UPC Slow Peak times

mark17j

I'm a new UPC customer and since my broadband was installed every evening around This time (5 -8ish) I achieve these very slow speeds...sometimes I can't even browse, other times of the day my speed is great achieving over 21mb down and 2.5 up... Question, is this peak time traffic to be expected every evening from now on?
Have others experienced similar with their UPC connections at these particular times?
Do UPC expect people to just put up with it ?????

mark17j

seems allot better now

Brian_Malone

They're just awful. So bad...I'm drained. The worst customer service experience of my life...

collier

Brian_Malone wrote: »

They're just awful. So bad...I'm drained. The worst customer service experience of my life...

This is only your opinion, I have actually found them to be very helpful.

Brian_Malone

It's not my opinion, it's a statement based on my experience. I'm not just looking into my heart and inventing a response. This is my first hand experience of their incompitence.

In the last 8 weeks I have had 10 plus phone calls and 2 technicians visits. Only 2 of the people I spoke with were capable and willing to help. The rest, useless.

collier

Brian_Malone wrote: »

It's not my opinion, it's a statement based on my experience. I'm not just looking into my heart and inventing a response. This is my first hand experience of their incompitence.

In the last 8 weeks I have had 10 plus phone calls and 2 technicians visits. Only 2 of the people I spoke with were capable and willing to help. The rest, useless.

You can't just make defamatory comments about a company on a public forum. Thus what you are saying is your opinion on your experience. Have you tried contacting their customer service manager before you posted here.

From my own experience they have always been very helpful and polite and I have contacted them for various reasons, all of which where sorted that day or the next working day.

Brian_Malone

o·pin·ionNoun/əˈpinyən/
1. A view or judgment formed about something, not necessarily based on fact or knowledge.

My statement is based on fact! This has been the worst customer experience of my life, as judged by me ie: the person living my life and therefore best placed to make this statement.

Brian_Malone

Suspicious amount of UPC related content in your posts...

collier

Brian_Malone wrote: »

o·pin·ionNoun/əˈpinyən/
1. A view or judgment formed about something, not necessarily based on fact or knowledge.

My statement is based on fact! This has been the worst customer experience of my life, as judged by me ie: the person living my life and therefore best placed to make this statement.

You have not stated the issue therefore can only be judged by onlookers as an opinion. I am trying to say that its your personal experience and can often differ from the majority of their other customers, you may just be an unlucky one. In my opinion I cannot fault them. You should however contact their customer service manager if you feel you weren't dealt with satisfactory, ranting on a public forum wont solve anything.

collier

Brian_Malone wrote: »

Suspicious amount of UPC related content in your posts...

Yes because I am a happy UPC customer and like to give technical advise to people relating to Networking/Operating Systems/etc.... you have looked at my profile so you may have seen I am a Software Engineer, so I am pretty well qualified to give that advice.

Brian_Malone

I don't feel I have been ranting, I have actually been pretty restrained.

My advice to anyone weighing up their options would be to give Eircom their custom.

Your opinoin cannot fault them, my experience can.

jor el

Brian_Malone wrote: »

Suspicious amount of UPC related content in your posts...

Keep your unfounded suspicions to yourself, and off the thread.

collier

Brian_Malone wrote: »

I don't feel I have been ranting, I have actually been pretty restrained.

My advice to anyone weighing up their options would be to give Eircom their custom.

Your opinoin cannot fault them, my experience can.

I have moved from eircom to UPC because of a billing issue which they where reluctant to resolve, have nothing to fault since.

jor el

Brian_Malone wrote: »

Your opinoin cannot fault them, my experience can.

Both of you are stating your opinion based on your experience.

Brian_Malone

I can empathise with your Eircom situation. It seems we've both had entirely opposite experiences.

collier

Brian_Malone wrote: »

I can empathise with your Eircom situation. It seems we've both had entirely opposite experiences.

To be honest I think anyone can have unlucky experiences with any company. I just hope I haven't spoken too soon

dartstothesea

Horrible speeds at various hours of the day for me lately.

Getting pretty sick of how unreliable the service is. I can't remember the last time I've seen anything close to the 20MB (and now 25MB) I'm supposed to be getting.

mark17j

Morning speeds are always good for me, but come This evening at some stage I expect to achieve 1mb down or under for a few hours.

Mavvvy

I know your pain, have had multiple engineers out to investigate the issue, but the problem is not domestic or near my local exchange. The closest i've come to figuring it out is through running multiple tracers to different countries. Note i'm currently in work so I am unable to post the actual tracers.

I'm no network expert at all and my conclusions below are based on a very loose understanding of what the results of my tracert's have displayed.

It seems some, but not all connections out of Ireland get bottlenecked at peak times, and which one you get stuck on is a bit of luck of the draw.

One particular "backbone" into london the UK the DBN-London aorta.net connection can reach pings of 168ms at peak times together with packet loss. While at the same time a connection to Edinburgh will net you a ping of 33ms.

Funnily enough a connection to Germany passing through london at the same time returns a ping of 38ms.

To be fair to UPC ,my experience has improved alot in the past two weeks, but note this has been a recurring/disappearing issue I have had since I first became a UPC/NTL customer 5 years ago.

Regards,

Mavvvy

Cuddlesworth

Its pretty obvious your both hitting serious contention in your area. Consider upgrading to the 50mb, it has a low user base and tends to get far better speeds at peak times.

Mavvvy

Cuddlesworth wrote: »

Its pretty obvious your both hitting serious contention in your area. Consider upgrading to the 50mb, it has a low user base and tends to get far better speeds at peak times.

That's what I thought when I switched to 50mb. Out of curiosity, how could local contention not be reflected in pings to the local exchange?

What I mean is, I get a low pings to all hops domestically in Ireland, its only when it goes to certain places overseas that the issue becomes visible.

For example for a week about a month ago I could not connect to a server which I rent in London with a few mates. Everyone else could connect, some in Ireland on connections from different providers. However I could not even get a ping from the server in question. Its this point here that led me to running the tracers in the first place to find out what was going on.

That said its all back to relative working order now, although with a bit of packet loss after the connection went down overnight on Tuesday.

Baffling

collier

It would seem that UPC should get more peers on board this would help connecting to sites not hosted in this country.

mark17j

For the last hour this is how my (Wired) connection is - MORE LATE EVENING Congestion...



Great speeds during the day but by evening this is what I have to look forward too - shudda stuck with my crappy 3mb dsl provider - at least it was congestion free.

mark17j

Still similar results 8.46am
Is there anybody else around Dublin west experiencing similar.. or any other parts of Dublin?
I reboot, reset modem twice now, no difference..
Thanks



Edit, it's struggling to improve

Mavvvy

@mark17j

I'm still having the same problems and for the past 3 weeks. Its getting stupid at this stage after being on to them multiple times.

Like I have said in other posts and what Colliers observersation is, it seems UPC either doesnt have enough peers or they are throttling customers through certain congested backbones. In the example below you can see how at the same time in the day you can get two very different sets of service from UPC.



To a server I rent in the UK @2:55PM Today

C:\Users\>tracert 109.70.148.51

Tracing route to server.gamingdeluxe.co.uk [109.70.148.51]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 9 ms 8 ms 26 ms MyIP
2 9 ms 25 ms 9 ms 109.255.249.222
3 11 ms 9 ms 10 ms 84.116.238.58
4 84 ms 84 ms 84 ms dbln-t2core-a-ae-0-0.aorta.net [213.46.165.2]
5 97 ms 99 ms 100 ms ldn-bb1-link.telia.net [80.91.249.135]
6 156 ms 90 ms 92 ms ldn-b5-link.telia.net [80.91.247.90]
7 97 ms 96 ms 94 ms telia.killercreation.co.uk [213.248.66.62]
8 109 ms 105 ms 104 ms 217.146.94.6 [217.146.94.6]
9 105 ms 105 ms 101 ms server.gamingdeluxe.co.uk [109.70.148.51]



To a friend of mine in the UK @2:55PM


1 9 ms 9 ms 9 ms MyIP
2 27 ms 9 ms 10 ms 109.255.249.222
3 39 ms 54 ms 56 ms 84.116.238.58
4 22 ms 24 ms 25 ms uk-lon01b-rd1-xe-1-2-0.aorta.net [84.116.134.134
]
5 23 ms 24 ms 24 ms 84.116.134.30
6 41 ms 25 ms 24 ms ae1-scr010.the.as13285.net [195.66.224.136]
7 25 ms 24 ms 24 ms host-78-144-0-171.as13285.net [78.144.0.171]
8 28 ms 24 ms 24 ms xe-11-0-0-bragg001.log.as43234.net [78.144.2.134
]

Basicly if you get stuck on the dbln-t2core-a-ae-0-0.aorta.net (whatever the hell that is, although I did google aorta and it seems at some point they were subcontracted to UPC) your boned.

I'm really sick of this.

Regards,

Mavvvy

porkchop34

@Mavyyy

I have the exact same problem,The throttling stops at around 10.30pm and starts around 6pm or shortly after.

I am a gamer and my pings are usually 30ms to UK servers then they go to 130ms during these times.

I am on the 100mb In Dun laoghaire Area and have been having these problems for a few weeks now.

By any chance are you using the white Thomson router.

Mavvvy

@porkchop
I am indeed using the Thomson Porkchop, good to know for sure its not an isolated issue. But its freaking nuts that its only ever the dub aorta route. Maybe the ldn-dub one is reserved for 100mb users and the rest on the non-peak times.

But my god is this terrible service.

dolallyoh

What transmit power settings are your modems using at good times and bad times.

Anything over 53 is bad.

Tempting to have a good old rant about the customer service but I will restrain myself ;-)

Mavvvy

dolallyoh
If i'm looking at the right reading, upstream and downstream hovers around 40db.

porkchop34

@dolallyoh

Same here about 41 around there.

Also having a seperate issue of the router restarting itself when certain wireless device connect to it.

I rang UPC a few times b4 regarding it but this ping issue with it just messes up my windows sharing within my network just causing massive issues altogether.

That aorta thing is the same with me 100ms+

mark17j

Hey Mavvy, Good to hear i'm not the only one experiencing these issues
Connection was stable enough during the day, achieving speeds upto 21mb -Slowing down considerably now achieving 7mb max with upload fine.
I expect by 10pm I will not be even able to load a web page as per usual.

mark17j

Dolallyah my modem stats

RECEIVE POWER LEVEL 21.2 dBmV
TRANSMIT POWER LEVEL 42.2 dBmV
SIGNAL TO NOISE RATIO 37.7 dB

porkchop34

@Mark Where do I find these power numbers? Thnx


Whatever this d2 aorta thing is it takes ages resolving it into the IP address when we are routing to France or Definately the UK I believe.

Hence Big Pings

dolallyoh

mark17j wrote: »

Dolallyah my modem stats

RECEIVE POWER LEVEL 21.2 dBmV
TRANSMIT POWER LEVEL 42.2 dBmV
SIGNAL TO NOISE RATIO 37.7 dB

Mine are:

Receive Power Level

-1.2 dBmV

Transmit Power Level

52.2 dBmV

check link below .........your receive is way out of acceptable bands

http://www.dslreports.com/faq/5862

mark17j

dolallyoh wrote: »

Mine are:

Receive Power Level

-1.2 dBmV

Transmit Power Level

52.2 dBmV

check link below .........your receive is way out of acceptable bands

http://www.dslreports.com/faq/5862

Porkchop just head into ur modem, click system and they should come up..

Why is it so high? Tech came out about 3 weeks ago to install my bb, new wiring outside, new UPC point on wall - cable connects directly to modem, no spiltters attached etc.. ??

an improvement to earlier

porkchop34

I dont have System I have the new White Router Thomson One I click on Status and can see power on the singular upstream and the many downstreams

Skittle

I'm seeing the same thing here. Everyone has to ring their helpdesk and tell them that there's a problem with their network. Don't get fobbed off with any "reset your router crap".

porkchop34

I will be ringing them on Monday .

They have ok customer service in fairness the guy said my router is probably past it.

Since they did an upgrade to put me from 7mb Upload to 10MB upload it hasn't been the same at all at all so I dont whether the new config file got botched and didnt install properly but both of the issues together just ruin my gaming and windows sharing.

I may utilise the Bridge Mode when it comes available and just get a class router instead.

Thanks for the help guys I will ring them tomorrow and say I have tried a million things get a new router and shout at them a bit.

I also got impacted by them blocking certain sites eg g2play.net for about a month as well too which was really annoying but that has been solved so it seems the do listen to us when we give out.

mark17j

Snail slow speeds here again - usually after 10pm the last few nights
First thing tomorrow I shall be calling them



better This Morning 8:52am

Mavvvy

How did you guys get on today with the dreaded call centre? Going to be calling them later when i get back from work.

Cuddlesworth

Mavvvy wrote: »

That's what I thought when I switched to 50mb. Out of curiosity, how could local contention not be reflected in pings to the local exchange?

Because bandwidth is not necessarily linked to response time. Contention on the local exchange is merely a matter of bandwidth, a set amount shared between multiple users. The less users, the more bandwidth per person. Ping is the amount of time it takes to send and receive a response. This can be affected by bad routing or heavy load on a particular exchange.

Mavvvy wrote: »

What I mean is, I get a low pings to all hops domestically in Ireland, its only when it goes to certain places overseas that the issue becomes visible.

Sounds like NTL have a exchange route to England that is either faulty or under a inordinate amount of strain. Heavy bit-torrent use tends to cause this, due to the thousands of requests going to and from the one IP. This would be unusual outside of bit-torrent or heavy use sites(like this one).

Mavvvy wrote: »

For example for a week about a month ago I could not connect to a server which I rent in London with a few mates. Everyone else could connect, some in Ireland on connections from different providers. However I could not even get a ping from the server in question. Its this point here that led me to running the tracers in the first place to find out what was going on.

Bad routing. It does happen, a support call should fix it.

Mavvvy

Thanks for the detailed response Cuddlesworth.

In the interim it seems the issue has been resolved, as this evening is the first time in weeks for ping and packets are not all over the place.

Hopefully it stays this way. Thanks to all our combined complaining seems to have worked (for the time being)

Nope, got hit with packetloss and a varible ping nightmare this evening. The pox on you UPC, I say

mark17j

My Connection was good the last few days surprisingly, no slow ups - but this evening being hit with heavy conjestion.. barely achieving 1mb down...pings all over the place

starviewadams

Was very slow this morning and yesterday morning,under 1mb down,which was frustrating for work,but is working great this evening,the opposite of everybodys elses problems.

Dublinproud

I am having this problem also and have been for a while.

Did anyone get anywhere with their complaints?

gerryR

I got hit by this last night (Round 9:15pm Dublin 6).

Fracking unusable, couldn't load most pages, speedtest.net half loaded then gave a latency test error. Eventually starting running at <0.5Mb/s but eventually crapped out.

I'll be off to another provider if this becomes a regular thing. Be interested to hear if anyone gets anywhere with UPC.

gR

*edit* It's fine again this morning BTW 25Mb/s down 2.5Mb/s up

mark17j

gerryR wrote: »

I got hit by this last night (Round 9:15pm Dublin 6).

Fracking unusable, couldn't load most pages, speedtest.net half loaded then gave a latency test error. Eventually starting running at <0.5Mb/s but eventually crapped out.

I'll be off to another provider if this becomes a regular thing. Be interested to hear if anyone gets anywhere with UPC.

gR

*edit* It's fine again this morning BTW 25Mb/s down 2.5Mb/s up

My speed has been ok lately, but some evenings some web pages won't load properly the loading wheel keeps spinning...I have to keep hitting the reload button... very annoying...so i just leave it for a few hours and it does be fine then

EDIT, all running good tonight

gerryR

I had the same problem this morning at arounf 7am, looked to be the same this evening but a reboot of the router and it look ok now. Emailed UPC anyway to see if there's a known issue.

mark17j

my wired connection This Morning.
Not the best.




better. 13:45pm but not as good as it should be this time of day.

mark17j

Right now :rolleyes:

Cuddlesworth

You would be better off downloading a large file off heanet rather then using a speedtest site. Its quite possible that the speedtest site itself is incapable of providing the bandwidth necessary, especially with the recent and fast uptake of 24-100mb lines in Ireland. Heanet is part of our INEX peering and while UPC doesn't exactly have great connectivity to INEX, their 10gig links are rarely put under any strain.

http://ftp.heanet.ie/