Fibertel & Throttling. Is It Just Me?

[Bricky]

I've noticed that our Fibertel Internet appears to be throttled as of late (maybe in the last week or so - I've only noticed it really in the last few days).

Downloads start at their usual mind-blowing 5 or 6 megabits, but quickly reduce to 0.5 megabits or less (within maybe a minute or two).
Is this just with me? Or if this something that Fibertel have introduced generally?






I'm talking about "real" downloads here (not speedtests, which I think are deliberately not throttled and regularly estimate ~10Mbit/s speeds!) - I'm mostly noticing it with large downloads from Apple, of the order of a few gigs each - of which there's been a lot lately.

 

[GS_Dirtboy]

Have you checked your browser settings, emptied your cache, all that kind of stuff?

 

[Bricky]

Have you checked your browser settings, emptied your cache, all that kind of stuff?

Yup, reasonably confident that it's not a technical issue here (I used to do networking stuff for a living).

I guess I'm hoping that someone else will say "Hey, that's happening here also!"

... then I won't feel like I'm being picked on

 

[dennisr]

Early evening (1800) performance decays dramatically for me, download/upload from USA. Performance returns after midnight. Daily occurrence. Fibertel Evolution in Caballito.

 

[Bricky]

I do get the occasional slowdown around 6pm also, but this is much worse than that.

Just started another download, 550MB this time (again, from Apple). For the first few minutes it ran at somewhat slow, but acceptable, 200-300KB/s. Now it's down to around 30:

I'm pretty sure now, this is traffic shaping (gone very wrong!) of some sort. And it does appear to be specific to me at the moment.
(possibly b/c most of my traffic is running over a vpn? That generally screws with traffic shapers)




(a little annoyed here to put it mildly - internet is bad in this country generally, but this is just ridiculous ).

 

[arlean]

I've done my share of complaining about Internet here, Heaven (and everyone else) knows. Three months at one time without Internet and unable to do a thing about it. Yelling didn't even help. That was Arnet. I changed to Fibertel many months ago and have been completely happy ever since. No problems with downloads at all. Sometime the computer balks and then I always notice too many things open on my desktop. When I shut stuff down, then it all works well.

I know I'm not offering any real help--except that you now at least know that it isn't happening to everyone. Good luck. I know how awful it can be!

 

[ghost]

If you call Fibertel support you can ask for support in English and they will transfer you. However do not expect a satisfactory solution in any language. They doing exactly what you suspect.

 

[dennisr]

Glasnost test: shaping

http://broadband.mpi-sws.org/transparency/bttest.php

 

[AmigoArtistico]

Well, maybe you've tried some things that you haven't told us, but there are a few obvious things to try:

• Disable the VPN and try some downloads
• You mention that the problem is occurring "mostly" with downloads from Apple. Have you tried downloading from other sites? Same results?
• Try using different software to download. Do a few bittorrent downloads and some ftp transfers and see if you're having the same symptoms.
• If your computer is a laptop, go to a cafe with wifi and try one of the downloads you're having trouble with and see if you get similar symptoms

Anyway, hopefully they aren't throttling you and there's a solution.

 

[Bricky]

@arlean: been in the same boat. In our last apartment we *only* had arnet for a while, and it was just horrendous. When we moved here (about a year ago), we got both. We use arnet as a backup (and for low traffic stuff like dns and voip), and, aside from being slow (usually ~1Mbit/s), it's actually been pretty reliable.

Much too slow for me for work though

@ghost: if I thought for a minute that I'd get someone at the other end who'd even know what I was talking about, I'd nearly give it a try. But I don't

@dennisr: great link! It timed-out here when I tried to run the http test earlier, but I'll give it a try again later.

@AmigoArtistico: the vpn is *to* apple. But actually is doesn't make any difference what I download, I tried a well seeded torrent this morning (under the dome - great show) and various other bits and pieces (over http, ssh, ftp etc.), it's much the same everywhere. And it's not computer-specific either.

Can't mess with it too much at the moment (I'm supposed to be working here!), but I'll try some other things tonight (e.g. I'm hoping that if I change the mac on the router it might trick the shaper into thinking I'm someone else).



@all: Appreciate the help