AT&T U-verse → AT&T Uverse throttle?

Hi all,

Curious if anyone is seeing same issue with downloading 'larger' files on AT&T Uverse (vDSL)...wondering if I'm being throttled here... (I'm paying for the Elite: 6 Mbps / 1 Mbps tier and have good speed results with various speed testing tools).

I've tried *many* different sites and file downloads where it starts out great, say 971KB/s and runs for to about 100MB or (guessing) 10% through the download then noticeably and *predictably* the download start dropping 1-2KB/s until it hits somewhere below 100KB/s. So, for example a 800MB file will go from projecting a download of 15 min to hours.

I've looked at M-Lab / Glasnost tools and they show no issues - but I believe its because they're not running long enough to see any effect here.

Thanks in advance for any advice or pointers.

Testmy.net at »testmy.net/ allows you to set the size of the download: »testmy.net/download . There is a monitoring meter that you can watch to better time the exact moment of slowdown.

David -- Thanks for this tip/site...will give it a try.

Would be glad to hear if anyone else has seen this - of course the 'usage' tool at AT&T isn't working so can't tell if I've reached some sort of limit or not.

I know from my router we were about total 130GB traffic downloaded last month (Jan. 2014) and vaguely recall seeing a 150GB threshold somewhere in researching this.

AT&T regular DSL has a 150GB per month limit. AT&T Uverse has a 250GB per month limit. Both limits include all addressing overhead, not just net content.

"If you exceed your data plan in any subsequent billing period, we'll provide you with an additional 50GB of data for $10. You'll be charged $10 for every incremental 50GB of usage beyond your plan. Importantly, if you do not receive a notice from AT&T, it means that you have not exceeded your data plan. In some cases, it may mean that we cannot measure your usage yet. Either way, you should not be concerned about your usage patterns for billing purposes."

There is no throttling I'm aware of. I can get a straight 4 MB/s connection on certain downloads. It really mostly depends on the route, etc...

I see related behavior: on speedtest.net, observed using multiple different server locations, the UPload (not always, but much too often lately) will do what you describe:

Start out strong/fast (reaching or exceeding 5Mbps, on Power tier), but close to the end, speed drops and keeps dropping, as though it will never finish (I always kill it, rather than wait it out).

In trying to replicate similar via testmy.net, Upload only: it's not reliable/repeatable but some larger file sizes and server location combinations appear to hang, long enough I'll just kill it. (TMN upload does not show a dynamic meter or progress bar). So far I'm calling that also consistent with (sometimes) hitting an ever diminishing transfer rate.

Reminiscent of an older thread with similar symptoms few months back... It was a case of using i.e. Charter cable's speed test servers from outside of Charter's network, which seemed doomed to be problematic regardless. I could believe/expect a throttling effect there.