The 'netflix' effect on Vodafone's broadband network is the cause of congestion in the evening.

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FierceGuppy

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#171678 27-Apr-2015 19:15

This is the article. My question is what is Vodafone doing to resolve it?

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#1292422 27-Apr-2015 19:21

I (Ngaio, Wellington) am certainly suffering very poor performance tonight on Vodafone Cable. Haven't tried watching Netflix but very slow on general browsing. Vodafone's Speedtest tells me about 7.2 Mbps download speed - I'm on 130/10, unlimited. Maybe my imagination but I do notice this happening after a long weekend. Perhaps Voda are running on a skeleton staff in order to save costs.

Tinshed
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freitasm

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#1292439 27-Apr-2015 19:22

Don't believe everything you read on Stuff. Actually not much at all.

The discussion here with TrueNet is where you will find out if that's really the problem (hint: likely not).

Jase2985

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#1292451 27-Apr-2015 19:23

find the post from johnr taking about what they are doing.

Vodafone are doing some work to try and alleviate congestion on the cable network. unsure on time from but it is being addressed

freitasm

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#1292453 27-Apr-2015 19:24

And the congestion on cable started back in December, a full three months before Netflix NZ launched. So not even close to be "correlation/causation". What really caused problems was launching "unlimited" plans.

Tinshed

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#1292461 27-Apr-2015 19:29

Agreed. I am sure these issues are quite complex to the uninitiated like myself. But it does seem strange that most often speeds are more than adequate, then sometimes, like tonight, they deteriorate significantly. Logic, if nothing else, tells you something has changed and not for the better.

Tinshed
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johnr

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#1292463 27-Apr-2015 19:30

As above if you are on the Cable (HFC) network not related,

sbiddle

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#1292477 27-Apr-2015 20:00

The customer in that story has a long history of complaining. If you search back to the last story about him late last year you'll see he's due for an RBI ISAM upgrade this year (he's on a Conklin at present, but even with the ISAM will still be outside VDSL2 coverage). Continually complaining when you know that the issue does not lie with Vodafone and the Chorus upgrade is already scheduled to take place sounds like somebody who simply likes seeing their name in the paper.

Netflix really has nothing at all to do with his issue. A Conklin is the issue.

As for the cable issues, well that's something entirely different. There is a reason why the US started moving away from unlimited plans 4-5 years ago and started introducing caps - because DOCSIS is a shared medium and it doesn't take a lot to cause problems. This is already discussed in several threads on here, and potentially Vodafone need to look at ways of dealing with the small number of customers who (if what I've heard is true) are using 10+ TB per month on residential plans. I don't believe for one minute anybody doing that could justify it as legitimate usage.

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Dratsab

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#1292537 27-Apr-2015 20:58

sbiddle: ...potentially Vodafone need to look at ways of dealing with the small number of customers who (if what I've heard is true) are using 10+ TB per month on residential plans. I don't believe for one minute anybody doing that could justify it as legitimate usage.

If that's true, I'd imagine Vodafone will start to look at implementing a fair use policy for their cable network.

FierceGuppy

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#1292540 27-Apr-2015 21:00

I see... Thanks for clearing that up. I will now pin my hopes on the Chorus upgrade.

Mauricio Freitas, I don't believe the congestion is due to having no cap, and much more likely to do with ever more people using faster internet. It's the rate at which data is moving through the network between 8pm - 10pm that is causing the congestion and not how much people download. For example, 100 people downloading 100GB at 100Mbps is likely to cause more congestion than 100 people downloading 10TB at 20Mbps.

sbiddle

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#1292547 27-Apr-2015 21:03

Cable is terrible tonight. Looks like all domestic transit off the network is completely saturated with 100ms + added latency, and speeds off net can barely get above 1Mbps.

FierceGuppy

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#1292577 27-Apr-2015 21:20

sbiddle: Cable is terrible tonight. Looks like all domestic transit off the network is completely saturated with 100ms + added latency, and speeds off net can barely get above 1Mbps.

Mine's plummeted to ~14Mbps from ~100Mbps. You'd expect ISPs to know which internet services are sucking up most of the bandwidth in the evenings.

johnr

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#1292579 27-Apr-2015 21:22

FierceGuppy:
sbiddle: Cable is terrible tonight. Looks like all domestic transit off the network is completely saturated with 100ms + added latency, and speeds off net can barely get above 1Mbps.

Mine's plummeted to ~14Mbps from ~100Mbps. You'd expect ISPs to know which internet services are sucking up most of the bandwidth in the evenings.

Please call and get a fault logged and note down the fault ticket number, Only test over Ethernet and to the VodafoneNZ speedtest server

John

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#1292590 27-Apr-2015 21:42

sbiddle:
As for the cable issues, well that's something entirely different. There is a reason why the US started moving away from unlimited plans 4-5 years ago and started introducing caps - because DOCSIS is a shared medium and it doesn't take a lot to cause problems. This is already discussed in several threads on here, and potentially Vodafone need to look at ways of dealing with the small number of customers who (if what I've heard is true) are using 10+ TB per month on residential plans. I don't believe for one minute anybody doing that could justify it as legitimate usage.

I moved here to New Zealand from the United States just over a year ago, and I can assure you that most ISPs are not implementing data caps. Here's a list of some of our DOCSIS cable providers, along with their data policy:

Charter: Has no official bandwidth cap, but officially has the capacity to restrict use for people that are considered abnormally heavy users. Used to have a 250 GB "cap", but was well-renowned for virtually never enforcing it.
Comcast: Has "trials" for 300-600 GB capped connections in a select few areas throughout the States. They haven't rolled out new trial areas since August 2013. They also received a lot of flak for introducing any caps at all in the trial areas.
Cox: Officially has data caps, but will not throttle nor charge extra for exceeding them. Didn't have Cox in the area I lived in in the States, so I don't know much about 'em, but I'm having difficulty finding much more info. Data seems to mostly be a non-issue though.
Time Warner: Tried to implement caps. Came under heavy fire and promised to instead keep offering unlimited.

I can assure you from first-hand experience in the US that home broadband data caps are very much the exception and not the norm. And for that, I am thankful. Data caps are not the solution. If anything, they are a temporary stop-gap - a necessary evil of sorts. With how fierce ISP competition has become in New Zealand in the last couple of years, implementing data caps again would be a major step backwards. ISPs couldn't do this now without considerable public backlash. Instead, a focus should be made on continuing to invest in and improve infrastructure to handle the speeds we're being sold in the first place, and for especially congested areas, working with the top percentage of users may help. Perhaps even throttling/traffic shaping specific traffic would help, but that's something that I'm relatively uncomfortable with, and again, it's more of a stop-gap than a real, tried and true solution.

Charter was actually a pretty nice ISP to me back in the US, all things taken into consideration. They sold me a 100/5 Mbps cable connection, and while it was usually good, I did start to run into issues a few months after using it. I called up their support, they had a technician out, and that tech informed me that the node was oversubscribed. The tech provided me with his personal work number, and after some back and forth, Charter had upgraded their capacity after about a month and a half. As an added bonus, both the tech and customer service provided me with some refunds on my monthly bills for the service disruptions.

The whole congestion issue that I experienced with Charter on their DOCSIS cable service was actually quite similar to what I (and many others) am experiencing with Vodafone now. But did Charter ever have to implement data caps to solve their problem? No. They realised that they were no longer able to service the speeds they were offering their customers, and invested to resolve that. I'm hoping that Vodafone will do the same thing, which it sounds like they will be.

Prior to moving to New Zealand, I also downloaded close to 1 TB of data in the course of a couple of days while on Charter. I don't think they could have cared any less.

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#1292602 27-Apr-2015 21:46

johnr:
FierceGuppy:
sbiddle: Cable is terrible tonight. Looks like all domestic transit off the network is completely saturated with 100ms + added latency, and speeds off net can barely get above 1Mbps.

Mine's plummeted to ~14Mbps from ~100Mbps. You'd expect ISPs to know which internet services are sucking up most of the bandwidth in the evenings.

Please call and get a fault logged and note down the fault ticket number, Only test over Ethernet and to the VodafoneNZ speedtest server

John

Tests to the VF servers show nothing as they're fine. The problem is everything off net is totally saturated.

freitasm

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#1292608 27-Apr-2015 21:52

FierceGuppy: I see... Thanks for clearing that up. I will now pin my hopes on the Chorus upgrade.

Mauricio Freitas, I don't believe the congestion is due to having no cap, and much more likely to do with ever more people using faster internet. It's the rate at which data is moving through the network between 8pm - 10pm that is causing the congestion and not how much people download. For example, 100 people downloading 100GB at 100Mbps is likely to cause more congestion than 100 people downloading 10TB at 20Mbps.

Please read my comment again, then read Steve Biddle's comments. Same thing, different words. Unlimited caused problems due to how cable works.

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