O Canada! > Canadian > Shaw > [BC] Shaw BT Throttling?

reply to AnonShawUser

Re: [BC] Shaw BT Throttling?

reply to ravenchilde
Estimating capacity:
Upstream: 2074 Kbps.
Downstream: 4909 Kbps.

The measurement will take upto 2.5 minutes. Please wait.

Checking for traffic shapers:

Upstream: Measurement aborted due to high packet loss rate.

Downstream: No shaper detected.
Median received rate: 4778 Kbps.

Immediately after running this test I ran utorrent and have approximate 2000 seeds and 2000 peers available to me. Rates jump to about 20-30kb each, then drop down to 1, over and over.

Since it's not a torrent issue and you are convinced Shaw does not throttle, and the test says it is not shaped, what am I doing wrong?

You will like these 2 as well then, (and hate the results).

»broadband.mpi-sws.org/transparency/

Guessing right out of the gates the first test will return error saying that there was too much packet loss just like the other one you ran, and even tell you to stop any other apps using bandwidth, now that you see it from 2 different sources it speaks for itself.

Second one will show you incoming latency's of 450ms or so. that's what the clients are up against when they are connecting to you.... ON TOP OF the throttling.. essentially they get the 10k a sec @ 450ms delay

As far as what you posted, its correct, the download is not throttled; however that doesn't make it immune to shaws peering / routing issues.
The upload part is what they DO throttle if your node is oversaturated, what your test results translates to on the upload side is that the peering / routing packet loss was so bad trying to send you data that what was returned to them was such a random array of results that they can not make a legitimate calculation from it.

That might explain the numbers you are seeing. Its 2 separate issues and both combine to be a huge problem. Can look here »[ALL] Ask ShawSean , have been dealing with this on my own connection now for the past couple days.

reply to Decius6
@Baud1200

What a shock. You get 400+ms latency from a site in Germany.

What a shock.. we only care about ourselves on this continent

Telus WIFI out at my brothers place pulls 220 FYI.

So what you're saying is the pipe i'm on has the upload throttled so badly that basically it's saturated. Even though the download is not throttled, it makes P2P impossible because the upload returns are too slow and have too much packet loss.

Is that correct? Could that also be the reason behind the chat system and other bugs in certain online games?

Basically, your area appears over saturated if they are throttling upload so yes, between the 10K limit they impose on the P2P and the incoming routing/peering latency there is a good chance many clients will not be able to connect or connect only with 1-2K and opt to select another seed instead. Yes, this will also limit your download speeds, but not to the extent that they are useless like the upload.

Good analogy is you are still sailing out into the $hitstorm but at least with the download you are getting a bigger boat so you (your packets) have a chance.. with the upload speed throttling it turns your "boat" to a canoe before it even throws you into the storm, breaks your paddles in half; and says good riddance.

As far as gaming goes you would see it as a the game disconnecting from the game server itself, long latency delays (lag) whenever you do something for it to happen on server and rubber banding (constantly being returned to previous spot when running).
With chat it would show up as quite a few lines coming in at once and long pauses in between groups of lines coming in, also as long delay between typing something and seeing it actually appear in chat after you hit enter.

As per their TOS they DO NOT throttle game or chat traffic BUT as I mentioned before, this does not make it immune to peering / routing issues that their network is plagued with.

Check your IM.

That is pretty much exactly what is happening in League of Legends - anything where it is communicating with the server is extremely slow, so SHaw must consider the method in which LOL interacts with my comp to be similar to P2P data and therefore throttles the upload incorrectly.

Na that's just the poor network infrastructure in your area being overloaded, and then you packets trying to make though that mess to get the long (cheapest for shaw) route to whichever server you are connecting to.
That's standard for an overloaded area.. the upload throttling is one of their attempts to lighten use of overloaded node instead of actually spending money to upgrade the infrastructure but as you can see it does not work and just gets customers even more upset.

In short... They don't actively throttle your game traffic, the poor quality of their network infrastructure does it passively.

So basically over the last few years Shaw has become more popular and rather than accomodate that increase in load they are trying to hack their way out of actually providing a legitimate service.

They figured that by converting analog channels to digital (which take far less bandwidth) it will free up enough bandwidth for them to offer these new services without major cost investment for infrastructure upgrade...

Now they see that it's was a poor decision and additional bandwidth is required due to the demand in certain areas so they are trying to sneak around having to spend money on those infrastructure upgrades. That's your throttling.

This is of course is combined with using the cheapest peering available to them. Thus often routing your traffic the cheapest way to different hosts instead of the fastest.

Can see a trend no?

reply to AnonShawUser

reply to Decius6
I've heard that Shaw doesn't throttle BT over and over... My experience doesn't comply with this statement.

Never do I ever get over 1.4MB/s on BT... even when you are getting huge growth in downstream traffic and then BAM! plateau at 1.4 MB/s.

So off to Usenet I go. Max connection every time, 2.7 MB/s. So no BT throttling? My ass. Something is going on there and it wasn't my end of things and certainly I found at least one BT stream over the course of a year that could push more then 1.4MB/s.

So I say bullshit to all the people that say Shaw doesn't throttle BT and when they do only the upstream.

Do you think its actually an active packet level throttling or you figure they use a QOS based model depending on the level of the other traffic and prioritize the p2p traffic accordingly based on overall usage (dead last routing priority) much like WOW did to decrease their bandwidth costs shortly after initial release.

Sadly I think its both... I have managed to get around the former but not the latter. I see the latency in routing delay...mainly uploading which of course will slow downloading as well if saturated. Any input?

reply to Decius6
It hit 4MB/s today as it should when I wasn't getting disk overload in uTorrent.

haha. That's probably the only time I hit more than 2MB/s. I usually only get 1MB/s these days Downloading a driver from AMD right now and getting only 2.8MB/s.

reply to Decius6

reply to Decius6
Well now that we have a whole lot of hearsay in this conversation on Shaw's business practices, can we do some actual troubleshooting?

What do your speed tests look like during peak and off hours?

If you do pings to servers do you see time outs?

Do you notice any difference when you are connecting to LoL or torrents when you are directly connected to your modem? Do you see any changes in speed tests or pings?

Have you disabled your firewall and re-run those tests?

Do you see this behavior on multiple computers? Have you tried running the aforementioned tests on multiple computers directly to your modem?

Have you talked to tech support and had node saturation confirmed?

On a side note, LoL chat service is not the most reliable thing and if you are connected to the game and you are not laggy, a disconnection to the chat service does not indicate a connection issue (If your game is laggy as crap then it does).

^
This issue only affects apps that use certain connection methods.
LoL chat client / menu is different from the actual game itself.
Matches work just fine, chat is buggy and times out.

I have had the same issue as this for the last 2 years of using Shaw, and only one thing has fixed it -- completely ceasing using bittorrent, or MAC address cloning before playing games (to get a new WAN IP assigned)