[Snap] Peak time slow down similar to what the xnet crowd are seeing?

Forums › 2degrees (including Slingshot, Orcon, Flip, Stuff Fibre, MyRepublic, 2talk and Vocus) › [Snap] Peak time slow down similar to what the xnet crowd are seeing?

nbroad

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#49542 19-Nov-2009 15:43

I'm on naked DSL connected to the Cloverlea exchange in Palmerston North.
My line rate is 7616 down and full speed up (can't remember the exact number at the moment) so I have a good connection to the exchange. The exchange is ADSL1 at the mo, upgrade planned next year.
Most of the day I can get close to 7 Mbps from the Chch server on Speedtest but between aroung 5pm - 9pm I'm seeing the speed dropping back to 1-2 Mbps.
This sounds suspiciously similar to what the xnet users are seeing here:
http://www.geekzone.co.nz/forums.asp?forumid=65&topicid=42222

Bang on 10pm my Speedtest to the Snap (chch) server jumps back to around 7 Mbps.
I have already talked to Snap and they put in a ticket with Telecom to check for exchange congestion.. the response was 'the node the customer is connected to is not experiencing any peak time congestion' or something to that effect.

Is there something weird going on here?
Anyone else on Snap experiencing this?

sbiddle

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#274517 19-Nov-2009 16:16

Are you actually expericing speed issues or is this just noticeable on speedtest.net?

Sites such as speedtest.net are not necessarily an indication of a speed issue, there are far too many factors that can influence the speeds.

vexxxboy

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#274525 19-Nov-2009 16:34

im on snap and i never check speedtest , my test is Youtube if i can watch videos without caching during those times then my speed is fine and lately it has been

Common sense is not as common as you think.

nbroad

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#274530 19-Nov-2009 16:40

I'd have to do more testing to see if national internet speeds line up to what I am seeing on the speedtest.net tests. Will come back with results.
I would have thought that I should get a fairly stable speed to the Chch server that should be near my line speed though (taking into account overhead etc). Shouldn't drop from 7 Mbps to 1 Mbps like that and then back up to 7 Mbps at 10 pm like it's a scheduled throttle or something!

nbroad

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#274531 19-Nov-2009 16:41

vexxxboy: im on snap and i never check speedtest , my test is Youtube if i can watch videos without caching during those times then my speed is fine and lately it has been

yeah my youtube started buffering last night though which it doesn't normally do so something's getting a bit clogged up somewhere along the line!

hads

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#274601 19-Nov-2009 22:24

Yeah don't trust speedtest.net results on Snap, I'm guessing it bypasses their packet shaping and reports false over the top readings. When we were on Snap (two weeks ago), real world speed was terrible compared to the results that speedtest.net was reporting.

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RalphFromSnap

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#274785 20-Nov-2009 17:22

Hi nbroad,

Can you give our helpdesk a call tonight before 7 (or anytime tomorrow), and ask for Tim. He will go over your connection with you using a fine toothed comb. I have every confidence that he will be able to work out what is going on.

Cheers,
Ralph.

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www.snap.net.nz

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RalphFromSnap

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#274791 20-Nov-2009 18:02

hads: Yeah don't trust speedtest.net results on Snap, I'm guessing it bypasses their packet shaping and reports false over the top readings. When we were on Snap (two weeks ago), real world speed was terrible compared to the results that speedtest.net was reporting.

Hads,

Upon a quick glance of your account I noticed a number of times that you used more data in a single day than the majority of our customers use in several months. I would consider this performance fantastic but sincerely apologise if our level of service did not meet your expectations and I hope you are having a pleasant experience with your new provider.

Cheers,
Ralph

Snap

0800 BROADBAND (276 232)
www.snap.net.nz

@SnapInternet on Twitter
Snap Internet on Facebook

Our Social Media Team:
^RO Ricky - Technical Lead
^AT Ashleigh - Retail Marketing Coordinator

hads

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#274796 20-Nov-2009 18:19

RalphFromSnap:
Hads,

Upon a quick glance of your account I noticed a number of times that you used more data in a single day than the majority of our customers use in several months. I would consider this performance fantastic but sincerely apologise if our level of service did not meet your expectations and I hope you are having a pleasant experience with your new provider.

Cheers,
Ralph

Hi Ralph,

Thanks very much for your note, it's a pity I wasn't dealing with you in relation to my account.

Yes I use a lot of data, I do work with customers in the US and AU transferring media files to their servers for streaming, so certain days we use quite an amount of data - around 60-80GB per month.

The performance used to be fantastic, if you looked back a few months you would have seen that. As I've said quite a few times on here now though in the last 2-3 months performance changed drastically. We went from getting around 1MB/s to our US server, to 30kB/s (rsync+SSH).

Using multiple (20-30) TCP connections I could still get decent speeds, but this isn't particularly useful in day to day use. It was almost like some piece of equipment was installed one day that slowed down single TCP connections.

A Senior Technical Specialist from Snap said in September "I regret to inform you that we consider this as normal behavior for our network. We are looking into this, but don't consider it an outage at this point." I'm guessing being senior he would know what was really happening on the network.

We are having a pleasant experience with out new supplier thank you, not as fast as Snap used to be but acceptable, and a lot faster than Snap was in the last few months. Unfortunately still arguing with Snap accounts over final charges.

Cheers,

hads

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nbroad

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#275414 23-Nov-2009 11:38

RalphFromSnap: Hi nbroad,

Can you give our helpdesk a call tonight before 7 (or anytime tomorrow), and ask for Tim. He will go over your connection with you using a fine toothed comb. I have every confidence that he will be able to work out what is going on.

Cheers,
Ralph.

Thanks Ralph.

Had a good chat to Tim on Saturday. Ran numerous tests and confirmed that my connection is being affected by congestion somewhere along the line (looking like the exchange). Tests run during the day showed my connection was fluctuating between 7 mpbs and 1.5 - 2 mbps. Tim is going to pass on the information to you. Hopefully we can get something done about it.

Cheers,
Nigel.

nbroad

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#276226 25-Nov-2009 15:45

Had a reply from Snap today.. they have been awesome. They ran some extensive monitoring on my connection and came back with a detailed explanation. I won't go into the all of the detail but to sum it up, my exchange is a bit bogged down and their's nothing that can really be done about it at this stage. The exchange (CVE - Cloverlea - Palmerston North) is due for an upgrade in March 2011. It's running an ADSL1 ASAM at the moment. Just a matter of waiting for the upgrade or if I'm really lucky then the exchange may be upgraded earlier if the performance gets really bad for all users I suppose.

Thanks so much to the guys at Snap for going the extra mile.
N.