Vodafone throttling my speeds on non standard ports

[yotoprules]

Hi,

I recently noticed my speeds have been throttled while using certain services. I'd get good results on speed test (20-30megabits) yet not be able to stream a song.

What I noticed is, if the server is running on port 80, speeds are unthrottled, and I get close to the speed that I get on speedtest. (1-2 megabytes a second which is about right)

But if I run it on port 8096, I get 200-300 kilobytes a second, sometimes dropping below 100. These speeds are not usable at all.

The funny thing is I am port forwarding the server to both port 80 and 8096 at the same time, and 80 is never throttled but 8096 is sometimes usable, sometimes not. The throttling seems a bit random and inconsistent.

The workaround is a vpn that uses an unthrottled port, but I shouldn't have to use a vpn or change the port to an unthrottled port. I should get the speeds I am paying for. But being unable to stream my music from my server is a big problem and I don't really want to run the server on port 80. I also have other servers I want to run and obviously I can't run them all on the same port.

What's going on here, and can this be solved.

Thanks in advance

(Sony Xperia XZ2) 

[Anonymous]

The problem is actually isolating the issue to make sure the problem is where you believe it to be!  So we'd need to be absolutely sure that the performance drop off is not due to things such as router or server firewalls.

I see no reason why Vodafone would be going out of their way to speed limit specific ports, it makes no sense!

Other than having devices in two separate locations and running iperf3 on a connection between them I can't see a simple means to do such a test (anyone have any ideas I'm listening).  I managed to set up the router here as an OpenVPN server and connect to it from a device made remote by using a mobile connection.  The results of which were consistent irrespective of the OpenVPN port.

[yotoprules]

Alright, how should I test it for other problems?

I did notice the same problem as I'm paying for a shared server which is another part of the world (forgot where its located) however that had the same problem. Now I'm hosting at home, and my mobile network is having trouble when trying to access it through non standard ports, getting really slow speeds, but as soon as I try through port 80 it all of a sudden works fine... I don't understand why Vodafone would do this either, maybe to reduce load on their servers or something through ports they think aren't as important? However it's causing problems for me. 

[Anonymous]

Playing around with iperf3 across two locations is the only sensible way I can think of to properly test this.  Even then you'll need to make sure that you have the port forwarding on the router set up, and that you've punched the right holes in the server firewall to let your "unsolicited" data through.

I can't help but suspect what you are seeing is the result of either port-forwarding or a firewall on at least one of your own devices - however, I wouldn't be prepared to say this is a definitive cause!