Extremely Bad International Connection on GIG

Forums › 2degrees (including Slingshot, Orcon, Flip, Stuff Fibre, MyRepublic, 2talk and Vocus) › Extremely Bad International Connection on GIG

FoxHoundNZ

8 posts

Wannabe Geek

#206019 7-Dec-2016 05:19

I switched from Spark to My Republic a day ago. I was tempted by their advertised price and supposingly 1gbps download speed. I get close to that only from local servers. Whenever I test anywhere else apart from some servers in AU, I get next to nothing in terms of connection speed and stability. I have done everything I could including flushing/changing my DNS, power cycling, VPN. I also did a million speed tests on both on/off peak time.

Then I spoke with their tech support and he did a bunch of test with Teamviewer. I was getting 15-30% the speed even from downloading on their My Republic FTP server. The heavy usage of my internet usually is to watch Twitch and stream sometimes for fun. 99% of the streams on Twitch.TV have troubles even buffering at medium quality. This is worse than the ADSL2 I used 2 years ago. I used Spark fibre for a year and it was really good but a little pricier.

I live in Christchuch but my friend in North Island said MR was pretty good so I dived into this without much proper research. Now I am stuck with a really bad internet with 24 months contract. Is there anyway I can void the contract as I am actually not getting the advertised product?

1 | 2

13457 posts

Uber Geek

ID Verified

Lifetime subscriber

#1683561 7-Dec-2016 05:23

Sometimes you get what you pay for

If you had have done some research first you may have found that my republic is not recommended at all around here

tdgeek

29740 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#1683578 7-Dec-2016 07:55

T+C's will probably have an as good as is available term. So, cancel, pay ETF and go back to Spark.

noroad

949 posts

Ultimate Geek

Trusted

#1683607 7-Dec-2016 09:04

FoxHoundNZ:

I switched from Spark to My Republic a day ago. I was tempted by their advertised price and supposingly 1gbps download speed. I get close to that only from local servers. Whenever I test anywhere else apart from some servers in AU, I get next to nothing in terms of connection speed and stability. I have done everything I could including flushing/changing my DNS, power cycling, VPN. I also did a million speed tests on both on/off peak time.

Then I spoke with their tech support and he did a bunch of test with Teamviewer. I was getting 15-30% the speed even from downloading on their My Republic FTP server. The heavy usage of my internet usually is to watch Twitch and stream sometimes for fun. 99% of the streams on Twitch.TV have troubles even buffering at medium quality. This is worse than the ADSL2 I used 2 years ago. I used Spark fibre for a year and it was really good but a little pricier.

I live in Christchuch but my friend in North Island said MR was pretty good so I dived into this without much proper research. Now I am stuck with a really bad internet with 24 months contract. Is there anyway I can void the contract as I am actually not getting the advertised product?

You have not really quantified anything here. you say you get good local speeds? The FTP server that you say you are getting, I'm guessing 150-300meg from is NZ based? You do know that even with a 10gig connection you will get only a few hundred megs if you are lucky from a server that has "international" latency? Does the time of day matter? You really need to quantify things a little better here.

hio77

12999 posts

Uber Geek

ID Verified

Trusted

Lizard Networks

#1683613 7-Dec-2016 09:11

noroad:

You have not really quantified anything here. you say you get good local speeds? The FTP server that you say you are getting, I'm guessing 150-300meg from is NZ based? You do know that even with a 10gig connection you will get only a few hundred megs if you are lucky from a server that has "international" latency? Does the time of day matter? You really need to quantify things a little better here.

somewhat put 10G in a whole different group.. That can be a heck of a lot of tuning even on the local side to 'perfect speeds' over TCP

Still.. it is a fun toy to play with! ;)

#include <std_disclaimer>

Any comments made are personal opinion and do not reflect directly on the position my current or past employers may have.

kingjj

1728 posts

Uber Geek

ID Verified

Trusted

#1683961 7-Dec-2016 14:26

Usual questions but what router do you have? Is your router putting your ethernet port into power saving? Are you sure your computer is gig ethernet capable? Are you testing over wired or wireless? Have you removed all other devices from the network and tested directly onto a laptop? What speed profile were you using on Spark?

If you check some threads for other ISP's on here you'll see a lot of similar threads with have usually been resolved by a profile fix at the LFC's end (in your case Enable), a profile correction with the ISP or more commonly an issue with the local environment at your address. I have a friend on a 1 gig connection with MR in Christchurch and his is rock solid. He spent a not so small sum getting his local environment set up correctly and on a very well spec'd PC to make use of it though.

There's an active thread under the 2Degrees forum at present that has some good trouble shooting tips that may be worth going through.

DarkShadow

1647 posts

Uber Geek

#1683965 7-Dec-2016 14:45

kingjj:

Usual questions but what router do you have? Is your router putting your ethernet port into power saving? Are you sure your computer is gig ethernet capable? Are you testing over wired or wireless? Have you removed all other devices from the network and tested directly onto a laptop? What speed profile were you using on Spark?

How does any of these explain great speeds locally, good speeds to Aus, and really bad speeds overseas?

noroad

949 posts

Ultimate Geek

Trusted

#1683969 7-Dec-2016 14:54

How does any of these explain great speeds locally, good speeds to Aus, and really bad speeds overseas?

Packet loss (for example) has less effect on a low latency traffic flow than a higher (i.e. USA or greater distance) latency traffic flow, so yes it is quite possible for all the things mentioned to be a factor. Also, the OP has not actually said what "really bad" actually means. We don't as yet know if he understands the nature of tcp/ip traffic flows and latency and how that affects achievable speeds. It may be an issue at MR or it may be a perception issue.

Equinox IT

Cloud spending continues to surge globally, but most organisations haven’t made the changes necessary to maximise the value and cost-efficiency benefits of their cloud investments. Download the whitepaper From Overspend to Advantage now.

FoxHoundNZ

8 posts

Wannabe Geek

#1684350 7-Dec-2016 22:51

Sorry guys I wrote the post real late last night so I didn't really bothered to post pictures. However a miracle happened today. At about 6am this morning, all the international connection seemed to work a lot better and I was able to watch Twitch on source quality again. Whatever their tech told their hamsters worked. However I am still getting pretty inconsistent speed on some cases. Notably voices being robotic on voip programmes like Discord. Here are some speed test examples I did again tonight.

As you can see I am still getting really bad speed overall from overseas. I am gonna keep monitoring the situation and hopefully it only gets better from this point on. Also I am definitely not as knowledgeable as people on this forum so my understanding on this topic is limited.

kingjj:

Usual questions but what router do you have? Is your router putting your ethernet port into power saving? Are you sure your computer is gig ethernet capable? Are you testing over wired or wireless? Have you removed all other devices from the network and tested directly onto a laptop? What speed profile were you using on Spark?

If you check some threads for other ISP's on here you'll see a lot of similar threads with have usually been resolved by a profile fix at the LFC's end (in your case Enable), a profile correction with the ISP or more commonly an issue with the local environment at your address. I have a friend on a 1 gig connection with MR in Christchurch and his is rock solid. He spent a not so small sum getting his local environment set up correctly and on a very well spec'd PC to make use of it though.

There's an active thread under the 2Degrees forum at present that has some good trouble shooting tips that may be worth going through.

The router I have is given by MR with this model Technicolor TG789Vac V2. My spec is the following

Operating System: Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit

CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4770K CPU @ 3.50GHz, 3501 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 8 Logical Processor(s)

MB (Chipset): ASUS Z87-A intel Z87 Chipset Sli support

Ram: 16GB DDR3-1600 Dual Channel Ram

Hard Drive: Seagate 2TB 7200RPM SATA 6GB/S + 120GB SSD

Optical Drive: CD + DVD Multi-Function DVD Writer

Graphic: ASUS GeForce GTX 970 Strix edition

Network: Broadband Ready with Ethernet port

Audio: High Definition Audio

Case: Thermaltake Mid Tower with rear 120mm Blue LED Fan, USB3.0

Power Supply: 550W Continuous Power Supply

USBS: 5 x USB2.0s , 3 x USB3.0s

I have done tests on both wired and wireless. I was using 100/20 with Spark. I think you are right about being my connection profile being wrong with Enable as that was what tech support said yesterday. However I did get 1gbps during that time when I pinged Auckland and next to nothing elsewhere.

noroad

949 posts

Ultimate Geek

Trusted

#1684659 8-Dec-2016 14:17

FoxHoundNZ:

As you can see I am still getting really bad speed overall from overseas. I am gonna keep monitoring the situation and hopefully it only gets better from this point on. Also I am definitely not as knowledgeable as people on this forum so my understanding on this topic is limited.

*sigh* OK, so you do know that having a "1gig" link does not mean you can ever jump on speedtest.net and get a 1gig "download" from a site 151ms away? TCP/IP does not work like that. 90Mb/s from a USA based server is actually not that bad. ISP's really should do better at explaining this stuff rather that just putting out a headline of the local link speed. If you has an unconstrained 10G link, you still would not get a 1G single stream download from a 150ms away server.

Lets have a few others run tests to that server and see what they get. I can get 320Mb/s on a machine 1G connected and 132ms (Auckland) away from SF. It rapidly drops off after that 130ms though.

Here's some reading a quick google found-

http://bradhedlund.com/2008/12/19/how-to-calculate-tcp-throughput-for-long-distance-links/

sbiddle

30853 posts

Uber Geek

Retired Mod

Trusted

Biddle Corp

Lifetime subscriber

#1684661 8-Dec-2016 14:27

As much as we're all critical of the Commerce Commission from now effectively banning Gigabit connections as being advertised as Gigabit at the end of the day it's both good and bad. Many people don't understand that a 1Gbps connection to your home won't make the entire Internet run at 1Gbps 24/7, and likewise that the 1Gbps is an EIR and is solely best effort.

trig42

5809 posts

Uber Geek

ID Verified

#1684669 8-Dec-2016 14:48

Your result of 87/90 to San Francisco is pretty good.

There wouldn't be a twitch stream (or even 10 concurrent ones) that would tax that connection speed. If you are having issues with streaming, something else is the problem if those are your speeds.

jjnz1

1358 posts

Uber Geek

Lifetime subscriber

#1684693 8-Dec-2016 15:47

Does speedtest.net use multiple connections to the testing server? I would presume so...

(for example there is no point running three independent tests from three different computers at the same time and add up the Mbps?)

Talkiet

4792 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

#1684707 8-Dec-2016 16:06

jjnz1:

Does speedtest.net use multiple connections to the testing server? I would presume so...

(for example there is no point running three independent tests from three different computers at the same time and add up the Mbps?)

Short answer... Yes they do.

Long answer HELL YES, and they do other stuff as well to make it a bit of an arbitrary test. (They disclose their method on their site)

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.

plas

453 posts

Ultimate Geek

#1684782 8-Dec-2016 17:44

For your reference, same server on 2degrees.

noroad

949 posts

Ultimate Geek

Trusted

#1684955 8-Dec-2016 21:45

plas:

For your reference, same server on 2degrees.

That's an impressive result.

1 | 2