UPC acting weird

ryanch09

Hey all
Upc internet acting up...i dont know if its me or them but this is happening on both computers in the house.

When i go to download a file (itunes for example) the speed will not go above 50 kb/s. which is very slow for my 20mb connection. yet when i do a speed test online its perfectly fine...any ideas whats wrong?

Will I Amnt

You may be being throttled,as far as I know UPC do this to bittorrent users.

ryanch09

No i dont think im being throttled as p2p works full speed(no i wasnt downloading anything illegal) so i dont really know whats wrong...probably not the browser as im using chrome on one computer and ie9 on another...

The Left Hand Of God

http://ftp.heanet.ie/mirrors/gnuwin.epfl.ch/iso/gnuwinII_November_30_2004.iso

Try that and see what it gives you. I find it a good indicator of my actual UPC speed.

This is also a good tool.

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/download_speed_tester.html

Oat23

Been having problems with my UPC the last few days also. I'm only getting around 70kb/s on that heanet .iso download and youtube videos are taking an age to load.

I've downloaded a lot more than I usually would over the past 2 weeks(damn that free RS premium account bargain alert!) but I don't think I could be near my 250GB limit.

If I am being throttled how long will it last?

lo0kash

I'm having similar problems. speedtest / pingtest usually very good, but sometimes youtube, last.fm (streaming services?) are very poor. Same symptoms on two wifi devices I have... Called upc, after 30 mins their conclusion was I should call their premium support number :mad:
Wish I never switched from eircom.

bkehoe

lo0kash wrote: »

I'm having similar problems. speedtest / pingtest usually very good, but sometimes youtube, last.fm (streaming services?) are very poor. Same symptoms on two wifi devices I have... Called upc, after 30 mins their conclusion was I should call their premium support number :mad:
Wish I never switched from eircom.

What DNS servers are you using? Try UPCs own ones if you are using Google/OpenDNS.

My Youtube, iTunes downloads, etc were often sub 1MBit when using Google DNS due to the way the traffic is routed based on where the DNS resolve happens.

ryanch09

Well tried heanet and got about 60kb/s this is very strange. my speed seems to be jumping all over the place..last night around 12ish i downloaded avast and it got full speed for that...this morning downloaded itunes and the best speed i could get was 150kb/s. I really dont know whats wrong...might give them a call later

Spunog UIE

Very same problems here on 20mb upc. Youtube videos were taking years to load yesterday and downloads today are acting a bit funny. Seem to be downloading in bursts of full speed then low to nothing for long periods of time.

ryanch09

Spunog UIE wrote: »

Very same problems here on 20mb upc. Youtube videos were taking years to load yesterday and downloads today are acting a bit funny. Seem to be downloading in bursts of full speed then low to nothing for long periods of time.

Hmm if your having the same problems must be something wrong on their end.....

dublincelt

Having issues myslef here in Carlow. Supposed to be 50mb. In reality its only barely managing 2.6mb download with faster upload (5mb).

Called the helpdisk and the earliest an Engineer can call out is WEDNESDAY afternoon.

Not impressed.

RoyalMarine

its possible they're doing works on their netwoks and its affecting everyone

Home Theatre

Similar problems to report here (Sligo). 50 Mbps connection was working perfectly until late Thursday night. Since then speedtest.net and speedtest.magnet.ie report download speeds between 1Mbps and 2Mbps.

The speedtest on the UPC site is normal (48 - 50 Mbps). Been on to UPC. They think the problem might be at their end but they want to send an engineer out anyway. Call scheduled for Tuesday.

Oat23

It might be a Sligo thing since Me, ryanch09 and Home Theatre are suffering from the same problems.

AllGunsBlazing

Oatesy23 wrote: »

It might be a Sligo thing since Me, ryanch09 and Home Theatre are suffering from the same problems.

You can add me to that list. Speeds have been shocking the last two days or so.

daingeanrob

me too 50mb package slow also in sligo

Owen_S

I'm in Tipperary and I've been having problems too, especially with streams(youtube videos mostly). The connection has been very inconsistent for about 3 days now. Normally it was always perfect, always got the 20mb I paying for, and had a good ping too.

Rob_T

Have been experiencing the same issue since yesterday. Speedtest.net tells me 28+mb when it selects Limerick server but if I select a US based server the speed plumets to <2mb. In Dublin south.

Chosen

(I posted this on another thread, but this seems the best place to do so)


Same here, since Thursday night. I'm supposed to have 20Meg down / 2Meg up and I have 1.2Meg down and 0.3Meg up, as per UPC's and Speedtest.net's speedtests. Magnet's speedtest blissfully says I have 20Meg down and 0.6Meg up.
Browsing the web feels like a really bad quality 56k: pages open slowly, some don't ever finish loading, some clicks have to be made 2 or 3 times before the page starts loading and download from the Microsoft website are going at 9-17Kb/sec.


(don't worry about my IP showing, I already have another one after the countless DNS tests...)




Please can you also state your location/area, so that we can at least see if this is an isolated problem?
I'm in D18 / Cabinteely



Edit: Ironic title on UPC's speedtest webpage ->
"Are you getting the broadband speed you are paying for?"

Owen_S

My speed test said I was getting 17mb, but I was only downloading from websites at 20kb/s most of the time. It is a problem all over the country.

johnboysligo

looks like traffic going out of ireland is being hobbled probably a backbone isp dicking with upc to get more money from them :mad:


btw upc is gone dialup on me too

dubal

Same here in Dublin 14, last few days its gone weird, fine then dropped, the fine again, then slow.

I am a firm believer in circumstantial evidence too, and there was 2 UPC vans on my road during the week.

Regards
Dubal

Chosen

The UPC vans could also be engineer visits to customers. I believe that at least until Friday evening at 4pm UPC haven't figured out that they have a backbone issue. I am saying that because that's when they gave me a wireless Cisco modem for free, as part of their troubleshooting for my line.

bardcom

Things are starting to make sense. This has been driving me mad for the last 2 weeks. I've the 30MB package, and I usually don't get close to 30MB, but will usually get 20+ so I'm not complaining. But 2 weeks ago, it dropped to between 7 and 12. Now for the past couple of days, I'm anywhere between 1MB and 4MB.

I rang UPC and they're sending an engineer out next Tuesday week.

Another odd thing though. Twice now after I've been onto UPC cust support and I've been through the usual line testing, rebooting, etc, the cisco modem seemed to go into a reboot on its own (actually seems like a number of reboots one after another). The UPC engineer said she could see this in the logs and it wasn't supposed to happen. But afterwards, my speeds were back up to the usual 20MB+.

(*edit - I should add that the faster speed lasted for a random time (couple of hours) and then I'd plummet back to the slow speeds)

linedash

Here's where it gets more interesting.

So I'm seeing the same performance here in Carlow; 30Mbps package - 60-120KB/s speeds from heanet and other download sites via http + ftp. Youtube is barely usable.

Their own speedtest says 2.4Mbps down, 0.3Mbps up.

Yet when I download files from my dedicated server using https; I get full speeds.

Hrm says me; install a proxy on the remote box and test heanet, etc again. Full speed.

Looks like there is some kind of traffic shaping/throttling/overloaded proxy or similar on the UPC network. Got a call back due from 2nd line support this afternoon/tomorrow, so will let you know how I get on.

Chosen

linedash wrote: »

Got a call back due from 2nd line support this afternoon/tomorrow, so will let you know how I get on.

Good luck with that, let me know if they end up calling you because I was promised the same thing 2 days ago; with the problem turning to be more of a national coverage issue rather than a bad line for me, I don't see it happening anyway.

lo0kash

bkehoe wrote: »

What DNS servers are you using? Try UPCs own ones if you are using Google/OpenDNS.

My Youtube, iTunes downloads, etc were often sub 1MBit when using Google DNS due to the way the traffic is routed based on where the DNS resolve happens.

Yeh I'm using comodo but chaning to UPC DNS doesnt make any difference...

Strange, as it was fine for few couple of months...

darraghn

Same here in Dublin 16. 100Mb service getting 3Mb down :mad:

lo0kash

darraghn wrote: »

Same here in Dublin 16. 100Mb service getting 3Mb down :mad:

I'm getting good download speeds in most of cases. The problem is poor connection when using streaming services - last.fm or youtube... Does anyone have similar problem?

murphp

Same problem last few days. I'm on the 20mb package . Youtube wont' load fast enough etc. But weird thing is gaming on xbox360 is fine.

Also weird - on speedtest.net I'm getting around 1mbps download and 2mbps upload. But on UPC's speedtest I'm getting results of 20mbps download and 2mbps upload.

I'm in South Dublin btw

dubal

dubal wrote: »

Same here in Dublin 14, last few days its gone weird, fine then dropped, the fine again, then slow.

I am a firm believer in circumstantial evidence too, and there was 2 UPC vans on my road during the week.

Regards
Dubal

Anyhow I rang upc, they are doing improvement works in the area, followed by a text
"UPC crews have identified and are repairing a general fault in your area. We will not need to call to your house."
Dubal

conzy

Getting similar problems in Kilkenny on and off, particularly over the past few days..

Youtube videos taking AGES to load, timeouts etc...

I thought it was a DNS issue as you could click a link and it would timeout, and you could click it again a few moments later and it would load instantly..

Just now I did a speedtest and got less than 1Mb/s but downloaded a file from heanet at 3.1MB/s ...

Tried switching to OpenDNS but it doesnt seem to help much

slave1

Same here, on the 100Mb line and various speeds previous to that, never had a problem before, always hitting the max speed, now am around 2/3Mb down and 0.17Mb up. I phoned support on 1908 and after 40 minutes on hold (on position number 1 in the queue) I hung up. Will be on to them in the morning again if this continues.

ryanch09

So this is obviously a countrywide problem...very disappointed that im not getting the speed im paying for...Might give UPC a ring tomorrow...although im not expecting any good results based on my past experiences with them..

Kintarō Hattori

In Balbriggan and I'm on the 20MB package. Download at the moment is about 1MB while the upload speed is just shy of 2MB. Downloading from heanet is running @ 45KB.

Dale Parish

On the 25mb package in Limerick City.
I'm yet to get the advertised speed on either UPC's own speedtest or speedtest.net, which is a joke :mad:
But the last 2 days have been seriously bad.
The router is restarting itself every second day

johnboysligo

murphp wrote: »

But weird thing is gaming on xbox360 is fine.

gaming is generally a different type of traffic ( udp ) than say youtube or a file transfer ( tcp ). could be wrong :P but that's how i remember traffic protocols being explained to me years ago and why some games would suffer if i was downloading files and other games wouldn't be effected at all

Home Theatre

A recent test on the 50 Mbps "fibre power", "Ireland's fastest broadband" connection. (Location is Sligo town)

bloke

There seems to be a number of different problems reported here. I would say anyone seeing slow speedtest results on the UPC page has a different (local) issue to those reporting streaming issues.

On the streaming issues and slow speeds downloading from some providers (itunes, apple), I have a theory:

(as background, I recently moved from eircom to UPC and in general delighted with performance. I am a network engineer by profession so hence aware of the following. Apologies if I am teaching people to suck eggs - not sure how to level this)

A large part (if not the majority) of internet content is served by a relatively small number of content providers who will cache content for a website/service and make it available to your end users at locations around the world. The actul website/service you are using does not have to worry about bandwidth or latency, they just pay the content provider.

The largest global content provider is Akamai (http://www.akamai.com/html/about/index.html). They are present in pretty much every significant internet exchange (IXP) around the world, including INEX in Dublin (www.inex.ie), where they will happily connect (peer) with any ISP who will do so. This helps Akamai (local content delivery = better performance = happy customers) and also helps the ISP (local content delivery = not paying a transit provider or paying for fibre to carry it across oceans)

Most ISPs (including almost all Irish ISPs) recognise the symbiotic advantage and openly peer with Akamai and other content providers - many go further still and will install caches directly within their own networks for large content providers. A minority of large ISPs take a more closed (read awkward) view that by peering for free they are helping the content providers generate revenue at their expense. They will refuse or restrict peering with content providers and/or demand payment for traffic on these peerings. This hurts their customers, but (in theory) helps the bottom line. UPC are (or seem to be) in the latter group.

As an example - I just loaded a random youtube video and the stream came from an Akamai IP (92.122.216.137). You can see below the path is via AMSIX in Amsterdam, 25+ ms away, despite a local peering available in Dublin.


2 109.255.253.190 (109.255.253.190) 9.475 ms 8.065 ms 7.666 ms
3 84.116.238.38 (84.116.238.38) 54.288 ms 26.714 ms 33.398 ms
4 84-116-130-237.aorta.net (84.116.130.237) 25.438 ms 23.285 ms 29.104 ms
5 nl-ams04a-ri2-xe-10-2-0.aorta.net (84.116.130.182) 24.852 ms
nl-ams04a-ri2-xe-2-3-0.aorta.net (84.116.134.89) 26.844 ms
nl-ams04a-ri2-xe-9-0-1.aorta.net (84.116.134.93) 31.370 ms
6 amsix-ams6.netarch.akamai.com (195.69.145.208) 26.513 ms 28.534 ms 26.194 ms
7 a92-122-216-137.deploy.akamaitechnologies.com (92.122.216.137) 25.326 ms 27.771 ms 33.726 ms

Youtube for me has been ok, but undoubtedly it slows some things down - particularly considering the amount of Ads, software downloads, images and video hosted by Akamai for a huge array of sites. The Amsterdam node, aside from being further away in latency terms may also not be optimised (pre-populated) for Irish demands and content, meaning the content may not be there already and get pulled from still further afield.

Akamai are not the only content provider with which UPC have restricted connectivity. There are others - another example would be Amazon who provide Cloud services used by a large number of companies in addition to DNS and content provider services. Amazon host much of their European content in Ireland and are present at INEX in Dublin however a traceroute from UPC will go via London and at least one intermediary network.

Not sure how to get this fixed - I'm aware through some contacts that UPC are somewhat intransigent in their peering policies. Seems unfair though that at least they have done *some* kind of deal with Akamai (and maybe others) on their home turf of Amsterdam but not bothered doing something here in Dublin when they are already in INEX ready to connect.

Maybe if enough people make enough noise they will reconsider... Any UPC people around here?

aspasp1

Mine is down too in limerick goes on and off.

dregin

In Dublin 7. Connection dropped Saturday morning. Didn't have time to look into it and finally got it back this morning after the cisco modem had reverted to factory defaults of its own accord... Been up and down all day today

eco2live

Same here. Youtube is really crap. Its strange as its been fine for the last 6 months. I have 50mb BB.

Follow these tests and let me know what you get:

Test 1
http://www.upc.ie/broadband/speedtest/
UPC webite (irish)

Ping 13ms
Download 3.49
Upload 2.98

Test 2
http://www.upc.nl/internet/snel_internet/speedtest/

Download 13.14
Upload 2.93

Test 3 (I choose the Dublin server)
http://www.speedtest.net/
Ping 25ms
Download 21.43
Upload 2.99

I know these tests are always different but I only check them when I have an issue. Its never as bad as this. I usually have between 22 to 48mb download speeds on the upc.ie speedtest. :mad:

Spunog UIE

Kildare UPC 25mb...

Test 1
Download 2.42
Upload 2.00

Test 2
Download 13.05 - 17.10
Upload 1.99

Test 3 (Dublin Server)
Download 19.7
Upload 2.01

murphp

johnboysligo wrote: »

gaming is generally a different type of traffic ( udp ) than say youtube or a file transfer ( tcp ). could be wrong :P but that's how i remember traffic protocols being explained to me years ago and why some games would suffer if i was downloading files and other games wouldn't be effected at all

Ah right thanks

omg a kitty

Im in D11, and my download and upload are both around 2Mb, Im on the 20Mb package.
But whats more annoying is that i get disconnected at least once everyday. All my computers would be connected to the modem but but it will say "No Internet Access"
I dont think its my modem.
When I was disconnected for the first time about 2 UPC networks in my area was open, theyre usually locked, I reckon they tried to reset their router and couldnt finish it. I connected to them both and it was just like mine, and then few mins later i could access the internet on them, So I rebooted my modem and it was fine.
UPC Customer support said an engineer will be here tomorrow but by the looks of it, there are hundreds of other people whos waiting to for an engineer tomorrow

CelticGibson

In Kildare on the 30Mb package. Speedtest results:



Crazy. :mad:

CelticGibson

I wonder does it have anything to do with this...

http://www.worldipv6day.org/

They are running a test on the new IPV6 protocols on that day. They might have mucked with the old IPV4 while they were getting ready for this..

http://www.akamai.com/ipv6

Just a theory.

CelticGibson

It's definitely TCP traffic. I am able to p2p at full speed...

cml387

Seems a bit better here in Clonmel.

eco2live

Its a joke that 50mb gives you 2mb and 100 gives you 4mb at the mo.

What is the point going for over 25mb if it never reaches even that. I logged a complaint by e-mail with UPC support. Please all do the same thing so that they do something.

CelticGibson

Still crap...



:mad: