
Issue the command ping -l15000 -w1000 8.8.8.8

This will send a lot of data to google and request a response. The default is 32bytes so 5000 is a beefier payload. If you don't put the w command (wait) then it will time out before it can respond.

If you then ping the ISP equipment closest to you the time should be somewhat improved. If it is improved over the long distance test then there "could be" throttling otherwise if the pings are about the same then its likely a radio problem. As your radio would be the slowest link.

If you think its the radio I will go back to my earlier recommendation and see if you can beg some spares to see if a different radio improves things. You only need to change it once. Its either going to improve dramatically or its going to be the same.

[stayouttadabunker]

for the heck of it - I tried it but got an error in the [-15000] entry.
What did I do wrong?
Should I have entered [-1500] instead?
Click on screenshot to enlarge if needed>>>

[poppo]

jay,

Earlier I posted the pingtest.net test results which I thought tested for that. It has remained consistent even during the slowest times. Pings to my gateway (the tower) are typically 7-12ms and always have been in that range unless they start having equipment problems.

They already said the radio checks out fine (and showed me the logs). No way would they let me 'borrow' another radio anyway.

[brichter]

Well, I'm still not buying it. These folks have had things screwed up for several days/weeks in the past, before they could figure out what was wrong. While I understand where you are coming from, it just doesn't make sense that they would not just tell me that is what they were doing and just tell me to pack sand. I've been a thorn in their side since the beginning due to the problems they were having then (first to do the intial install, then have to move that to the mast , then having to re-point to another tower). I would think they would have jumped on the opportunity to get rid of me instead of making things up.

But, IF that is what they did, then they may be in for a big backlash once more people start to notice. It was only a couple of hours before I noticed and I was on them.  And I'm by no means a heavy user. Throttling should not affect simple web browsing. I get pages that won't load without refreshing or that take as long as dial-up when things are at it's slowest. 

If nothing else, maybe they will re-think their stratagy. Word travels fast around here.

I sent the owner an e-mail and outright asked him if this was a throttling issue. So we shall see what he says.

Just to play Devil's Advocate here, the longer they avoid fessing up, the longer you're paying for the service, and if they're truly the only game in town (or as long as their service is more than marginally better than the competition), their customers (which includes you) are pretty much a captive audience.  Comcast was the same way with television programming until Dish Network and DirecTV became players in the same market.

I feel your pain here because I live in an older section of town, and high speed DSL was never an option until about 6 years ago so I was at the mercy of whatever ISP could give me service. I had Sprint Wireless for a while (same deployment as yours, an antenna and modem atop a mast on the roof, and a router under my desk), and they used to test my connection's speed to their internal server, so of course the speed was great and they never admitted there was an issue. Where they were throttling us customers was at their peering point with the Internet, because the more data they passed, the more it cost them. I'd get over a megabit to their internal server, but only 128k if I was lucky out to the internet. Finally, AT&T dropped a multiline repeater a few blocks from my house and I get 6 meg down now. I tried Comcast, but their cable plant is so old here it can't support any higher bitrate than I get with DSL, and it's shared media as well so other people's usage affects me. On top of that, they can't give me static IP addresses, so AT&T DSL gets my business until something better comes along.

[stayouttadabunker]

oh I figured it out...
I had to add the wait [ w ]  before the "15000"..
here's some results from the North Country....lol
Click to enlarge screenshot if needed...>>>

[poppo]

LOL. My times are better than yours. (but wrong data size command)

Hmmm..... it comes back at 45ms with a data size of 1000, but times out with 1500 (even with a high -w).

[stayouttadabunker]

lol

Yeah...and I'm supposed to be on "hi-speed DSL"   yeah right....  

I pay way too much  for this crap up here...

[CaptainHappy]

for the heck of it - I tried it but got an error in the [-15000] entry.
What did I do wrong?
Should I have entered [-1500] instead?
Click on screenshot to enlarge if needed>>>

Mark,

Jay is probably in bed, but I think that you missed a letter in there possibly: "-l15000" maybe that was supposed to be a lower case "L", you know "l"???

Just a thought.... I tried an "l" and it did something without erroring...

CH

ADD: Just noticed on the next page that you did it with a -w, and I think it is supposed to be -l (l for length) like I mentioned above.