Aberdeen - dreadful speeds tonight - line congestion?

[jellyman]

On CityFibre 900 and speeds are near unusable. Switched to the mobile dongle and they were even worse.

What is going on?

[Annoyeduser71]

I ran the online speed test, and it showed no issues between Vodafone and my router, with speeds over 800 Mbps. However, as I mentioned, when I use a VPN, the speed magically goes up, with upload speeds around 900-950 Mbps. So why would the download speed be affected but not the upload when it reaches my router? As I said, traffic shaping could explain this

[dfunky]

Picture attached is a week's worth of speed tests. You can see where it dropped off on the evenings of the 4th and 5th, then something was "fixed" where the download speed variance smoothed out. Then from about 8am this morning some other failure mode has come along and messed up download speed all day. Upload constant at 900+Mbit...

I'm with you, it has to be traffic shaping of some sort. I wouldn't object to it if they left me with a stable 100Mbit or so, but connection now is unusable for what I want to be doing...

[RebelRose]

I've suffered traffic shaping before when I live in another country, and it was a tad different... it just meant some traffic was slow, e.g., Netflix or something, because they were throttling that, and turning on a VPN magically fixed it because they could no longer tell it was Netflix traffic. They wouldn't throttle speed tests, or their "partner" streaming services. 

However, this seems to apply to all traffic in my experience, which would defeat the purpose of traffic shaping. I think it's some other routing fault going on at their end, maybe some mad attempt at dealing with congestion, I'm not sure.

Also, I would imagine they'd apply traffic shaping rules consistently to everyone, and at the same times, but it seems to be all over the place in that regard.

[Annoyeduser71]

I can be a heavy downloader, I have well over 1200 games in my steam libary, 600 across the others and 300-400 on playstation, Obviously Im not downloading them all the time, but I just downloaded the Black Ops 6 beta, that was over 80gigs I think, plus updates etc and that just one game.

[Annoyeduser71]

[img]https://i.imgur.com/KK1PqCj.png[/img]

[LuckyLlama]

Pretty tiring tbh how predictable this is - Aberdeen Peak time vs Non-Peak time. 

iMagE to bE mOdErAtEd ( Likely tales )

[RebelRose]

Yeah it's solitaire and board games in the evenings for Vodafone customers =D I'm surprised at the sheer extent of the reports, even on Reddit too. Must be making a lot of noise to their support folks, surely.

[AverageJoe58243]

DL speeds during peak hours seems to be getting much worse since July. About 7pm yesterday it dropped to about 2mb. Speaking to their tech support today, they actually suggested that I should replace all my CAT 6 ethernet cables (House hard wired with it) with CAT 5 cable. They're reaching for any excuse in order to close calls and shrug off sorting out the main issue which is network congestion or useless traffic management. They still couldn't explain why CAT6 works fine during working hours but not during peak hours. Seriously thinking of raising a complaint with CISAS considering I have months of support tickets logged with them. https://www.cedr.com/consumer/cisas/make-a-complaint/  Waste of time dealing with their support staff as they know what’s going on and are probably given a script to gaslight their customers in the hope they’ll give up and accept a sub standard service which breaks their 250MB guaranteed DL 24/7 SLA

[RebelRose]

Yeah I've had some hilarious ones over the past few months. One where she was begging me to accept a free WiFi booster as she was certain it would solve the issue, but I couldn't get through the fact I was on Ethernet, it was like the technology didn't exist. Another one told me "Aha, found the issue! I am connected to your router, and I can see it's just done a firmware update, that would've caused some issues whilst it updated." - however, up to this point, I'd never even taken the Vodafone router out the box, I was exclusively on my Asus one. I had to call out the BS which was a little embarrassing for all.

Maybe go ahead and raise that complaint? Anything I could do to help or should we keep it individual? Would be curious to know how that goes 

[AverageJoe58243]

They also gave me a free WiFi booster a few months ago. Took it as I didn't have the energy at the time to explain to their tech support person why that's going to make zero difference in a hardwired household. I really think their support teams have extremely basic IT knowledge (if any). Just put there as blockers to gaslight non technical customers from kicking up a stink. A bit pointless as a quick google search will identify lots of Aberdeen folk who are not happy with their VF/CF broadband service and all have the exact same issue during peak hours.