Unusable 1.5MBit/s Internet from Orcon (Chorus, Wellington) 2 nights in a row. Others?

Forums › New Zealand Broadband › Unusable 1.5MBit/s Internet from Orcon (Chorus, Wellington) 2 nights in a row. Others?

accordionbus

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Geek

#303823 11-Mar-2023 21:16

Friday night, and again tonight, I noticed my Chorus 300Mbit/s fibre link was performing so poorly I couldn't complete an "apt update" on my laptop. Investigation showed speed test results consistently at 1.5Mbit/s and real world download speeds considerably lower than that. Tonight I can't even steam a podcast.

But uploads were and currently are getting 50-75 MBit/s in the same test. These are locally peered tests from Chorus too.

Chorus terminal and router restart had no effect. Same issue on multiple devices. No unfamiliar devices on network. Same behaviour on wired ethernet. Traffic capture from router (FritzBox) doesn't show high or unusual traffic just godawful performance.

Was still awful when I went to sleep at 11pm.

Seemed poor but usable most of today. Two tests reported 30Mbit/s and later a fine-if-not-what-I'm-paying-for 100 MBit/s.

Tonight it's back to 1.5MBit and I'm losing my mind a bit. If this happens when I'm trying to work I'll be in some trouble.

Anyone else seeing similar symptoms? Ghastly download rates, fast uploads, severe in evening? Seems newly onset or much worse yesterday evening and again tonight.

accordionbus

11 posts

Geek

#3049069 11-Mar-2023 21:17

That ain't right. I'd assume either extreme contention or shaping. Orcon say they don't do traffic shaping or bandwidth limits, and anyway my use has been very light since I moved in here 2 weeks ago.

I've noticed the service often doesn't perform at advertised rates but I honestly don't care if it's 150MBit/s or 300 in all but the rarest occasions. I just came from 50MBit/s VHDSL2 and thought that was pretty sweet frankly... and I'm a work from home IT pro.

But flakey 1-2MBIt/s isn't ok.

I contacted Orcon about it last night via their email form which they assure will yield a very prompt response. But they're haven't responded. So that's super too.

nztim

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#3049071 11-Mar-2023 21:24

100ms is like to asia and back something is not right

Any views expressed on these forums are my own and don't necessarily reflect those of my employer.

Ge0rge

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#3049072 11-Mar-2023 21:26

Sounds like it could be related to this

accordionbus

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#3049078 11-Mar-2023 21:34

Ge0rge:
Sounds like it could be related to this

Yeah, saw that and should've linked it. Wanted to highlight the significance of uploads being normal, the second day in a row, excluding CPE, etc. Apologies if I should've posted in that thread instead, I'm new here.

I'm going to do some poking with mtr and some other tools and see what I can uncover. This doesn't behave like normal congestion; speeds are usually much more variable and with spikey packet loss in severe congestion situations. It's acting more like throttling...

nztim: that's a bit of an outlier, 45-60 has been more common. But still odd for what should be a fairly close, peered endpoint. Going to play with mtr and see what it can tell me.

If I need to I can hook the laptop straight up to the ONT with suitable vlan config to prove its not the FritzBox either. But I guarantee it's not the FritzBoz.

Jase2985

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#3049080 11-Mar-2023 21:40

Tracing route to dynamic-cpe-pool.orcon.net.nz [121.99.166.xxx]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms GWN7000 [192.168.1.1]
2 2 ms 2 ms 2 ms lo-vprn-100.br1.mdr.vygr.net [114.23.3.255]
3 3 ms 8 ms 13 ms ae-0-621.cr1.mdr.vygr.net [114.23.3.230]
4 3 ms 2 ms 2 ms as9790.akl.ix.nz [43.243.21.3]
5 10 ms 10 ms 10 ms default-rdns.vocus.co.nz [60.234.8.50]
6 54 ms 55 ms 51 ms dynamic-cpe-pool.orcon.net.nz [121.99.166.xxx]

that's from Auckland. massive latency inside the Vocus/Orcon network.

there is also massive jitter from your speedtest.

accordionbus

11 posts

Geek

#3049092 11-Mar-2023 22:02

Jase2985:

[snip]

there is also massive jitter from your speedtest.

I chose a poor speedtest sample - that specific one was the most recent, which probably wasn't in ideal wifi range. Here's a better sample, from yesterday, IIRC on wired Ethernet.

Here's what MTR has to say, pointing to Inspire Networks since that's what the Chorus speedtest picks as a peer. Can't guarantee it's actually routed similarly without using wireshark to fish out the IP of the speedtest peer, but it sure fits:

$ sudo mtr --report --tcp -P 443 -c 100 -s 1300 -i 0.1 -f 2 inspire.net.nz
Start: 2023-03-11T21:55:05+1300
HOST: kaylee Loss% Snt Last Avg Best Wrst StDev
2.|-- ??? 100.0 100 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
3.|-- tengigabitethernet0-2-0-5 0.0% 100 45.7 46.5 40.3 58.5 2.5
4.|-- ??? 100.0 100 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
5.|-- 121-79-193-67.sta.inspire 81.0% 100 7330. 1823. 41.4 7330. 2716.5
6.|-- www02.inspire.net.nz 0.0% 100 45.2 48.2 42.4 51.8 2.1

... and this is with throughput back up to 60 MBit/s when I just re-tested.

So it really does look like congestion. Severe and extended on Friday night, ends a bit earlier on Saturday night, and will no doubt improve on Sunday night earlier still. Someone's pipes are way smaller than their promises.

The question is whether it's Chorus or 2Degrees/Vocus/Orcon.

Edit: Argh, I thought BBCode died in the mid-2010s, where's the Markdown? And the post preview? GAH. How do you do preformatted code blocks in this dinosaur? I tried <pre>...</pre>, [pre]...[/pre], even manually munging it with   entities to stop the browser collapsing consecutive spaces...

Edit2: And aha, got it, [code] works, and the forum s/w protects consecutive white space already.

Not much more to investigate as it's recovered for tonight. Bet it's back tomorrow. Churn time.

accordionbus

11 posts

Geek

#3049099 11-Mar-2023 22:20

I suggest closing this thread and using https://www.geekzone.co.nz/forums.asp?forumid=81&topicid=303816 (I apparently can't link to it yet due to new user account restrictions) since it does turn out to be the same thing.