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Vodafone Mobile Broadband - Problem Loading Websites Using 'Google Analytics'

aviator
4: Newbie
Why is it that during loading of pages like telegraph.co.uk mobile broadband sticks at google-analytics.com. This is not the only one but many pages access external advert sites and these don't seem to be welcome.

It certainly does not stick on my Sky broadband at home but always does where ever I am using Vodafone USB E270 with the latest firmware.

This is a real pain since it is only recently that mobile broadband is sort of useable on a lot of the country.

That is not to say it is realiable 😉 Yesterday I had one of those annoying calls to 191 enquiring why Poole was not working on 3G. Usual stuff about signal strength 'oh it can change even at the same spot sir!' but finally agreeing there is a fault but no idea when it will be fixed and no we cannot phone you to tell you when it is back on. Arggh! All this following on the dreadful stuff in Leighton Buzzard where 3G has been unusable for well over a month.

Vodafone is a great company but these things add up to bad churn rate which is a real pity.
8 REPLIES 8

Retired-Daz_V
Moderator (Retired)
Moderator (Retired)
Hey there Aviator!

Interesting one this! It might be down to the optimisation :huh:

I would suggest downloading the VMC version 9.2, and uninstalling your current version of the suite (if it's VMC Lite, you can leave it, it'll be fine). Then reboot and install the 9.2, remembering to select Custom install and choose Optimisation as a feature. Once loaded, you'll be able to turn off the optimisation, which streamlines images, but on occasion can cause issue with certain content.

Other than this, I recommend trying a newer version of browser or another one - Safari and Firefox are great alternatives to IE, and I personally would choose either over Internet Explorer.

Let us know how you get on - is anyone else suffering this strange issue by chance?

In regards to the signal fault, this is unfortunate to hear. Sadly we can't always call back when a problem is resolved as it could potentially affect a large number of customers - I agree ideally this would be excellent to do, but is currently impractical as we're all hard at work resolving outstanding issues :(

If you were quoted a reference to go with the fault, we can always look this up for you as to an update! :)


Daz

eForum Team


PS... why not check out our Online Services today for a look at Online Billing? It's a great way to manage your account with us, and so simple :P

techmind
4: Newbie
Wow - you've found an issue there!
I'm not getting telegraph.co.uk to show more than the first couple of lines.
Ok, after about 4 minutes I get most of the rest of the page.

Interestingly, if I try to view http://www..telegraph.co.uk/ through the https://proxify.co.uk/ secure-http proxying service it loads (but still takes some seconds).

I strongly suspect what you're seeing is related to Vodafone's "transformation" (aka "optimisation") proxies which reformat content (particularly images) on-the-fly to reduce the bandwidth for download (by applying further compression). Unfortunately, as far as I can infer, these proxies also seem to introduce significant delays in retrieving 'assets' which can slow down page-loading of complicated pages by far more than any speedup achieved by the compression. These delays seem to be worst when the network is busy, i.e. mid-evening. Perhaps logically, it also seems to cause most problems for pages with a large number of inlined assets (images, ads, etc etc) - and the Telegraph pages look pretty heavy in that respect.

When you view pages through the secure-http proxify service, you bypass Vodafone's delaying proxies (but obviously you're still one hop removed from a direct not-at-all-proxied connection).

See also this thread: http://forum.vodafone.co.uk/index.php?show...2267&st=120

If your problem is what I think you're seeing, you might find that adding a MaxConnectionsPerServer line to your registry (usual warnings re tinkering with the Registry apply) and giving it a value of 10 or so helps mitigate the problem (the default for WinXP / IE7 systems is 2, but I believe is effectively 6 under IE8, which should help somewhat). More info in the thread linked above. Basically changing this parameter allows your system to attempt to download more assets in parallel (and endure the waits concurrently), rather than having to get them one after the other (or just two at a time) with a (possibly) several-second delay for each one (enduring the waits sequentially).

Apparently it is possible to configure Firefox to add extra "no-cache" http headers which can help to minimise the impact of Vodafone's compression proxies - but I've not tried this personally. It really shouldn't be necessary to have to change browsers as a work-around!

By the way, I don't think that changing your VMC client is likely to make much difference. For the record I'm running version 9.2.4.7868

Vodafone have been promising to remove these transformation proxies, which cause all sorts of unwanted side effects (corrupted ZIP, .gz, and other files, corrupted transparent GIFs), for months. Please hurry up and do it, Vodafone!

techmind
4: Newbie
Why is it that during loading of pages like telegraph.co.uk mobile broadband sticks at google-analytics.com. This is not the only one but many pages access external advert sites and these don't seem to be welcome.


Can you list any other (mainstream) sites which have a similar problem. The more evidence we have that the problem is widespread, perhaps we can raise the priority of getting it fixed!

(Since I changed my MaxConnectionsPerServer a month or two ago -a partial work-around- things have generally been quite a bit better for me, but the Telegraph site is clearly still awful this evening even with 10 connections.)

Thanks,

Andrew

techmind
4: Newbie
I don't know in great detail exactly how web-traffic works, but given that Vodafone has NAT routing (and it's transforming proxies), I wonder whether all of all Vodafone's mobile broadband customers appear to external websites to be one very very active customer (all coming from a single, or very small set of IP addresses) and whether those websites' servers limit the total number of connections per customer/IP ... which might cause bottlenecks with popular sites...?

Retired-Jon_V
Moderator (Retired)
Moderator (Retired)
I don't know in great detail exactly how web-traffic works, but given that Vodafone has NAT routing (and it's transforming proxies), I wonder whether all of all Vodafone's mobile broadband customers appear to external websites to be one very very active customer (all coming from a single, or very small set of IP addresses) and whether those websites' servers limit the total number of connections per customer/IP ... which might cause bottlenecks with popular sites...?

That's a good theory there techmind. The IP's are shared, using both NAT and PAT, so the affected websites could very well be employing "anti-hammering" techniques on Vodafone customers.

That problem will go away as soon as we switch to Public IP addressing, but it's something I don't think we've taken into account before. The problem is going to be figuring out a way to test it.

Jon

eForum Team

aviator
4: Newbie
That's a good theory there techmind. The IP's are shared, using both NAT and PAT, so the affected websites could very well be employing "anti-hammering" techniques on Vodafone customers.

That problem will go away as soon as we switch to Public IP addressing, but it's something I don't think we've taken into account before. The problem is going to be figuring out a way to test it.

Jon

eForum Team

It isn't a Google Analytics problem per se as I checked on my website which uses the same and all works just fine. It is also nothing to do with browsers Jon as I use Chrome but tested with IE8 also.

So it could be something to do with any caching that Vodafone does and/or the shared IPs.

The problem for customers is that Vodafone advertise this as Mobile Broadband which it is close to being but has too many gotchas ranging from lack of local access in major areas, unreliable nodes, contention ratio, customer service and now this. All very frustrating for a long time supported and shareholder.

The problem for Vodafone is that not many are prepared to complain and just go to another network, probably only to find a worse situation.

That said I do find Vodafone support better once you can get past the first tier and mindless questions, guesses etc etc. It is only here on the forum that you can really get down to the nitty gritty.

techmind
4: Newbie
That's a good theory there techmind. The IP's are shared, using both NAT and PAT, so the affected websites could very well be employing "anti-hammering" techniques on Vodafone customers.


Then again, you might expect that Vodafone's cacheing servers/proxies would greatly reduce the traffic seen by the external websites if this were in fact a potential problem - though the cacheing may be less effective if the sites are substantially dynamic and can't be cached properly.

On the other hand, if too many Vodafone customers are hitting ctrl+F5 and/or using Firefox with "no-cache" header modifications (to circumvent Vodafone's image-compression) then VF cacheing will be less effective and a lot more "duplicate" traffic requests will be put out onto the internet... Another reason to hurry up and get rid of the compression/"transformation" proxies? ;)

ianknudsen
Not applicable
Then again, you might expect that Vodafone's cacheing servers/proxies would greatly reduce the traffic seen by the external websites if this were in fact a potential problem - though the cacheing may be less effective if the sites are substantially dynamic and can't be cached properly.

On the other hand, if too many Vodafone customers are hitting ctrl+F5 and/or using Firefox with "no-cache" header modifications (to circumvent Vodafone's image-compression) then VF cacheing will be less effective and a lot more "duplicate" traffic requests will be put out onto the internet... Another reason to hurry up and get rid of the compression/"transformation" proxies? ;)



I've been asked to add a couple of web sites that i'm having problems getting into to this thread so they can be tested:-

www.techradar.com - get a 400 Bad request error.
www.halifax.co.uk - can't get in at the top level but can search in google and get in at a sub level.
www.telegraph.co.uk - as other people have mentioned - it also takes ages to load for me aswell.