UPC Speed Issues

Giraffe Giraffe

For the last few weeks I've been having a lot of issues with UPC. It is only sometimes a problem though.

For some reason, for I'd say easily half of every day, the connection is very very poor. However, because they have such a poor speed test they refuse to believe their is any issues with the broadband even though I've been on the phone to them a couple of times.

When I use other speed tests such as the one on IrishIspTest I can see what the problem is. Its very obvious from the graph below that somethings wrong but they refuse to pay attention to it. This is a huge issue for doing anything online really, anything that is streamed such as Youtube or even a page with a lot of images will often fail to load or take significant amount of time to load (worse than 56k levels). Their lovely speed test(when it loads) tells me that its 7MB average(it should be 20) which is good enough for their support line to ignore anything I say. Essentially any speed test that measures the Quality of Service has it below 5-10% when its acting up and this can last hours at a time.





Is this limited to just my local area or has it been a problem in a greater area?

Edit:

After running a route test there always seems to be huge packet loss at 89.101.174.29 which is an "ntlworld" node.

And this is what it looks like wheneverything is fine

Zombrex

Are you in the city centre? I've noticed a lot of problems with UPC over the last few weeks, they say it is because they are upgrading the city centre.

drpepper

My UPC internet has been up and down like a yoyo for the past day.
Im only now really able to do anything online.

Firhouse, D24
50Mbit Package

Tracert now shows mostly stable.
Last night it was a joke until about an hour ago.

C:\Users\drpepper>tracert google.ie

Tracing route to google.ie [209.85.143.104]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 8 ms 9 ms 8 ms 109.255.160.1
2 * 19 ms 11 ms 188.141.126.209
3 33 ms 6 ms 10 ms 089-101-175030.ntlworld.ie [89.101.175.30]
4 8 ms 8 ms 9 ms 213.46.165.54
5 7 ms 7 ms 11 ms 209.85.252.212
6 15 ms 8 ms 44 ms 209.85.253.125
7 9 ms 10 ms 17 ms 216.239.47.38
8 18 ms 11 ms 10 ms dy-in-f104.1e100.net [209.85.143.104]

Trace complete.

BothBarsOn

Crap here in D7 recently too. Started about 4/5 days ago. Getting about 1Mbps; usually get 13-15. I rang them but got nowhere ('Reboot your modem' etc).

Giraffe Giraffe

BothBarsOn wrote: »

Crap here in D7 recently too. Started about 4/5 days ago. Getting about 1Mbps; usually get 13-15. I rang them but got nowhere ('Reboot your modem' etc).

I got that **** too in an email, then a call to first level and then again at whatever department they passed me onto. I ended up refusing to do it the last time time because i specifically stated in my email that I have tried it hundreds of times.

Its being a nightmare all evening today.

I, personally, am having no problems. However my sister is only getting 2.5Mb on what should be 20Mb. Tried restarting the modem and got nothing more than 3Mb. Shes going to ring 'em tomorrow and see what they say.

I just done this now on my 50Mb connection. My sister was getting 2-3Mb from same server ~2 hrs ago.

Jon_459

Ookla is the speed test that UPC have on their website. I'm currently supposed to be on 20 Mb ... Ookla reports around 18/19Mb ... the fastest I've gotten on any other test utility is about 10.

I somehow don't have the greatest confidence in Oookla:D

conor-mr2

Reposted in http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2056357312 also!

Well Im in Ravenswood in D15 myself and have been having consistent issues with speed.

I had an old Blue NTL modem and had been testing speeds on speedtest.net (I use this as it saves the results for me).

To rule out any other variables like splitters etc I tested at the box outside
https://plus.google.com/photos/11288...49431634?hl=en

My results speak for themselves.. crap
http://www.speedtest.net/results.php...fa2c6b64&ria=0

There's actually a good solid block of 25Mbs where I tested at my parents house.

I had the Engineer out yesterday and he gave me a new modem (Cisco 2203) I retested and it looked like the issue was resolved-- a good solid block of ~20Mbs. That is until evening time when my speeds were crap again. I retested again this morning when I woke up and my speeds were normal again.
Ive asked on UPC on Twitter whether there is a contention ratio and they said no.

Elsewhere I saw it claimed contention was 17:1 (http://broadbandireland.blogs.ie/category/upc/) but this post could be old.

Im still not happy myself with this as Im paying for a 20Mb line --soon to be 25Mb and will be charged €35 per month for the new speed from 5th September.

But Im not getting the speeds Im paying for. I can appreciate some loss at peak times but not to the extent that Im experiencing.

Oh speed tests on UPC and magnet show similar results--they just dont have a record facility.

Giraffe Giraffe

The Ookla tests that UPC and Magnet use are awful, they make a lot of assumptions and thats why its giving such high results when other ones such as the one on irishisptest.com give low ones.

Mines not even peak - I get it at 3am at night so they can't blame contention on it at that hour.

conor-mr2

Ive set up a little autoit script to click on "test again" on the speedtest page every 10 minutes.

Last might I left it run until about 1.40am (the GMT time on the speedtest is out by an hour)
It was only at 11.50pm (10.50pm GMT) that my speeds started going back up to ~19-20Mbs.
http://www.speedtest.net/results.php?sh=27ad77016fe53a2d320558d9fa2c6b64&ria=0


Im going to do the same today to see if there is a trend of lower speeds around peak times.

Giraffe Giraffe

It was about the same time last night that mine became fine again.

Giraffe Giraffe

Was fine most of today - Issues beginning at around 1AM.
`
Edit: Working fine again 2:40AM.

conor-mr2

Not for me...

http://www.speedtest.net/results.php?sh=27ad77016fe53a2d320558d9fa2c6b64&ria=0

Same story as yesterday. Im still running the script every 15 minutes today.

Giraffe Giraffe

Started again at 5:20pm

Sub 1MB results often, generally 2-3mb.

Mavvvy

Hi Guys,

Been having the same issue as above for about 2-3 weeks now. As stated previously peak times between 6pm-12am are completely aweful.

One thing i've noticed is that connection to servers domestically in Ireland are normally fine.

Its only when you start running tracers to the UK and beyond that it becomes terrible, namely a connection through aorta.net I beleive. (Can't remember the details exactly in work now).

Its nuts 50mb connection with ping of 120ms to central london. Maybe an exchange is on its last legs somewhere.

Edit: It would seem its the entire backbone namely dbln-t2core-a-ae-0-0.aorta.net [213.46.165.2]