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rotohoto
join:2012-03-31
canada

rotohoto to dave778

Member

to dave778

Re: [BC] Broadband100 download speed only 1-4Mbps - Vancouver

I'm seeing the exact same thing, near 41st and West Boulevard in Vancouver. I spent about 40 minutes today tearing my home network apart cuz I was sure it must be something failing on my end, then I found this thread I have a fairly elaborate setup, so I tried multiple computers bypassing my switches and router trying to find the source of the problem.

I have BB100 and I'm seeing ~5Mbps or less doing anything other than using the Shaw speedtest site. I first noticed problems about a week ago when it seemed like youtube videos were loading really slowly, even when watching something that was being fed from Shaw's youtube cache servers. I figured it just must be something screwy with those, and didn't think much about it.

The last few days I've noticed it's not just youtube, it's everything. If I load up a few well seeded torrents, I can just barely break the 10Mbps barrier. Same thing with newsgroups.

Looking at a wireshark capture while doing a speedtest I am seeing a *lot* of duplicate TCP ACKs. This only happens with off network speed tests, it doesn't seem to while using Shaws.... or at least there are a lot fewer of them.
I have no problem consistently hitting 85+ Mbps from the Shaw speedtest. And yes, I can look at traffic levels on my router interface by the second and the 85Mbps number does seem to be legitimate
I have a few colo'd servers across north america, one even being at Harbour centre in Vancouver. From any of these, using iperf to my home connection, I'm seeing similar poor results coming in under 5Mbps.

Trying to blame this on the digital conversion doesn't pass the sniff test. Based on the fact that I can hit nearly full speed to their speedtest site shows that there is nothing wrong with the cable modem/cable plant/cmts. It looks like it's only a problem with traffic that leaves Shaws network, so perhaps there's an issue with one of their peering points... or perhaps they've made some changes to how they do DPI, and it's not working exactly as they had planned.

I've had BB100 since they made the pricing changes last year, and this is my first issue with it... for the most part it's been great.
But having this issue drag on for a week is a little bit frustrating... Hopefully they have an idea what's causing it and it's being worked on.

gibber2
@shawcable.net

gibber2

Anon




West 41st and maple...one week in.
rotohoto
join:2012-03-31
canada

rotohoto

Member

Well at least we know it's not just some isolated issue.

I called in again today looking for an answer... the first line support guy said that my Moto 6120 "couldn't handle the speed" for the level of service I have... nevermind that it's seemed to handle it just fine for the last number of months... and it still seems to handle it fine as long as I'm using the Shaw speedtest.

I wasn't allowed to talk to a supervisor since he was so sure it was a modem problem, and said that swapping it *will* resolve my problems.

I'm skeptical that it will, but they won't do anything else until I take it down to one of their retail outlets to swap it for a new one... so... I guess that's what I need to do next.


dave778
join:2012-03-24
Vancouver, BC

dave778

Member

Swapping wont help anything. Half of Vancouver is getting these crapy speeds. They made me change my modem 3 weeks ago & its still the same. I'm getting the same speeds as you.
rotohoto
join:2012-03-31
canada

rotohoto

Member

I realize swapping my modem wasn't going to fix anything, but until I did that I knew I wasn't going to get anywhere going through their phone support.

Took a detour this morning to swap my modem at the Shaw tower. I'm sure it's not the new modems fault, but I'm actually seeing worse results today.




Called back and got a pretty helpful guy this time.

Eventually I extracted from him that my issues are due to the fact I'm on the "Cambie hubsite", which is having serious problems with congestion brought on by upgrades they are doing. His explanation being that as they take down portions to upgrade it, that lowers the overall bandwidth available to the site until it's finished.

He said the upgrades could be done by the end of June... or maybe July... but most certainly by August

I was offered either a $15/month credit for 3 months, or a one time only credit of $60something for this month. I let him know in it's current state I'm really not interested in paying for it at all, but that's the best they could do. Other than that, my options were downgrading to lite speed or something, but I often work from home and a higher upstream makes a lot of the things I do much more pleasant.

I must admit I'm still thoroughly surprised by all this. This goes completely against every experience I've had as a Shaw customer since they took over my area from Rogers in the early 2000s.

So there has either been some very poor planning with regards to how they are going about their upgrades (in terms of both implementation and communication), OR they have a bizarre idea of what's acceptable in terms of delivering service.

I strongly dislike Telus, but faced with paying nearly full price for garbage service over the next 2-5 months (and who knows how much longer? the CSRs still don't have a firm date), or just sucking it up and dealing with the pain in the ass of switching, I think that's an easy choice. I'll be booking a Telus install tomorrow, then I guess if Shaw can't get their shit together before that date comes... that's that.