Are eircom throttling youtube

mememo

Hi all lately i have being having a lot of problems playing youtube videos in anything over 360p after 5-6pm which i found very strange since i have 70mb down anyway after some head scratching and making sure everything was working ok on my end i found out if you right click on the youtube video it shows a really useful menu called stats for nerds :rolleyes: which shows the exact connection speed . When i tryed playing a video at 720p it would jump to around 27000-60000kps for about half a second then drop to a consistent 2000-500kps which would cause the video running at 720pto stop and buffer about every 30 seconds . After seeing this i thought ah its probably a youtube problem so i gave it a few days and it was still the same after 6pm the speed would drop drastically so today i installed a VPN and straight away my speed is back to 60000kps so my question is has anyone else had this problem with Eircom or is it just me or can anyone here with a VPN test this and see if they get the same results

leigh852

mememo wrote: »

Hi all lately i have being having a lot of problems playing youtube videos in anything over 360p after 5-6pm which i found very strange since i have 70mb down anyway after some head scratching and making sure everything was working ok on my end i found out if you right click on the youtube video it shows a really useful menu called stats for nerds :rolleyes: which shows the exact connection speed . When i tryed playing a video at 720p it would jump to around 27000-60000kps for about half a second then drop to a consistent 2000-500kps which would cause the video running at 720pto stop and buffer about every 30 seconds . After seeing this i thought ah its probably a youtube problem so i gave it a few days and it was still the same after 6pm the speed would drop drastically so today i installed a VPN and straight away my speed is back to 60000kps so my question is has anyone else had this problem with Eircom or is it just me or can anyone here with a VPN test this and see if they get the same results

I am having the exact same problem as you. As soon as you get between the hours of 5-6pm YouTube playback grinds to a halt. At around midnight its back to full speed again. Its not gradual either.All of a sudden come 12pm videos start buffering from about 500kbps to near the full speed of my connection.

The interesting this is I tested with a VPN during the slow times and low and behold if buffered full speed. I resorted to using the Hola extension on Chrome during these times just to even get Youtube to buffer at some sort of decent speed.

I talked to eircom tech support and the seemed to be as baffled as me and suggested the usual restarting of routers, resetting to factory defaults, DNS server changes, etc. I gave up after an hour of basic troubleshooting steps with them.

It looks very suspicious that they are throttling however if they were I'm sure more would have noticed by now and there would be uproar.

red_bairn

It isn't just YouTube - I tried loading Eircom's own video on Silicon Republic and that wouldn't buffer. I wonder are they having load problems with some of their nodes.

mememo

I don't think its a load problem i live in Athy which has around 6000 residents its very strange i just tested it at 8:30 and its back to 50000kbs but last night i was able to play Netflicks in HD with no problem the only difference between twitch/youtube/Silicon Republic and Netflick is that the former use flash player and Netflicks uses silverlight just out of curiosity tonight at the slow time I'm going to try forcing html5 playback on youtube and see what speeds i get

leigh852

mememo wrote: »

I don't think its a load problem i live in Athy which has around 6000 residents its very strange i just tested it at 8:30 and its back to 50000kbs but last night i was able to play Netflicks in HD with no problem the only difference between twitch/youtube/Silicon Republic and Netflick is that the former use flash player and Netflicks uses silverlight just out of curiosity tonight at the slow time I'm going to try forcing html5 playback on youtube and see what speeds i get

For me anyway it only affects YouTube. I can stream from any other site at full speed no problem.

I have also tried forcing HTML5 in YouTube but noticed no difference in speed really.

Simon Gruber Says

A lot of people are experiencing this on eFibre, myself included. Buffering on twitch (although I wouldn't be surprised if it's twitch's fault there) and YouTube with 80 down. There's a number of threads about it on the Talk To Eircom forum here and a sticky thread about it on Eircom's own forum here. http://community.eircom.net/t5/Broadband/bd-p/32 (seems to be down at the moment)

mememo

Simon Gruber Says wrote: »

A lot of people are experiencing this on eFibre, myself included. Buffering on twitch (although I wouldn't be surprised if it's twitch's fault there) and YouTube with 80 down. There's a number of threads about it on the Talk To Eircom forum here and a sticky thread about it on Eircom's own forum here. http://community.eircom.net/t5/Broadband/bd-p/32 (seems to be down at the moment)

I don't think its twitch's fault ..... this time i tryed using it with a VPN yesterday and no buffering on source but as soon as i turned it off the VPN stream was unwatchable even on medium oh and I'm using hotspot shield as my VPN

Simon Gruber Says

mememo wrote: »

I don't think its twitch's fault ..... this time i tryed using it with a VPN yesterday and no buffering on source but as soon as i turned it off the VPN stream was unwatchable even on medium oh and I'm using hotspot shield as my VPN

I'll give that a go. I said that as twitch has issues in the EU quite frequently, so I wasn't sure what was causing it this time. Unfortunately it won't make a difference for watching it on the Xbox

Terrlock

Just experienced this problem for the first time last night on Youtube...using eircom fiber so something is definitely not right

mememo

Yeah I'm getting the same thing again tonight i had a little more time today so i spent about 2 hours playing around with my router what ever is going wrong is definitely on Eircoms end i tryed a few streaming sites some have problems and some don't but i can still get around full speed on steam 7.9MB/S . It just seems to be video streaming sites that are affected but as soon as switch on my VPN everything works perfectly

ZephyrSurfer

Eircom have messed up everything in the last week or so. I have a solution if you guys want.

Change your DNS settings on your modem. Search Public DNS(I'd give a link but boards.ie is not letting me)

If this worked for you, go yell at Eircom(a lot until it's fixed), Thanks.

Edit: Make sure to reboot afterwards. That's the modem to be sure.

mememo

This is a joke today I,m only getting 100kb without a vpn . I,m assuming its because the schools are out It has to be a saturation problem wtf eircom I'm paying €50 a month for this BS cant wait to phone them again tomorrow and spend an hour talking to people who have no idea what I'm talking about

Terrlock

I have logged a case with eircom on their youtube performance.

Could you guys maybe do he same if you have the same issues, so we can get this looked into.

They are saying the problem is outside of the eircom network, I'm not so sure.

mememo

Outside the network lol thats why i hate getting in contact with Eircom there are a few people that know what their talking about and the rest just spout excuses if VPNs are bringing the speed back up to around normal then it has to be on Eircoms side

DRose1

It's not just youtube they are throtling, its also file downloads.

I use the popular beyondpod app on my Samsung Galaxy s4 for all things podcasts.

For the past week or so, in the evenings/peak times, the download speed is without question throttled down to an absolute crawl. Something around 2kb a second.

Speedtests say I am getting my expected download speeds, browsing websites etc is also fine.

Unbelievable what this company gets away with.

Edit: I opened beyondpod with the free vpn app hola (US connection) and guess what... I can download podcasts again at a respectable speed...

Gerard_Smith

In a word Eircom is currently DIRE. I'm having issues with almost every video streaming site, frankly this seems too large to be deliberate. Something is wrong somewhere and needs fixing, I have never seen Eircoms broadband this bad.

Also can anyone recommend a good VPN service? I've messed around with the free version of Tunnelbear today to know it fixes everything but I would like something I can setup on my router.

jive

Youtube, vimeo, facebook and daily mail all loading extremely slowly if at all between 6pm-11pm. All loading fine through VPN. All other websites that I frequent are loading as normal, speed tests confirm my internet is also running as normal.

mememo

I had an engineer out today from Eircom and he said there was a problem with the main box installed with fiber i was just able to test it now on youtube a few minutes ago and its 40000kbs ill run tests every half hour tomorrow night and let you all know if the new box changed anything

Bog Standard User

eircom are not throttling youtube but there is a definitely a traffic routing problem that needs fixing.

it is being looked into though. right now there is very little tech support can do until eircom network operations sort out the traffic routing issue.

its not even limited to efibre

im on a 12mb adsl connection and it too crawls between 6pm and midnight everyday.

ma11achy

Same problem here. Speed tests are telling me I'm getting in the region of 20 Mb/s.... However YouTube, iTunes, etc. are pretty much unusable.
It took over a minute to download a FOUR MEGABYTE file last night.

I have a poll on the eircom forum to see who else are experiencing the same issues.

DRose1

So the conclusion is that Eircom are not purposely throttling anything, but there are major issues with their infrastructure/network that is causing all these issues?.

Mor-Riomhaire

In short, yes. This isn't just limited to You-tube or if you are on e-fibre or ADSL.

Gerard_Smith

I've paid for a month of Tunnelbear with the current sale. Hopefully this will be fixed before the auto-renewal.

mememo

Im using hotpot shield i got a free 3 month free code a while ago so hope its fixed by then ....

brianon

Experiencing exactly the same issue. YouTube and NFL Game Pass unusable at those hours and flying just before. SpeedTest going from solid 10 meg to 3 meg.

http://community.eircom.net/t5/Broadband/Slow-speeds-at-peak-times/td-p/60996/highlight/false/page/42

http://www.reddit.com/r/ireland/comments/2kvlqg/eircom_slowdown/

How would we use tunnel bear ?

BionicRasher

Mor-Riomhaire wrote: »

In short, yes. This isn't just limited to You-tube or if you are on e-fibre or ADSL.

I see issues with Youtube, updates to Android apps, Sky Go and in general just browsing anytime between 7 and 10 on and we use Vodafone. Can also confirm speeds dropping by about 15% during these times according to my Samknows data.
Would you think this is wider than just Eircom?

loyatemu

BionicRasher wrote:

I see issues with Youtube, updates to Android apps, Sky Go and in general just browsing anytime between 7 and 10 on and we use Vodafone. Can also confirm speeds dropping by about 15% during these times according to my Samknows data. Would you think this is wider than just Eircom?

depends where the issue lies. eircom & Vodafone lines would share backhaul from the individual exchanges, but they would each have separate core networks and connections to the rest of the internet.

stezie

have the same issue as well for any video streaming service, not just youtube, but sky go tv, rte player, etc

Its fine in the morning, and after 6 its unusable.

There is definitely contention going on, or some sort of network management...

leigh852

For the first time in well over a month its fine this evening. YouTube buffering at full speed. Usually this time of night its mostly unusable. Anybody else find it better tonight?

Hank Scorpio

Give it an hour or 2...

dalta5billion

Vimeo unusable tonight.

cantalach

Yes, I've been having the same problems for the last few weeks with YouTube and Vimeo.

• It is not a general download problem because a speed test reports oodles of bandwidth available and low latency.
• Both YouTube and Vimeo will very quickly buffer the first few seconds but then stall completely.
• However - and this is the crucial bit - if I bring up my VPN to work, the same clips play flawlessly. Note that our VPN routes everything through the VPN once it is up; not just traffic going to work.
• Everything points to Eircom throttling content from specific sites.
• FWIW, I am not an eFibre customer.

dalta5billion

We've been documenting this over here.

Eircom having major peak time congestion internationally.

_dof_

I just spotted the following response from eircom:
community.eircom.net/t5/Service-Updates-and/Response-to-customer-posts-on-recent-broadband-speeds-queries/m-p/83939#M229

Response to customer posts on recent broadband speeds queries - November Thursday 06 2014

To our customers

We are aware that recently some customers have reported difficulties with video streaming and accessing content from some sites hosted externally to our network, such as YouTube.com for example.

This is due in part to the huge growth in data volumes and data traffic that is transported over our network, which has exceeded our forecasted growth.

We are making a number of improvements to our international connectivity which will add significant capacity and this work should be completed in the next two or three weeks.

Many of you posting to this forum on this issue will see improvements as this work has completed. If you continue to have speed and have followed all troubleshooting procedures, you should call our tech support team on 1890260 260.


We will keep you posted on this issue here but if you have any queries on this, or any other issue please feel free to post us on the forum here, contact us on Twitter @eircom or call you can also chat with one of our online Chat agents at Eircom.ie.

Eircom Customer Care

evosteo

i was looking everywhere for answers to this it was driving me crazy. videos on facebook and youtube buffering like mad but speed test was showing me steady 50/15mb u/d. that stats for nerds option on youtube was saying my actual bitrate was only 1-2mb. suppose it makes sense it been an international problem. wonder what they think they can do to ease the issue? theres only so much fibre crossing the waters :eek: this just seems to be an evening peek time issue is that correct??? between about 6pm to about 11pm?

ED E

They can lease more bandwith. The Tier 1 providers may well have dark fibre/frequencies they arent using to lease still, I suspect they do.

CelticRambler

Didn't see this thread when it started, but FWIW, I'm a thousand km away from Eircom - different country, different network altogether - and my YouTube performance has taken a dive over the last few weeks, especially at around the same GMT times as you guys are reporting. To be fair to Eircom and all the other operators, I think there's just such a huge volume of junk being shifted around the 'net these days they're fighting a losing battle.

cantalach

_dof_ wrote: »

Response to customer posts on recent broadband speeds queries - November Thursday 06 2014

To our customers

[snip]

Eircom Customer Care

It's interesting to note that the spokesperson doesn't deny that they are throttling. I take this as implicit acknowledgement that they are.

Doodah7

cantalach wrote: »

It's interesting to note that the spokesperson doesn't deny that they are throttling. I take this as implicit acknowledgement that they are.

I don't think that is fair tbh. They have identified that there is an issue internationally with web traffic and that they are taking steps to ameliorate it. They don't address throttling as they say that this is not the issue. You can't therefore simply make a jump in logic then to say that they are engaging in such activities because they didn't address it!!

cantalach

tallpaul wrote: »

I don't think that is fair tbh. They have identified that there is an issue internationally with web traffic and that they are taking steps to ameliorate it. They don't address throttling as they say that this is not the issue. You can't therefore simply make a jump in logic then to say that they are engaging in such activities because they didn't address it!!

With the greatest of respect, I disagree. In my experience, when parsing the statements of big companies, it's as important to look at what they don't say as what they do. They acknowledge that there is a congestion problem with their international links. The most obvious way to ameliorate this temporarily - until they sort out the problem properly - is to throttle certain content types and/or sources. I wouldn't expect them to admit this, nor would I expect them to deny it.

If the problems were caused solely by congested international links and throttling was not being applied, I would expect that:

(a) The observed behaviour would be different. YouTube and Vimeo would play in spurts. But that's not what we're seeing. We're seeing the first couple of seconds play just fine and then a complete freeze-up.

(b) Playback through a VPN would also be affected. Just to reiterate what I said in my first post above, when I bring up my work VPN (which terminates in the western US and therefore presumably runs over the same congested international links), I can play full HD video flawlessly on YouTube and Vimeo.

ED E

Your logic is flawed, your VPN can route you in a totally different fashion avoiding the bottleneck. A great example is the L3/Cogent/Netflix spat where VPNs took a longer route but bypassed the congested points of presence.

Youtube will also load the first few seconds in low res then shift to 720/1080. This is probably the burst of playback you see.

cantalach

ED E wrote: »

Your logic is flawed, your VPN can route you in a totally different fashion avoiding the bottleneck. A great example is the L3/Cogent/Netflix spat where VPNs took a longer route but bypassed the congested points of presence.

Youtube will also load the first few seconds in low res then shift to 720/1080. This is probably the burst of playback you see.

Yep, fair enough on the VPN routing (that's why I said 'presumably'). Not convinced about the second point though. Doesn't look low res to me.

Whatever the cause, I just want it fixed.

logic

ED E wrote: »

Your logic is flawed, your VPN can route you in a totally different fashion avoiding the bottleneck. A great example is the L3/Cogent/Netflix spat where VPNs took a longer route but bypassed the congested points of presence.

Youtube will also load the first few seconds in low res then shift to 720/1080. This is probably the burst of playback you see.

Should it not be the case were a link is congested that traffic is then routed over non congested links? Albeit they might be slower but they would be fine for http traffic, no?

Spear

logic wrote: »

Should it not be the case were a link is congested that traffic is then routed over non congested links? Albeit they might be slower but they would be fine for http traffic, no?

That may also mean incurring increased transit costs instead, and given how cash strapped Eircom is, saturating a peering point is the lesser evil.

pH

cantalach wrote: »

(a) The observed behaviour would be different. YouTube and Vimeo would play in spurts. But that's not what we're seeing. We're seeing the first couple of seconds play just fine and then a complete freeze-up.

(b) Playback through a VPN would also be affected. Just to reiterate what I said in my first post above, when I bring up my work VPN (which terminates in the western US and therefore presumably runs over the same congested international links), I can play full HD video flawlessly on YouTube and Vimeo.

100% agree. But it is a little more complicated. I had an older NG broadband and I suffered 18 months of this problem - performance absolutely fine during the day, but around 630pm on weekdays it would just die for youtube and twitch. Browsing websites always seemed fine but the youtube problem was exactly as you described it a quick burst then immediately dropping to next to nothing.

But there didn't seem to be a general problem for all eircom users, I made many posts on boards and other places but it seemed I was alone or in a very small minority that was facing this issue.

After I upgraded to efibre it was fine for most of the summer, but now it's back with a vengeance. But when I posted here:
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=92202325
on 15/9 there didn't seem to be anyone else in the same boat once again. As you can see my problem with unusable youtube/twitch started in August this year which means I have been unable to stream youtube in the evening for the best part of 3 months now - if this was a backhaul issue why are thread like this only appearing now?

Another thing I'd add is that the drop off in speed is quite abrupt, it doesn't feel like the back haul is getting busier and busier - youtube works fine in HD and it goes to barely working at 240p - all in about 5 minutes.

And like you - switching on my openvpn to a dutch server means I can watch youtube and twitch without any problems.

sparky63

Response on another thread.

http://community.eircom.net/t5/Service-Updates-and/Response-to-customer-posts-on-recent-broadband-speeds-queries/m-p/83939#M229

Spear

sparky63 wrote: »

Response on another thread.

http://community.eircom.net/t5/Service-Updates-and/Response-to-customer-posts-on-recent-broadband-speeds-queries/m-p/83939#M229

All of which aligns with saturated peering and the normal lead time to arrange an augment of peering capacity.

dalta5billion

Spear wrote: »

All of which aligns with saturated peering and the normal lead time to arrange an augment of peering capacity.

The agreement would include provisions requiring joint capacity and forecasting reviews on a periodic basis. The agreement would require that each 10 Gbps interconnection point (whether initially-deployed, relocated to correct a bit mileage discrepancy, or augmented based on increased volume) would have to have an agreed minimum utilization. The agreement will also include provisions obligating both parties to augment interconnection point capacity on a timely basis when and as traffic meets specified thresholds. Other standard terms will be included in the settlement-free peering agreement negotiated between the parties.

From Level3's Settlement-Free peering guidelines (although Eircom probably pay Level3). This should have been sending off alarm bells weeks ago.

How Level3 and ISPs interact regarding congestion: http://blog.level3.com/open-internet/when-the-middleman-and-isp-are-aligned/

And why this should have been caught a long time ago:
http://blog.level3.com/open-internet/observations-internet-middleman/

Spear

dalta5billion wrote: »

From Level3's Settlement-Free peering guidelines (although Eircom probably pay Level3). This should have been sending off alarm bells weeks ago.

How Level3 and ISPs interact regarding congestion: http://blog.level3.com/open-internet/when-the-middleman-and-isp-are-aligned/

And why this should have been caught a long time ago:
http://blog.level3.com/open-internet/observations-internet-middleman/

And since a tier 1 like Level3 would never refuse an opportunity to improvement peering capacity, you can draw your own conclusions from this.