sup191
join:2008-02-24
Milwaukee, WI
| [TWC] Throttling in Milwaukee?
I have the upgraded RR package. (15/1) For the past six months, my uploads and downloads have easily maxed out or have come close to maxing out those speeds. Over the past few days, my DC++ and Usenet uploads have dropped from the normal ~120k/sec to ~10-50k/sec. There are many periods where the speeds bounce between zero and 50k/sec - alternating back and forth. My download speeds are fine. Speedtest.net shows my up/down speeds being at their maxed limits. I plan on calling TW to see if there is a network problem in my area tomorrow after I get home from work if the problem persists. It'd be weird for them to only throttle my up stream and not the down, but since it's bothering me, I thought I'd post about it here first to see if others are noticing the same type issues in the Milwaukee area. |
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Xizer
join:2004-02-05
Kenosha, WI | I am experiencing none of these issues. |
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epickles
join:2005-02-18
Morrow, OH
 ·Embarq
 ·RoadRunner Cable
| reply to sup191
How very interesting. I am in the Cincinnati area, and have experienced the exact same situation. I've had 5 different guys come out, and all of them say everything is fine with my line, even though they see what is going on.
My upload bounces around tremendously, and they have seen that. They ended up putting a different cable modem on (twice) and it still has not helped. It is tied to the account.
I also pay for the upgraded 15/1 package.
I've given up at this point, because they can't find anything. It's my understand from the techs that have come out that there is a private group (abuse dept) that monitors heavy usage customers and can make modifications to their service without anybody else knowing. TWC considers heavy bandwidth usage (albeit using what you pay for) an abuse issue and automatically assumes that you are doing something illegal (ie. P2P, Torrents, Usenet, etc), and frown upon that. They can't, however, prove it... so they make it run horribly to discourage the use.
My symptoms started to occur about 1 month after I started using Usenet pretty heavily (and thus maxing my connection) and have not subsided even though I've stopped. |
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sup191
join:2008-02-24
Milwaukee, WI
| reply to sup191
Well, I ran Wireshark to check for RST packets and I didn't see any. I also ran about 4-5 speed tests and they all max out my upload stream. This has to be happening on Time-Warner's end. At this point, I'm planning on calling customer service, but I really doubt they'll either know about or admit to throttling my upload stream. Has anybody else ever had this type of problem and had it successfully solved? |
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jarschmi
join:2007-07-18
Milwaukee, WI
·RoadRunner Cable
| reply to sup191
I don't have the really fast RR package, but I have a suspicion that RR's news server does, in fact, throttle, after periods of heavy use (UL or DL).
However, the news server subscription and access provided by RR far outweigh this factor. Many providers heavily sensor the newsgroup content and do not provide free access.
Overall, I don't have a problem with it, as the service dampers are infrequent and I only DL and UL a few hours at a time here and there (a few times a week). |
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sup191
join:2008-02-24
Milwaukee, WI
| said by jarschmi  :I don't have the really fast RR package, but I have a suspicion that RR's news server does, in fact, throttle, after periods of heavy use (UL or DL). I could understand if it was just Usenet causing this issue, but it is effecting DC++ which I use quite a bit with a small group of friends. I don't know what Time-Warner considers "excessive use of bandwidth", but I know in the past couple months I haven't come near "hogging" more than my share. For the most part, we use DC++ as a place to chat as most of us are located all around the world.
If throttling IS what's happening, it would have been nice to get some sort of warning before the throttling happened, but I know I'm hoping for way too much from one of the major cable companies. I'll just cross my fingers it's a network problem and it works itself out over the next couple days. If not, I'll call them and complain. I'm not too hopeful about the outcome though... |
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epickles
join:2005-02-18
Morrow, OH
·Embarq
·RoadRunner Cable
| said by sup191 :said by jarschmi :I don't have the really fast RR package, but I have a suspicion that RR's news server does, in fact, throttle, after periods of heavy use (UL or DL). I could understand if it was just Usenet causing this issue, but it is effecting DC++ which I use quite a bit with a small group of friends. I don't know what Time-Warner considers "excessive use of bandwidth", but I know in the past couple months I haven't come near "hogging" more than my share. For the most part, we use DC++ as a place to chat as most of us are located all around the world. If throttling IS what's happening, it would have been nice to get some sort of warning before the throttling happened, but I know I'm hoping for way too much from one of the major cable companies. I'll just cross my fingers it's a network problem and it works itself out over the next couple days. If not, I'll call them and complain. I'm not too hopeful about the outcome though... For what it's worth, I was NOT using TWC's news servers, I was using Giganews.
Secondly, I was under the same impression. According to TWC's techs, "excessive" usage(ie. what starts to raise their eyebrows) is any more downloading than 18-20 gigs/month. Mine was at 23-25, I was told that average household is 10-12 gig/mo. They also look at utilization, and anything more than about a 25% constant utilization (ie. connection maxed out for more than 25% of the time) sparks an "excessive" warning with their abuse dept. They don't, however, cut you off (not sure if they even legally can). In my estimation, they do, however, make it run like crap to discourage your use. |
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sup191
join:2008-02-24
Milwaukee, WI
| said by epickles :For what it's worth, I was NOT using TWC's news servers, I was using Giganews. I use Easynews servers, not TW's. Uploads are still crap to both of them however.
So, once they "tag" you as excessive, do they ever put you back to normal status after a certain amount of time?
For kicks and giggles, I chatted last night with a live support person on help.rr.com. I knew nothing would come out of it, but tried it anyways. After the rep on the other end said that there were no network issues and she could ping my modem fine, I asked her why I was having my uploads throttled. After a minute or so, she comes back with "Sir, I assure you that Time Warner is not throttling your uploads". When I pressed for what else it could be, she referred me to an 888 number that helps with bandwidth problems. I plan on calling the number when I get home today from work. I also plan on testing tunneling to see if I have the same problems. If I don't, then it pretty much prooves that Time Warner is screwing with my connection.
I'll keep this thread updated on what's going on. |
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epickles
join:2005-02-18
Morrow, OH
·Embarq
·RoadRunner Cable
| As far as I know, there is no time limit that they put you back. I was downloading from Rapidshare today, and had the same issue. It's funny how I can download from Microsoft, download.com, and some of the others, but when it comes to strictly Newsgroups, Rapidshare, and other "questionable" stuff, it is heavily limited. Now, if at different times of the day it were higher than others, I would believe the whole bandwidth saturation thing... but this is consistent. |
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sup191
join:2008-02-24
Milwaukee, WI
| My download speeds are not effected by this throttling anywhere. Only my uploads are effected. I called TW customer service today and they said everything is fine on their end and that I wasn't being throttled due to excessive bandwidth usage. They said my account is in good status.
A few minutes ago, I sent a 10 meg file to a ftp site I set up at work. I got the full 120k/sec speed I used to get everywhere. I then tried uploading the same file to alt.binaries.test and was bouncing between 0-10k/sec. Sure Time Warner, you're not messing with my bandwidth...
I am going to try uploading to usenet through a VPN tunnel. If it works smoothly, that should pretty well prove that TW is responsible for my issues. If they are, odds are they have my account flagged for this throttling. I'm going to drop roadrunner and have my girlfriend sign up as a new customer. That should shed the throttling (hopefully) unless they are doing this to the entire node or area. |
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punker
deleted by moderator
Premium
join:2004-06-21
Palmdale, CA
clubs:
edit:
February 25th, @09:19PM
| reply to sup191
my works fine my bounce between 100KBytes/s to 135KByte/s
torrentz
terayon modem  |
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epickles
join:2005-02-18
Morrow, OH | reply to sup191
After you upload via VPN tunnel to usenet, please let me know how that works out. |
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sup191
join:2008-02-24
Milwaukee, WI
| said by epickles :After you upload via VPN tunnel to usenet, please let me know how that works out. After setting up a VPN tunnel, my uploads were smooth and without any dropped packets. Granted, I was testing using a free VPN service (well, $3 for 3 days or 100 MB's), so my speeds were set low by the VPN server, but I had no problem holding a constant speed without any dropped packets. The VPN was using PPP instead of the usual TCP protocol, but it still proves to me that Time Warner is interfering with uploads from me. DC++ also worked a lot better through the VPN. I tried uploading a 10 meg file to a FTP site and I got my usual max speed - 125k/sec. So, FTP is not effected. I even tried torrenting a 4 gig Linux ISO, just to see if that was effected, figuring that would be the MAIN thing they would want to limit. I did get a bit of packet loss, but the speeds ended up being exactly what I got before my other issues happened. I'm not sure why the torrent worked so smoothly. I'm guessing the large number of seeds/peers outdid the amount of packet loss I was getting.
I don't know what it all means so far, but I still feel Time Warner has something to do with this. The last things I plan to try out in the next couple days is to try my cable modem at a friends house and see if the same problems happen, and finally, swap the modem at a Time Warner store. After that, I've exhausted everything I can possibly do on my end.
Dammit Verizon! Where is FiOS in my area?!?  |
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sup191
join:2008-02-24
Milwaukee, WI
| I have also noticed a couple other slowdowns over the past couple hours. Videos streamed from YouTube are no longer buffering anywhere near as quick as they used to. Now the video plays with the buffered part only just past the point of where I'm watching. Also, I download from Usenet at times through Easynews.com. I can usually hold a 12-14Mb connection while downloading. Tonight, my speed started at 1.5Mb/sec and slowly worked it's way down to 150k/sec.
Why can't Time Warner admit to traffic shaping? |
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epickles
join:2005-02-18
Morrow, OH | reply to sup191
It most certainly is traffic shaping. Actually, I believe it is more along the lines of user prioritization, or site prioritization. I have DSL ready to be reinstalled... It is slower, but on the other hand it may actually be faster. |
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Dingleberry
join:2001-04-29
532xx
·RoadRunner Cable
| reply to sup191
Just out of curiosity... what DNS servers are you being offered by dhcp?
I ask as I've recently started being offered 65.24.0.168 and 65.24.0.169. I don't know what's up with them, but they often can't resolve from valid domains (several .edu, and others I don't recall offhand), and are perhaps a lot slower in resolving than the servers I used to be offered. These new machines appear to be in ohiordc.rr.com. And the old machines offered were 24.94.163.32 and 24.94.163.33 which are in rdc-kc.rr.com.
I've wondered if this is related to rr's hijacking mistyped uri's/url's... but perhaps I'm just paranoid.
At any rate, I've since started appending the kc dns servers to resolv.conf and internety things seem to work a lot better. |
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idigg
@sbcglobal.net | reply to sup191
I've been having similar issues with RR in Milwaukee (Biz class @ 8MB/1MB. I've just been using OpenDNS as it seems to be a better option at this point. |
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sup191
join:2008-02-24
Milwaukee, WI
| reply to Dingleberry
said by Dingleberry :Just out of curiosity... what DNS servers are you being offered by dhcp? I don't use DHCP. I use 169.207.1.3 and 209.153.128.4 for my DNS servers. I've been using them for over eight years. I honestly don't remember where I even got them from.
I'm going to try OpenDNS either tonight or tomorrow and see what differences that makes in everyday use. I've heard nothing but good things about them. Will this solve TW's traffic shaping, no, but it can't possibly hurt.
Hopefully the recent news of the FCC looking into Comcast's traffic shaping will lead to something. If they get slapped for doing it, other ISP's hopefully will. |
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sup191
join:2008-02-24
Milwaukee, WI
| reply to idigg
said by idigg :
I've been having similar issues with RR in Milwaukee (Biz class @ 8MB/1MB. I've just been using OpenDNS as it seems to be a better option at this point.
Ok, I just changed my DNS servers to the two from OpenDNS. My ping rates went from ~60ms (my old DNS servers listed above) to ~115ms (with OpenDNS). I think I'll be sticking with my old DNS servers. |
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MacLeech
Anonymous posters are ignored
Premium,MVM
join:2001-07-14
SoCal
| said by sup191 :said by idigg :
I've been having similar issues with RR in Milwaukee (Biz class @ 8MB/1MB. I've just been using OpenDNS as it seems to be a better option at this point.
Ok, I just changed my DNS servers to the two from OpenDNS. My ping rates went from ~60ms (my old DNS servers listed above) to ~115ms (with OpenDNS). I think I'll be sticking with my old DNS servers. try 209.244.0.3 and 209.244.0.4 |
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