Problems with Spark Ultra Fast Fibre MAX?

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pab

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#208396 10-Feb-2017 00:13

Moved to Spark Ultra Fast Fibre MAX mid January and has been fine until the 8th of Feb. Since then upload has been (relatively) crippled to 30Mbit/s inside NZ, 8Mbit/s OZ, 1Mbit/s US, <1Mbit/s Europe (speedtest data).

Most noticeably, I could saturate upstream with my NAS backup to Amazon cloud drive with 5 connections uploading at 100Mbit/s each, now I won't get more than 1Mbit/s per connection.

The helpdesk haven't been much help - power off ONT, power off router, wait, power on ONT, power on router. No change, repeat this time resetting router to factory default. I'm in Christchurch. Used both Spark Huawei router and an ASUS RT-AC87U.

Any ideas? No wifi being used, QoS is off. It's driving me a bit nuts.

Talkiet

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#1718064 10-Feb-2017 08:05

Hi there... Your speedtest download looks fine so that's a bit confusing - I wouldn't expect LFC connection or local handover issues in the upstream direction. There was a thread on NZNOG just yesterday that seemed to suggest that AWS in Aussie was a bit buggered... (See the history on https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/ )

Is it any better today? If not, PM me your account number and I'll see if I can see anything. I have Ultra Fibre Max too and I am in Chch. I've not noticed any degradation at all but I'm not doing any heavy duty uploads or downloads at the moment.

Actually, you mentioned you've been saturating the upload to 500Mbps? How much data have you been uploading? 500Mbps is 5.4TB/day! How much data do you have to upload?

Anyway, send me your details and I'll see if I can see anything funny on our side.

Cheers - N

[edit - please include trouble ticket number the helpdesk gave you]

Please note all comments are from my own brain and don't necessarily represent the position or opinions of my employer, previous employers, colleagues, friends or pets.

BarTender

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#1718094 10-Feb-2017 09:04

Here is the thread on nznog about the AWS issue: https://list.waikato.ac.nz/pipermail/nznog/2017-February/022455.html

pab

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#1718309 10-Feb-2017 13:27

Thanks for the offer to look into it further @Talkiet - I've sent you a PM.

Things are better today - speedtest to Spark's CHCH node gives me DOWNLOAD, 928.31Mb/s and UPLOAD, 354.65Mb/s. My Amazon Cloud Drive (ACD), currently four of them are going up at around 10Mb/s each, which is much better than yesterday. Now <1 order of magnitude slower instead of 2 orders of magnitude slower. I'm unsure if it's an ACD problem or a Spark problem - the slow upstream speedtest when I was idling my connection yesterday had me thinking Spark.

The ACD connections go via the US. I currently have 4 connections uploading.

netstat -ntp | grep syno-cloud-sy
tcp 0 2206368 192.168.2.110:43290 52.87.143.186:443 ESTABLISHED 31989/syno-cloud-sy
tcp 0 2263512 192.168.2.110:57663 52.73.179.92:443 ESTABLISHED 31989/syno-cloud-sy
tcp 0 2289384 192.168.2.110:54108 52.71.245.34:443 ESTABLISHED 31989/syno-cloud-sy
tcp 0 2195424 192.168.2.110:56307 54.209.63.219:443 ESTABLISHED 31989/syno-cloud-sy

curl ipinfo.io/52.73.179.92
{
"ip": "52.73.179.92",
"hostname": "ec2-52-73-179-92.compute-1.amazonaws.com",
"city": "Ashburn",
"region": "Virginia",
"country": "US",
"loc": "39.0481,-77.4728",
"org": "AS14618 Amazon.com, Inc.",
"postal": "20149"
}

Talkiet

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#1718334 10-Feb-2017 14:33

Yep - got and replied to the PM. I can't see anything obviously wrong and we've had no other reports of similar issues. The OP has some unique requirements so I am digging a little deeper but so far this doesn't look like an issue within our network. (Not saying it definitely isn't, but so far no red flags).

If you can, let me know if it's better or worse (noticably) at peak time tonight. Also interested to know if there's any detectable issue with interactive use (browsing, video streaming etc).

Cheers - N

Please note all comments are from my own brain and don't necessarily represent the position or opinions of my employer, previous employers, colleagues, friends or pets.

pab

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#1718512 10-Feb-2017 23:28

Just tested now with nothing else connected and got the following:

Test Date: Feb 10, 2017 22:57

Download: 196.39 Mbps

Upload: 44.43 Mbps

Ping: 5 ms

Connection Type: Ethernet

Server: Christchurch

VoIP, Skype and YouTube all seem fine as does general web browsing. Downloading via http (Linux iso from ucmirror.canterbury.ac.nz) topped out at 20Mbit/s. ACD uploads maxed 1.5Mbit. So no real impact on small stuff, but throttled on high throughput activity. Streaming while downloading/uploading doesn't appear to affect the stream, just the upload/download slows down further. Wife and kids happy and after discussing with Talkiet I'm fairly chill about it.

I'm backing off on the heavy usage for a few days and will monitor progress. Happy to test speeds to specific places/times.

michaelmurfy

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#1718519 11-Feb-2017 00:39

I've got to ask. Why are you doing that requires this much speed? The reason why I ask this is I once had a server that had 8TiB of drive space and there was one month I had to do a complete backup (around 6TiB total) which I did during off-peak time however after this I only had to do Delta backups (as in - backing up changes only) which meant I was only uploading around 300GiB/mo. For somebody to complain about upload speed issues is a bit of a red flag to me since this is normally due to some dodgy (or even contract breaking) activity especially since your tested download / upload speeds are totally fine for a regular residential user.

Even if I only had lets say 20Mbit it still wouldn't bother me as the backup job would have still completed overnight so you must be doing something else other than that. You've got to remember that being on a residential plan means you're needing to respect other users - having 1000/500Mbit doesn't give you the right to max it out at all times - if you're needing to saturate the upload side of things (or even download) then you should really be on a business plan suited for your needs or have a server hosted in the cloud on a dedicated Gigabit connection (you can get these for next to nothing these days).

The problem could also be caused by somebody in your area deciding it is a great idea to host a server farm or superseed torrents. You've got to remember GPON is 2.4Gbit down, 1.2Gbit up (don't quote me on the exact numbers) split between 16 to 32 households so all it takes is a couple of Gigabit punters maxing out their line to cause everyone else to suffer and this is the main reason despite me having Gigabit and an unlimited connection I only do massive downloads / uploads during off-peak whilst also having servers hosted in the cloud.

Michael Murphy | https://murfy.nz
Referral Links: Quic Broadband (use R122101E7CV7Q for free setup)

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pab

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#1718528 11-Feb-2017 07:00

I inherited a large amount on home video shot on 8mm film from my grandfather. I've been digitising in my spare time over the past few years. I have about 40TB on disk and almost half way through the digitising process. I've been wanting to back it up for years, but wasn't possible on ADSL. The data transfer perform is compounded by a bug in the Synology cloud sync utility that uploads a large file and instead of waiting for the chunks to recombine on the Amazon side, it does a separate test if the file exists and has the same size and hash, but that fails as the recombining process hasn't finished so it uploads the file again. The second time the file is uploaded the verify request succeeds.

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kornflake

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#1718529 11-Feb-2017 07:43

Michael that is exactly why the gigabit plans should never have been introduced on Mass market ufb connections, too few people get this fact and will complain like hell to there isp, to which the isp may not be able to do anything about it.

Talkiet

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#1718530 11-Feb-2017 07:44

pab: Just tested now with nothing else connected and got the following:

Test Date: Feb 10, 2017 22:57

Download: 196.39 Mbps

Upload: 44.43 Mbps

Ping: 5 ms

Connection Type: Ethernet

Server: Christchurch

VoIP, Skype and YouTube all seem fine as does general web browsing. Downloading via http (Linux iso from ucmirror.canterbury.ac.nz) topped out at 20Mbit/s. ACD uploads maxed 1.5Mbit. So no real impact on small stuff, but throttled on high throughput activity. Streaming while downloading/uploading doesn't appear to affect the stream, just the upload/download slows down further. Wife and kids happy and after discussing with Talkiet I'm fairly chill about it.

I'm backing off on the heavy usage for a few days and will monitor progress. Happy to test speeds to specific places/times.

Damn, that speedtest result is pretty bad and it shouldn't be. At least interactive use still seems ok. I can't look into it at the moment as I am about to head out the door to go shoot the Downhill MTB NZ open... As for what we discussed via PM it might take a day or 2 to come into effect . If it's still this bad by Monday, definitely drop me another PM.

I'm not 100% sure what this is, but I'm 99% sure that it's not affecting any other users.

Cheers -N

Please note all comments are from my own brain and don't necessarily represent the position or opinions of my employer, previous employers, colleagues, friends or pets.

BarTender

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#1718580 11-Feb-2017 10:57

pab: I inherited a large amount on home video shot on 8mm film from my grandfather. I've been digitising in my spare time over the past few years. I have about 40TB on disk and almost half way through the digitising process. I've been wanting to back it up for years, but wasn't possible on ADSL. The data transfer perform is compounded by a bug in the Synology cloud sync utility that uploads a large file and instead of waiting for the chunks to recombine on the Amazon side, it does a separate test if the file exists and has the same size and hash, but that fails as the recombining process hasn't finished so it uploads the file again. The second time the file is uploaded the verify request succeeds.

Interesting that you're saying you moved 40TB and that you're half way through it. Reading this post it does sound rather suspicious to me that your monthly usage has been on the extreme for a while when you were with MyRepublic in May, then Bigpipe in December so you have been bouncing between ISPs. It does sound like you're running a business / service rather than something a home user would do. Perhaps a business connection rather than residential is more suitable for your needs.

Edit. MR in May, Bigpipe in Dec.

michaelmurfy

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#1718592 11-Feb-2017 11:36

@pab I'm going to call you out on the whole video thing. If that was the case you'll be done by now. I'm with @bartender here thinking there is something else going on.

michaelmurfy

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#1719635 13-Feb-2017 20:40

@pab any update to what both myself and @bartender have said? Since a lack of response to our statements does make it seem you're simply abusing your connection.