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Telus and iTunes

It seems like my Telus IP changed to a very different one recently, to 108.180.108.XXX. Ever since that time, I have been getting very slow iTunes download speeds. Speedtest.net shows a healthy 14mbit down 0.6kbit up for my 15M plan. I was able to verify that this should be a routing issue because when I go on my work PPTP VPN, speeds in iTunes shot right up to normal. As soon as you disconnect VPN and rely on Telus' routing, iTunes download speeds decrease to 80kbyte/sec.

Anyone else in 108.180.108.XXX having issues with iTunes? What about Akamai hosted stuff?

Yes, noticed similar issues.

Symtex, any insight what has changed?

I've noticed slow browsing speeds on certain websites, while SpeedTest.net has good speeds, as well. Any way to fix this?

I'm in a 66.xxx block but I've been having a similar problem. Images stored on a CDN sometimes take forever to load.

Last night I was trying to download an Intel graphics driver which is hosted by Akamai and I could hardly break 2 KB/s. I finally gave up today and tethered to my phone to download it.

It looks like Highwinds is the culprit. Telus is peering with them in Seattle and passing some of their traffic off to a way overloaded Highwinds link.

Every once in a while the host resolves to a local cache using Telus' DNS.

traceroute to downloadmirror.intel.com (205.250.85.32), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets
 1  6.596 ms  6.693 ms  7.015 ms
 2  173.182.197.2 (173.182.197.2)  8.366 ms  6.642 ms  7.010 ms
 3  205.250.85.32 (205.250.85.32)  7.221 ms  6.356 ms  6.509 ms
 

traceroute to downloadmirror.intel.com (23.59.190.114), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets
 1  6.994 ms  6.886 ms  6.899 ms
 2  173.182.196.2 (173.182.196.2)  6.968 ms  6.350 ms  6.487 ms
 3  204.225.243.18 (204.225.243.18)  11.190 ms  9.915 ms  9.725 ms
 4  205.185.218.69 (205.185.218.69)  10.480 ms  12.673 ms  10.501 ms
 5  *  205.185.218.74 (205.185.218.74)  36.984 ms  36.288 ms
 6  a23-59-190-114.deploy.static.akamaitechnologies.com (23.59.190.114)  10.415 ms  10.257 ms  10.491 ms
 

Oops I meant to say my speedtest is 0.6mbit up but that's not the issue here.

Anyway so a workaround is to use VPN. That always gives me good speed when routing is the cause.

Apple, iTunes and Apple Trailers have been very slow and it seems like they all use Akamai. I looked up how Akamai determines routing and they basically pull your geographical location based on DNS. I managed to get around the slow Apple speeds by using a different DNS not Telus'. For example, people in Vancouver can try UBC's DNS 137.82.1.1.
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TELUS Internet 15, Vancouver BC

There is relief being plan coming soon.

Thank you, Symtex!

Thanks for passing that along Symtex, its much, much better now. Looks like they've got it hitting the local cache again.