[HN Gopher] Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?
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Internet magically gets faster when opening speedtest?
I want to start by saying this is anecdotal, and I feel paranoid
for even thinking it. But often my internet will feel very slow, so
I'll open speedtest to check if something's wrong. When I do, all
of my stalled tabs suddenly spring into action and finish loading.
The tinfoil hat wearer inside of me speculates that my internet
provider is overloaded and throttling my bandwidth, but immediately
prioritizes me when it senses that I'm trying to check if I'm
getting what I pay for. Has anyone else noticed this pattern? Is
there a way I can test this more scientifically?
Author : halgir
Score : 248 points
Date : 2022-04-17 18:01 UTC (4 hours ago)
| ranger207 wrote:
| Yes, this is true. This is why Netflix runs fast.com: it serves
| Netflix content from Netflix servers, so if ISPs want to
| prioritize fast.com content they'll have to prioritize Netflix
| content as well. Of course, that doesn't help non-Netflix
| sites...
| bzxcvbn wrote:
| And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why net neutrality is
| important.
| ComradePhil wrote:
| Only if you use the internet primarily for streaming. If you
| use the internet primarily for something else, with "net
| neutrality", you will be paying for the video streaming
| traffic (which makes up 60% of downstream traffic) even
| though you don't use it for that. If Netflix is required to
| pay the ISPs, Netflix just increases their prices and it
| doesn't affect internet users who don't primarily stream
| video.
| beowulfey wrote:
| Damn, maybe we should get rid of "electricity neutrality"
| too. Would be great if we just charged extra to all these
| bitcoin miners and marijuana grow farms so I wouldn't have
| to subsidize their electricity use.
| Dma54rhs wrote:
| Industrial usage rates and rules are different in every
| country I believe if you use huge amounts. At least here
| in Spain I pay more for monthly fees because I tend to
| use more for hearing with electricity. So it's baseline
| kwh a month consumption. Also different contracts when
| you want to use a lot of current at the same time.
| elcomet wrote:
| You pay electricity by usage. We don't have "unlimited"
| electricity plans. This is why you do not subsidize
| Bitcoin miners.
| rglullis wrote:
| Honest question: is there any place in the US where
| electricity is subsidized or has discriminatory pricing?
| JaimeThompson wrote:
| Electricity is routinely subsidized for large companies
| building new factories such as the GigaFactory Tesla is
| building in Nevada.
|
| You can also look up "name of area / state" and search
| for electrical tariffs.
| rglullis wrote:
| Ok, but these subsidies are not based on a specific
| group. Some might think to be bad to subsidize Tesla, but
| would there be such a thing as subsidies for weed
| farmers?
|
| The reason I am asking: unless there are such subsidies,
| it would mean that people pay proportional to their
| usage, so OP's joke about "electricity neutrality" would
| not only be wrong, it would be against net neutrality as
| well.
| JaimeThompson wrote:
| By way of example some states have discounted rates /
| special rates for cotton gins. Here is one. https://www.e
| pelectric.com/files/html/Rates/TX_Tariff_Schedu...
|
| Such things are complicated to figure out fully, the
| subsidized power might not be subsidized directly by the
| power generators / power distributors. In some cases two
| bills are generated for the duration of the power subsidy
| so the subsidized part only sees the subsidized rate.
| mpalczewski wrote:
| California, sort of: They figure out what sort of place
| you own, pigeon hole it with other "similar" places and
| charge you more per kilowatt hour if you use more than
| they think you need. It's a procrustean bed approach.
| jyrkesh wrote:
| A lot of electricity in the US is charged differently
| during "off-peak hours". I know some EV owners who take
| advantage of this by scheduling when they charge their
| cars.
| rglullis wrote:
| Thanks, that's a more relevant example of discriminatory
| pricing. I wonder though if people defending net
| neutrality would look at this and think "off-peak pricing
| is wrong, everyone should pay the same..."
| ComradePhil wrote:
| This is already done in sensible parts of the world to
| some extent where consumer electricity is priced
| differently from electricity for business purposes... but
| yes, a more fine grained control would lead to better
| prices for most users.
| WanderPanda wrote:
| *should be an option that you can book at your ISP.
| WarChortle18 wrote:
| Given that I only have one ISP available to me. How would
| that work?
|
| This is a problem of their own making. They can't have
| their cake and eat it too. Comcast has a monopoly in my
| area for high speed internet. Every other option is
| 25mbps(on a good day) or below. Comcast has shut down all
| potential competition.
|
| So yea if they want to be a regional monopoly they might
| have some regulations placed on them they don't like.
| aaomidi wrote:
| Please elaborate
| ogurechny wrote:
| It is quite obvious, at least from outside of USA, that "net
| neutrality" there is how certain group of corporations has
| been trying to lobby the codification of rules preferential
| to them to use in battle with other group of corporations.
|
| Anywhere in the world there are local and global popular
| services that generate high volumes of traffic. Providers
| naturally care about getting shortest paths to them, plan in
| advance, join local exchanges, and so on, even if they don't
| have any direct agreements. For starters, it might lower your
| traffic costs. In some locations there are mid-tier ISPs
| offering just good connectivity with all locally popular
| networks; they offer the solution for low-tier ISPs for some
| extra coins. However, it is hard to imagine that some ISP
| would try to make the big source of traffic pay for what has
| already been paid by customers.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > It is quite obvious, at least from outside of USA, that
| "net neutrality" there is how certain group of corporations
| has been trying to lobby the codification of rules
| preferential to them to use in battle with other group of
| corporations.
|
| Complete nonsense. "Net neutrality" means that there is no
| preferential treatment of packets based on origin or
| destination.
|
| > However, it is hard to imagine that some ISP would try to
| make the big source of traffic pay for what has already
| been paid by customers.
|
| I think you need to work on your imagination. ISPs in the
| USA have already tried this (not sure if it is still
| happening).
| User23 wrote:
| > Complete nonsense. "Net neutrality" means that there is
| no preferential treatment of packets based on origin or
| destination.
|
| Categorically false. There's no "net neutrality"
| legislation enacted or proposed that doesn't have giant
| and vague QoS and general network operations carve-outs.
| parasubvert wrote:
| > "Net neutrality" means that there is no preferential
| treatment of packets based on origin or destination.
|
| Which is utter nonsense for any large service provider
| that requires traffic engineering to handle elephant
| flows.
|
| This is the problem with blanket slogans, they constrain
| the network in ways that impact user experience
| dramatically, and is why a LOT of internet pioneers
| oppose net neutrality.
|
| Encouraging open access networks seems more striking at
| the heart of the matter.
| bmitc wrote:
| It's also an example of how it's already been lost.
| mnd999 wrote:
| That's pretty defeatist. A cartel of corrupt politicians
| and large cable companies conspired to regulate against it.
| These regulations can just as easily be removed and
| replaced with proper net neutrality rules.
| jrockway wrote:
| There is the cartel effect going on (lobbying against
| municipal broadband), but even in the absence of that,
| it's still tough to be an ISP. Think about how much money
| it costs to dig up a street and put cables under it, and
| then run them into each house along that street. People
| that want to use the Internet don't have enough money to
| do that, and that's why the business is tough.
|
| My experience from working at fiber ISPs is that the
| infrastructure is the hard part. Google Fiber got a good
| deal in its partner cities to run the fiber next to
| existing power lines (which not every city has, they're
| all underground here). When they ran out of easy install
| opportunities, expansion stopped. My experience was the
| same at a NYC-based ISP. If your building was on a street
| that already had open access tunnels, then we could serve
| you. If not, you were out of luck.
|
| If you figure out how to profitably get wires to people's
| houses, you solve the ISP's problems. I've seen proposal
| after proposal for trenching, microtrenching,
| nanotrenching, picotrenching, attotrenching... and none
| of these worked in the real world. (I might have made
| some of those up; I think "attotrenching" is what I
| called just running cables into people's windows and not
| burying them. Didn't try it, but I imagine it would
| irritate people with its intrinsic flakiness and
| ugliness.)
|
| The rest is simple, you can set up a full fledged fiber
| ISP for under $1000 in equipment! Figure out how to dig
| up the street profitably and you unlock a ton of wealth.
| (This, incidentally, is why people keep trying to sell
| wireless solutions. No streets to dig up. WiFi with
| pringles can antennas! 5G! A huge constellation of
| satellites! And honestly, it kind of works. But not so
| well that people are switching from their fiber
| connection to Starlink or whatever.)
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| FWIW In my place grave diggers is a synonym for a least
| paid profession.
| hedora wrote:
| There are plenty of feasible wireless ISP technologies.
| They have a directional antenna on the subscriber side,
| pointed at a shared tower.
|
| I've had mixed experiences with them. The wireless link
| itself tends to be 100% uptime with no bandwidth
| contention. The quality of the network between the tower
| and the internet backbone varies wildly depending on the
| ISP.
|
| Anyway, last mile of 10's to 100's MBit symmetric over
| multiple miles is a solved problem these days.
|
| The remaining problems are mostly political. Sadly,
| that's been true since dial up modems became obsolete.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> If you figure out how to profitably get wires to
| people's houses, you solve the ISP's problems. I
|
| Same as they did with electricity a century ago. If you
| want to provide service to the profitable urban area then
| you must run wires to the non-urban areas too.
| hedora wrote:
| Heh. Instead, you just need to sell the unprofitable
| parts of your network to Frontier.
|
| Their business model seems to be using sales volume to
| make up for marginal losses.
| JaimeThompson wrote:
| >If you figure out how to profitably get wires to
| people's houses,
|
| The same way we got power to the homes which was
| government assistance and the private companies not
| expecting them to be totally profitable in a few years.
| ogurechny wrote:
| > I think "attotrenching" is what I called just running
| cables into people's windows and not burying them.
|
| Behold, MSU dorm LAN in early 2000s.
| https://medium.com/@pv.safronov/moscow-state-university-
| netw...
|
| Partial "topology" shot: https://chronicles.igmsu.org/wp-
| content/uploads/2015/10/topo...
|
| Home LANs and early ISPs were built with the same
| equipment by the same kind of enthusiasts. Typical
| commieblocks have enough place for cable shafts inside,
| though. Then the building roofs would get connected (with
| any kind of cable having any properties you could find)
| in the same grassroot manner. All that free libertarian
| enterprise, and now, after a number of tech upgrades,
| mergers, and so on, you can get gigabit for ten bucks.
|
| I get it's not that suitable for suburbian installations,
| but the idea is that it all starts small and ugly. That's
| why your cable corporations are never ever going to allow
| even a tiny bit of alternative to happen, heh.
| jrockway wrote:
| That's beautiful and I love it.
| bmitc wrote:
| I didn't say it couldn't be regained. But it will be an
| increasingly uphill battle. Regulators and politicians
| have been sold to the highest bidders.
| freemint wrote:
| Compliance can be forced by law in a country which is
| capable of self regulation.
| ineedasername wrote:
| In the US we had it for a brief period of time. Then we got
| an FCC chair who not only took it away, but actively
| trolled people who were angry about it. (And that's before
| we even get into the issue of the public comment ballot box
| getting stuffed by copypasta spam in favor of killing net
| neutrality and wink-and-nudge blind eye turned away from
| it.)
|
| That's the double edged sword in the US of having executive
| level departments with wide latitude to set regulations
| with the weight of law behind them but not the same high
| barrier of changing them as it takes to change a law.
| Technically this allows agencies to be more nimble, or as
| much as possible in any lumbering bureaucracy. On the other
| hand it means that very important pieces of public policy
| are even further removed from election accountability and
| subject to the whims of different administrations.
|
| Whether you're for or against it, the Keystone pipeline is
| a prime example of the insanity that results from this. It
| was approve & construction begun on one administration, a
| final portion for it put on hold by another, then opened
| again by a third, a fourth stopped it again resulting in
| its backers cancelling it (seemingly) once and for all.
| Forget about the difficulties of generation-long projects,
| this makes anything longer than 4 years highly uncertain.
| serenitylater wrote:
| You can have plenty of projects get done that take longer
| than 4 years. You will have problems getting projects
| done that half the country hates if it takes longer than
| 4 years.
|
| This seems like a feature not a bug.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| It's not about "half the country hates it", though.
| Plenty of projects have widespread support, but are only
| backed by one party (or no party). It's clearly a bug, as
| it causes undue preference for the status-quo above and
| beyond the popular will (and the common good).
| mrtksn wrote:
| Strangely, fast.com still reports faster connection speeds than
| my broadband is supposed to offer. No, my broadband is not
| faster than what I'm paying for, I can see that when monitoring
| actual transfers(including the transfers when doing the tests).
| They do offer about %95 of the promised speed, not %110 that
| fast.com or speedtest.net measures.
| kiwijamo wrote:
| In New Zealand it is somewhat well known that our local fibre
| providers actually provisions each connection for slightly
| more than the agreed speed. E.g. 100mbits is usually
| provisioned at around 110mbits. So our speed tests are
| usually just over 100mbits (due to TCP etc overheads taking
| some of the overprovisoned parts). Wonder if that is what is
| happening to you.
| brundolf wrote:
| I'm now imagining a consortium of software companies that all
| put most of their service requests behind a shared speed-test
| domain, to do the same thing as a common good
|
| Maybe this could even be a standalone service
| _moof wrote:
| Doesn't Netflix also provide hardware with caches to ISPs?
| Thought I saw that somewhere. (Not saying you're wrong; just
| mentioning what might be another factor.)
|
| EDIT: Here's what I was thinking of:
| https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/appliances/
| kortilla wrote:
| This is not necessarily true. It's trivial for an isp to exempt
| Speedtest.net traffic so it doesn't get throttled while the
| rest of your traffic does.
|
| It's unlikely they would do something more complex like lifting
| all traffic limits once a connection to Speedtest.net opens.
| hedora wrote:
| At least in the old days, they'd have to unthrottle
| everything to get decent speedtest numbers. The cable modems
| the ISP issued around here had FIFO network buffers capable
| of buffering 5-10 seconds of traffic.
|
| So, any slow connection would stop the entire household from
| having decent internet.
| withinboredom wrote:
| I'm suspicious that what they're saying is true. If so, a
| simple curl to the site would be all that is needed without
| running a full speed test.
|
| It'd be great if they could be more methodical and track down
| what's really going on. I'd also wouldn't be surprised to see
| an ISP doing something like this, but at the same time, it's
| much more likely to be networking issues on the consumer's
| side than a malicious ISP imho.
| aaomidi wrote:
| I mean, it's a bit of an odd choice because it's pretty easy to
| detect if a user has "opened fast.com in the past few minutes"
| gruez wrote:
| 1. Add a <img src="https://fast.com/pixel.png"/ >on
| netflix.com
|
| 2. ???
|
| 3. profit
| dmurray wrote:
| If you're a web developer, you owe it to your users to add
| this to your site even if you have no connection with
| Netflix or Fast.com. Randomize the image name every time to
| avoid caching - it doesn't matter if the image isn't found.
| thefreeman wrote:
| I mean, it's just as trivial for netflix to make periodic
| requests to fast.com fron their streaming apps if ISPs were
| using that as a metric to throttle their traffic.
| stepanhruda wrote:
| That's why we need DNS over HTTPS and Encrypted Client Hello
| to become widely used. Then there would be no way of knowing,
| as long as Netflix uses the same infrastructure to serve
| fast.com and netflix.com
| denton-scratch wrote:
| "Need" is too strong. Without going into the arguments
| against DoH, we don't "need" it, because there is an
| alternative: run your own recursive DNS. That _should be_
| something that a consumer could switch on or off. A default
| install of Unbound, for example, seems to /just work/.
|
| Downside: if you have any kind of home network, running
| your own recursive DNS probably implies running your own
| DHCP, which isn't normally a consumer alternative (you
| could do it using settings on a domestic router, but not if
| it's crippled or locked-down). Also, DNS caching shouldn't
| be so effective (but I haven't noticed that effect).
|
| Upside: all kinds of problems resulting from relying on DNS
| servers controlled by others disappear. You're not relying
| on them any more.
| stepanhruda wrote:
| What if I want privacy on a non-home network? Huge part
| of my traffic is over 5G/LTE.
| dspillett wrote:
| VPN if that isn't blocked or throttled by your carrier?
|
| Though you need a trusted host to act as the other end,
| or you are just swapping one monitored link with another,
| and finding that could be a task in its own right
| depending on your threat model / paranoia level.
| cpv wrote:
| There are some apps (like Intra) which allow you to
| connect to a built-in (cloudflare, google) or custom DoH
| server (your own or other providers which support DoH).
|
| Nextdns have their own app for this as well.
|
| For android 9 or higher there should be an option in
| network settings.
| stepanhruda wrote:
| Right, I specifically use DoH with Cloudflare on my
| phone. I'm talking about the "we don't need this" reply
| above, which is a suggestion for tinkerers, not a good
| recommendation for general population.
| DanAtC wrote:
| Recursive DNS is still unencrypted and would be visible
| to your ISP
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Yes, they can observe my queries to authoritative
| servers. But I didn't claim that running your own
| recursive DNS guaranteed privacy; I only claimed that it
| dispelled all problems arising from relying on someone
| else's DNS recursors.
|
| I happen to trust my ISP, BTW; I really just like running
| my own because I can observe what it's doing.
| stepanhruda wrote:
| So your "alternative" is strictly worse / solving a
| different problem.
| tomatotomato37 wrote:
| That wouldn't really help; the network activity signature
| of a speed test is noticably different from browsing or
| video streaming, and even if it wasn't, the connection for
| streaming lasts a lot longer than the test. You could
| defeat it with a timer.
| stepanhruda wrote:
| Netflix can literally implement fast.com to do the exact
| same operation as when streaming and then measure
| performance of the stream.
|
| Yes you could do a timer, but that would mean e.g. first
| 30s of all Netflix streams to be much faster and then
| slow down just in case they were in fact speed tests.
| Also would be difficult to differentiate between running
| a speed test vs a stream that gets its connection closed
| and reconnects.
|
| All of this is an order of magnitude for ISPs to deal
| with than unthrottling traffic for specific domains. It
| doesn't have to be perfect, but making it prohibitively
| more expensive helps a lot.
| starwind wrote:
| I worked at a cable company for a while and the guy who sat
| behind me managed gigabit connection roll outs. He always told
| the techs in the field to use fast.com because it was the only
| one they could rely on. He knew the cable company prioritized
| connections to people who were checking their internet speed
| londons_explore wrote:
| Just run a Cron job to ping speedtest.net every 1 minute.
|
| My ISP does the prioritization whenever you do a DNS lookup for
| speedtest.net. You don't actually need to run the test.
| tus666 wrote:
| Fascinating if true.
| raggi wrote:
| Study the traffic in Wireshark, and also sniff upstream of your
| router to compare. I'd bet it's your router before I'd bet it's
| your isp.
|
| I gave up with cots routers a while back, and life has been
| significantly improved. I wrote it up here
| https://res.rag.pub/2020-11-1-an-home-router.html
| mfer wrote:
| Speed tests often test last mile. That's only part of real world
| performance. Some examples of other factors to real world stuff:
|
| 1. If you internet provider has limited bandwidth when it
| connects to other parts of the internet. I used to have a problem
| where my ISP has one connection out of its network. That
| bandwidth was limited and caused real world issues.
|
| 2. TCP can and often does involve multiple round trips. As web
| pages have grown in size it's had an impact on performance at the
| network level
|
| Increased bandwidth in the last mile doesn't solve for these
| types of issues
| bombcar wrote:
| You can often deduce the pipeline sizes from a trace route - if
| the next step out of your ISP is LA-NYC-1G.carrier.net you're
| probably never going to see more than 1G until they upgrade the
| equipment and leave the name the same.
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| I have noticed that speed test seems to run fast when everything
| else is slow. I haven't seen anything else speed up though. I
| guess they prioritise traffic to speed test, but unfortunately
| that doesn't get me a speed up in general.
| Masoodmustafa wrote:
| negative_zero wrote:
| As other commentets have pointed out: you are not insane :)
|
| Another speedtester you can try:
| https://www.dslreports.com/speedtest
| Masoodmustafa wrote:
| lr4444lr wrote:
| I dunno, man. I upgraded my 8 year old router and saw my speeds
| increase 100 fold on speed test. Thinking this was an aberration,
| I ran some tests doing software downloads and some DB backup
| restores that would give me enough testing time to rule out
| connection start friction or drops, and it was pretty much
| confirmed.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| So the trick is to always be running a speed-test in the
| background?
| medstrom wrote:
| A simple Bash loop could suffice, if it's enough to ping the
| site:
|
| while : do ping speedcheck.org ; sleep 10 ; done
|
| Fast internet forever!
| Jamie9912 wrote:
| an ICMP ping is not a "connection"..
| medstrom wrote:
| True, edited.
| RachelF wrote:
| They now have a CLI speedtest app:
|
| https://www.speedtest.net/apps/cli
| lostlogin wrote:
| I nearly did this, but because I was having connection issues.
| I got it to post to Slack every 15 mins and to post to an alert
| channel if speed was less than a certain value (something like
| 3Mbps, crazy low). I would log the fault from work and it would
| be fixed by the time I got home.
|
| However I have fibre now, and it's glorious. No crap scripts
| required (though it still runs!).
| withinboredom wrote:
| Sounds like the speed tests are filling your buffers,
| allowing your router to do proper QOS and prioritize your
| packets correctly. Do you have QOS turned on? You might want
| to turn it off since it sounds misconfigured.
|
| You can check here: https://www.dslreports.com/speedtest
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Downloading a large file from Microsoft is a good test (their end
| wont be the bottleneck, and they have a lot of large files you
| can download)
| btown wrote:
| Impossible to know for sure, but the ROI on "accelerate packets
| that match an IP whitelist that is drawn nightly from the DNS
| records for well-traveled speed test sites" must be quite high.
| CursedUrn wrote:
| Could speed test sites do something about this? Like obfuscate
| the traffic somehow to get more genuine results?
| vitus wrote:
| This is one of the biggest selling points of fast.com -- it's
| served from the same Netflix domain + servers that also
| stream video (nflxvideo.net).
|
| If ISPs want to make fast.com fast, then they need to do so
| for all of Netflix.
| manicpolymath wrote:
| I think the bigger problem isn't so much the traffic type as
| it is traffic destination. As long as there are only a few
| hosts or domains providing speed test services (and there
| always will be: upload speeds are expensive) ISPs will be
| able to whack-a-mole with their whitelists.
|
| I'd say that this needs some sort of regulation, but as long
| as ISPs are the gatekeepers, they can cheese $Government all
| day long too. This word gets overused perhaps, but the
| closest I can come up with is a decentralized monitoring
| setup with random speed test hosts (especially hosted @home
| style). Care would have to be taken to avoid how-are-these-
| still-legal data caps though.
| bfz wrote:
| It's possible to build a speed test site out of media file
| fetches from otherwise public assets from third party sites,
| the quality of the measurement will just be a little noisier.
| In many ways this would actually be a better test than some
| well-placed IP address, since there is a chance to randomly
| sample many different routes from the ISP to real world
| destinations for practical object sizes (i.e., not just an
| idealized unidirectional stream with no request roundtrips in
| between).
|
| For example you could do something with Image.onload event,
| but even better are the recent JS web performance APIs, they
| provide a huge amount of detail - including DNS lookup
| latency, TCP connect time, TTFB etc.
|
| Actually now I want to build this
|
| edit: I'm probably not going to build this, but you should.
| For large object sources, there are Flickr full size images,
| HLS URLs for video on demand systems (each HLS segment is
| generally around 1-3MB), etc.
|
| I'd want a giant list of these to pick from at random, and
| probably want to bucket the results along (domain name,
| destination BGP ASN, destination GeoIP) axes as well as
| whatever the JS performance API offers. You could maybe
| present each axis as some kind of confidence interval, then
| geometric mean to produce an overall score presented
| graphically somehow
|
| You could then collect up all these scores and publish stats
| bucketed by Internet provider. And that's the point where I
| realized I don't have the energy to build all this ;)
| canadaduane wrote:
| This sounds so much closer to a "real" test than our
| single-server tests.
| GoOnThenDoTell wrote:
| This sounds awesome!
| Klathmon wrote:
| I believe this is the idea behind the https://fast.com speed
| test.
|
| It just downloads data from Netflix servers, so the results
| you get are basically guaranteed to be the speeds you would
| get with Netflix.
| withinboredom wrote:
| On Windows, Chrome is limited to one core when it's in the
| background and uses all the cores in the foreground. Makes web
| development incredibly annoying. (This was several years ago, it
| might have changed and I don't use windows as much)
| b20000 wrote:
| related question: spectrum pushes fiber where i am located, but
| there is no way to bring fiber into our residential
| unit/building. i guess they mean fiber to a local hub or
| something, then cable to our unit. isn't that what they do
| anyway, and unless you have fiber into the unit, offers no
| improvement?
| nwpk wrote:
| All providers managing their speedtest servers with QoS. These
| servers will be handled as a business critical system. All other
| services are available as they are, if not specified in a
| contract. So, you might toss your tinfoil hat into trashcan. Yet
| better you can use mtr (https://www.bitwizard.nl/mtr/) to just
| find the real source of the problem.
| kolanos wrote:
| Anecdotal, but I consistently get 80mbps on speed.cloudflare.com
| and 220mbps on fast.com with Spectrum.
| oneplane wrote:
| Where are you located? Never had this happen with the ISPs here
| but perhaps it's common in other countries.
| Geonode wrote:
| Yes, they've been doing this for years.
| cloudking wrote:
| Biggest improvement I found came from replacing the ISP provided
| modem/router with my own modem and router. Both improvements in
| overall speed and latency in gaming. I'm guessing they have less
| remote access control over third-party modems, and the quality of
| name brand is generally better. I use a Netgear cable modem and
| Ubiquiti router gear.
| conorcleary wrote:
| All those ads...
| AlexandrB wrote:
| It wouldn't surprise me one bit if the ISP was doing something
| like this. It's an easy way to make their service look better and
| there are few consequences for getting caught. It's also hard to
| prove conclusively that it's happening.
| tommiegannert wrote:
| I don't trust speedtests. There are all kinds of wrong
| incentives, similar to GPU benchmarks. One thing I noticed was
| that the data speedtest.net sends has really low entropy. It just
| repeats 10 bytes. If I ran an ISP I would...
|
| So I wrote chargen2p [1] as an extension to the classical chargen
| protocol.
|
| I use it together with a Prometheus exporter [2] I wrote to
| periodically check my laptop's connectivity. The actual check
| runs over Wireguard, since I didn't want to open my chargen2p
| server to the public. This only checks download speeds, mind you.
| (The chargen2p library exports upload metrics, but the exporter
| doesn't use it.)
|
| My graphs tell me the average is ~5 MBps, so 40 Mbps. This is
| between me (Switzerland) and a Hetzner DC in Germany.
| speedtest.net just now claimed 160 Mbps.
|
| [1] https://github.com/tommie/chargen2p
|
| [2] https://github.com/tommie/prometheus-connectivity-exporter
| vyrotek wrote:
| This is one feature I like from my Wifi router. It does regular
| speed tests and tracks the results over time. I like to think it
| reminds my ISP that I want the speed I'm paying for.
| tentacleuno wrote:
| Is that with dd-wrt or something similar? I heavily doubt you'd
| get that feature on an ISP router :-)
| jamesmunns wrote:
| Unifi routers do this, for sure.
| thefreeman wrote:
| if this is theoretically saturating your bandwidth doesn't this
| lead to intermittent poor performance from your connected
| devices?
| bombcar wrote:
| Saturating download can prevent acks from getting through in
| some cases on some mediums. So throttling download a bit
| speeds everything else up.
| russellbeattie wrote:
| I had this same exact thought, and will open fast.com once in a
| while to give my AT&T 1Gb fiber at home a kick.
|
| But I never assumed malice, even if it is AT&T. I'm not a network
| engineer but I can see how giving whatever back end networking
| management system they have a nudge by requesting a fast
| connection improving things.
| xioren00 wrote:
| This is real. I have had it confirmed to me by a Comcast
| employee. And really, this shouldn't surprise anyone.
| asdff wrote:
| How frequently do you need to ping speedtest to be prioritized?
| ChaosMarine wrote:
| Just because they can do it should not be a reason for doing
| it. You're broken in, defatist or conformist.
| cstrahan wrote:
| Not being surprised is not the same as being
| defeatist/conformist. There are things I would love to see
| changed that don't surprise me, and there are things that
| surprise me that I see no reason to change. One does not
| imply the other.
| [deleted]
| DanAtC wrote:
| Which ISP? Name and shame
| traceroute66 wrote:
| Lots of people here have already mentioned the Netflix fast.com
| test, which is indeed good.
|
| But also worthy of recommendation IHMO is the Cloudflare one
| (speed.cloudflare.com). Main reason I say that is its one of the
| few that measures jitter (or at least openly exposes the
| measurement).
| vmception wrote:
| Fast doesnt do upload
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > Fast doesnt do upload
|
| It does but it's hidden, you have to hit "Show more info"
| (once the main test has finished).
|
| A bit stupid, but I'm sure some committee thought it was an
| awesome idea to do it that way.
| vmception wrote:
| Where is this on mobile? I went to fast.com
|
| Is it after the speed test is over?
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > Is it after the speed test is over?
|
| Yeah, you have to let it run thorough first, then the
| button appears.
|
| (At least on desktop, I can't remember what it does on
| mobile)
| WanderPanda wrote:
| Makes sense to me. The point is that the speed test traffic
| pretends to be netflix traffic which is mainly download.
| The upload to other servers could be limited by the ISP
| while being unlocked for netflix with low cost (because
| people don't upload a lot towards netflix). So there is
| less signal in the fast.com upload speed measurement
| jtc331 wrote:
| It actually does -- you just have to click "Show more info".
| dataflow wrote:
| CloudFlare one is giving me less than 1/3 the download speed
| fast.com shows, and in fact, testing by downloading a Linux ISO
| [1], the latter seems to be the correct one. I don't know what
| CloudFlare's test is doing (their server is geographically
| nearby) but I obviously can't trust their measurement.
|
| [1]
| https://mirrors.edge.kernel.org/archlinux/iso/2022.04.05/arc...
| FrenchDevRemote wrote:
| That's probably due to your ISP imo, they're known to favor
| some routes/servers
|
| Or the cabling to the cloudfare server is worse than to other
| servers
| butz wrote:
| Interesting, while fast.com and speed.cloudflare.com got the
| same download speed, upload speed was much lower on cloudflare,
| but cloudflare used test server, that is geographically closer.
| teddyh wrote:
| Note: Users in Sweden and northern Europe are probably better
| served by http://www.bredbandskollen.se/
| brahma-dev wrote:
| Not very scientific but you can try something that is unlikely to
| be whitelisted.
|
| Eg. http://134.209.196.181:8080 This is an instance of
| https://github.com/e7d/speedtest running on Digital Ocean in
| Amsterdam.
| jshier wrote:
| Or just running iperf on a personal server. I use that to
| diagnose differences between raw UDP / TCP throughput and HTTP.
| femto113 wrote:
| Interesting. Using Wave broadband in Seattle from this server I
| get 38.69 Mbps Download 154.43 Mbps
| Upload
|
| While from speedtest.net (to a local server) I get
| 178.34 Mbps Download 192.23 Mbps Upload
|
| I'd chalk it up to distance/noise except that the download
| speeds are way more similar than the upload speeds.
| dboreham wrote:
| Unlikely your suspicions are correct. Provisioning high QoS to
| the speedtest site is common practice (see fast.com for
| countermeasures), but changing the entire subscriber QoS because
| traffic to one particular destination is detected seems like too
| much work and doesn't really achieve anything useful.
|
| If you are on a wireless network (either your upstream from a
| WISP, or internally on your own network), then I'd suspect some
| wireless air access control syndrome is the cause -- e.g.
| stations are usually randomly fighting for air, but when you pull
| down your big speed test file that ends up putting the network in
| a state where your station gets all the air time. Lo and behold
| all your traffic has better QoS. Basically your speedtest
| traffic, because it is a constant stream, shoved everyone else
| off the air and allowed your other traffic to get through at the
| same time as a result.
| iancarroll wrote:
| > changing the entire subscriber QoS because traffic to one
| particular destination is detected seems like too much work and
| doesn't really achieve anything useful
|
| Unless something has changed recently, the Speedtest site just
| acts as an intermediary between you and one of the "volunteer"
| servers that actually perform the test for the client. Since
| these are hosted on many networks, it's conceivable that this
| is the easiest way to QoS the speed tests.
| bragr wrote:
| This should be easy to test. Find a a big file somewhere served
| reasonably fast and see if you can replicate the results while
| pulling it down. Maybe some Linux distro ISO? I really doubt an
| ISP would optimize that.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| > and doesn't really achieve anything useful
|
| At my previous apartment, I would get a full month rebate off
| my internet bill if I could document speeds considerably below
| average on a computer plugged in with ethernet. I could very
| well see an ISP with such a policy looking for nefarious ways
| to "fix" that money loss.
| KMag wrote:
| There's that, and also visiting a speed test site is an
| indicator that a particular user is more sensitive to speed
| than the general user base (and perhaps considering jumping
| to another ISP). It absolutely makes business sense to
| prioritize traffic to users who pay more attention.
| kortilla wrote:
| No, as an isp these are the worst customers. It's better to
| piss off an dump people who consume a lot of bandwidth an
| are obsessed with throughput if you're "business obsessed".
| thayne wrote:
| I've also noticed this, at least subjectively. I haven't done any
| rigorous experiments to confirm this is actually happening, but
| my ISP has a reputation for doing shady stuff, so it wouldn't
| surprise me if they prioritized traffic to speed test sites.
| ComradePhil wrote:
| Write a script to curl speedtest every minute and have fast
| internet speed all the time?
| asah wrote:
| google "speed test" also offers another view... but haha no less
| biased afaict.
|
| speedtest.net: 19ms ping / 288 Mbps down / 72 Mbps up g speed
| test : 8ms ping / 620 Mbps down / 28 Mbps up
| dathinab wrote:
| A twitch art vtuber steamer had a similar realization:
|
| Running certain online games in the background (I think it was
| final fantasy) fixed problems with the art/drawing/just chatting
| stream dropping frames.
|
| (Sorry I forget who, I also think it wasn't someone I normally
| watch so it's unlikely I will remember.)
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Ultimately it's down to peering. Even without malicious action
| from your provider, it could just be that their routes to your
| selected speed test server are free while the routes to your
| other destination are congested.
| FredPret wrote:
| I wonder if one could route all traffic through a speedtest site
| zorr wrote:
| That's basically what Netflix does with its fast.com service.
|
| This could be an interesting business model for a VPN service.
| Host a popular speedtest and VPN endpoints on the same IP's.
| The challenge is to make the speedtest popular enough so ISP's
| will optimize for it.
| FredPret wrote:
| It would be cool if all our devices could talk to one another
| directly in a huge mesh network with no ISPs whatsoever. I do
| so detest the usual ISP user experience
| Havoc wrote:
| ISPs screwing with speedtest results is quite common and
| plausible.
|
| The claim that it affects other tabs...seems wildly unlikely to
| me though. QoS and shaping is per service and per target.
| pojzon wrote:
| I was cursing on my ISP for a long time till I understood that Im
| on a 100Mbit wifi.
|
| Then added a wire connection to my server and instantly 10x the
| speed :^]
|
| Dont be like me, have wires set up everywhere where needed.
| vmception wrote:
| My local wifi is faster than my 1gb/s ethernet.
|
| This holds true in the same room and one room over.
|
| I like this.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| If you're happy, great. But you might want to figure out
| what's interfering with your wired bandwidth, because wired
| 1G ethernet should basically win every time compared to
| current WiFi standards. Maybe not ax under ideal conditions.
| But that's a maybe.
| vmception wrote:
| 1G ethernet is 125 megabytes (spelled out to avoid acronym
| ambiguity) per second
|
| 802.11ax is much faster than that, my wifi router is good
| for 1.5G or so while the protocol allows for 3.5G or so and
| my file transfer speeds are easily more than 125 megabytes
| per second
|
| I'm not going to run more wires either way
|
| So....... you sure I should care?
|
| Its great fast speeds that scale to the file sizes I want
| to handle, which are pretty large for prosumer needs.
| caymanjim wrote:
| Wires are great, and I try to use them when possible, but you
| can saturate most home Internet with decent midrange WiFi
| hardware. I get over 1Gbps between local machines just using
| the stock Comcast/Xfinity WAP, and about 330Mbps to the
| Internet (capped by service plan). I splurged a little on a
| ~$120 4-antenna NIC but even my cheap older ones can saturate
| the WAN link.
| tomschwiha wrote:
| Reminds me of buying a 144Hz monitor but not enabling 144Hz-
| mode..
| lucb1e wrote:
| Country, ISP?
|
| I never noticed this with any ISP I've used in NL/DE/BE/FI.
| osigurdson wrote:
| > ..senses that I'm trying to check if I'm getting what I pay
| for.
|
| In Canada, ISPs are under no obligation to provide advertised
| speeds and there are no reliability guarantees whatsoever for
| retail customers. I was very surprised to learn this when dealing
| with Telus. Fortunately I was not on a contract and was able to
| switch to another provider.
| hkt wrote:
| Try with LibreSpeed?
|
| Hosted version: https://librespeed.org/
|
| Self hosted version: https://github.com/librespeed/speedtest
|
| For those who need to document lower speeds than SLAs from their
| ISPs, this will help you check for chicanery, shenanigans, and
| sneaky QoS. Recommend.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| Well, I've had this experience as well, where I note the
| performance is so bad that I go to the speed test page of my
| internet provider and then it ends up being ok. However I have a
| pretty solid suspicion that they have not done anything to
| monitor usage and stop throttling when seeing a check because:
|
| 1. I used to consult (for two years) in the department of my
| internet provider that would have had to do the reporting to the
| people who would have controlled throttling and even worked on
| the speed test page at times and there was no project to do that.
|
| 2. There was evidently no known and talked about throttling
| project among the hundreds of techies working at the business.
|
| 3. This place would not have been able to pull off the
| coordination between departments required to do this and also
| keep it a secret, and I'm betting most Internet providers would
| be even more incapable of doing something so nefarious.
|
| 4. The department providing customer support would have had to be
| in league with whatever department providing throttling, however
| KPIs for the customer support would of course have been
| negatively impacted by the many people calling in to report
| negative bandwidth usage. Thus they would have had to be in
| league with another division of the company to make sure they
| underperformed and thus did not get good bonuses etc. That would
| be an enviable level of dedication I must say.
| tyingq wrote:
| Try one they probably don't have on their whitelist, like
| https://proof.ovh.net/
| edgyquant wrote:
| When I lived in the Midwest I had frontier and when I'd complain
| about speeds they'd send me to their speed test that always
| reflected my exact data speed (even though the actual internet
| speeds were 10x slower some times.) Fast.com always had more
| accurate speeds.
| UI_at_80x24 wrote:
| I was on the phone with a buddy trying to troubleshoot Local file
| transfer speeds vs Speedtest results.
|
| Speedtest kept reporting 100Mb/s range speeds (the tier he was
| paying for). Local file transfers however were stuck in the 1MB/s
| range.
|
| After some questions and troubleshooting he discovered that he
| had used a 10Mb/s hub instead of a 1Gb/s switch that was sitting
| right next to it. A simple mixup.
|
| His internet connection was also plugged into that same 10Mb/s
| hub.
|
| There is NO WAY his PC could have reported 100Mb/s to speedtest.
|
| Do not trust them for accurate results.
| mlyle wrote:
| > Do not trust them for accurate results.
|
| Ookla speedtest properly transfers data and divides to find
| throughput-- both with the website, the GUI app, and their CLI
| program. The open source speedtest-cli that uses their
| infrastructure is hampered by only one connection and can't
| seem to ever report higher than 300mbps.
|
| Fast.com is ... a little optimistic about transients getting
| transfers started and sometimes reports numbers 5-10% too high.
|
| Neither is grossly wrong by an order of magnitude. Maybe there
| was also wifi around and simultaneously connected, confounding
| the situation? Easy to end up in a situation where all your
| internet traffic is going over wifi (because e.g. your dhcp
| client replaces the default route with one going over the wifi
| interface), and all your local traffic goes over ethernet.
| _jsnk wrote:
| > speedtest-cli ... can't seem to ever report higher than
| 300mbps.
|
| I routinely get 700-900Mbps reported using speedtest-cli from
| centurylink fiber. My bottleneck is the CPU on my router
| running openwrt.
| mlyle wrote:
| Can you look at this, and tell me which of the 2 you're
| using:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31063868
|
| From speedtest's official cli program, on my 2.5gbase-t
| connected machine I get 2200mbps up and down.. but from the
| open source speedtest-cli I get 300-350mbps.
|
| (Here, I only got ~900mbps because I was running from a
| raspberry pi with a 1000BaseT link).
| mmastrac wrote:
| I'm seeing gigabit(-ish) via speedtest-cli:
| Speedtest by Ookla Server: TELUS Mobility -
| Calgary, AB (id = 17555) ISP: TELUS
| Latency: 0.50 ms (0.12 ms jitter) Download:
| 938.58 Mbps (data used: 422.8 MB) Upload: 919.90
| Mbps (data used: 959.8 MB) Packet Loss: Not available.
|
| FTTH, Ubiquiti EdgeSwitch -> UniFi Dream Machine Pro SE via
| 10G link -> Nokia ONT.
|
| I _do_ get limited to around 300mbps if my Mikrotik is in the
| mix and using CPU for routing.
|
| Yeah, my home network is overkill but it's a cheaper hobby
| than other ones might be, hah.
| mlyle wrote:
| > I'm seeing gigabit(-ish) via speedtest-cli:
|
| You're using their cli client, not the open source one.
| Below, first their "speedtest" and then the open source
| "speedtest-cli" mlyle@brazen:~ $
| ./speedtest Speedtest by Ookla
| Server: Cloudflare - San Jose, CA (id = 44932)
| ISP: Frontier Communications Latency: 12.10
| ms (1.29 ms jitter) Download: 953.32 Mbps
| (data used: 1.0 GB )
| Upload: 891.89 Mbps (data used: 1.1 GB )
| Packet Loss: Not available.
|
| vs. mlyle@brazen:~ $ speedtest-cli
| Retrieving speedtest.net configuration... Testing
| from Frontier Communications (47.155.215.132)...
| Retrieving speedtest.net server list... Selecting
| best server based on ping... Hosted by Nitel (Los
| Angeles, CA) [446.50 km]: 49.103 ms Testing
| download speed.............................................
| ................................... Download:
| 323.09 Mbit/s Upload: 300.49 Mbit/s
|
| speedtest-cli is a python program, vs. the native
| speedtest: mlyle@brazen:~ $ file
| /home/mlyle/.local/bin/speedtest-cli
| /home/mlyle/.local/bin/speedtest-cli: Python script, ASCII
| text executable mlyle@brazen:~ $ file speedtest
| speedtest: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, ARM, EABI5 version 1
| (SYSV), statically linked, stripped
| mmastrac wrote:
| Practically the same. Perhaps it's a server selection
| issue? Selecting best server based on
| ping... Hosted by iTel.com (iTel Networks Inc)
| (Calgary, AB) [3.20 km]: 2.275 ms Testing download
| speed....................................................
| ............................ Download: 931.69
| Mbit/s Testing upload speed........................
| .........................................................
| ............... Upload: 854.01 Mbit/s
| mlyle wrote:
| Interesting. I consistently get garbage results with
| speedtest-cli (across multiple machines and network
| connections) and good results with speedtest's own.
|
| On the pi, I suspect it's running out of CPU--
| real 0m9.877s user 0m2.737s sys 0m5.595s
|
| But that doesn't explain the systemic problem.
| mmastrac wrote:
| The Pi is definitely limited in terms of CPU. This is a
| fairly old, but beefy Xeon chip on my unraid box. Might
| be native vs Python code on ARM?
| mlyle wrote:
| Yup, native vs. Python would explain a lot on the Pi, but
| I've also seen this on my big Threadripper machine here
| and on my Hetzner server in Virginia.
|
| I'd assumed it was just something intrinsic.
|
| On the other hand: speedtest's own thing uses multiple
| parallel connections. So if you have low amounts of loss
| that prevent one TCP connection from going super fast,
| it'll do better on speedtest than speedtest-cli.
|
| Thanks for the help/info. Something to spend more time
| understanding at some point in the future.
|
| edit: Just noticed that the Hetzner server in VA
| geolocates wrong and chooses servers in Kansas.
| vitus wrote:
| > edit: Just noticed that the Hetzner server in VA
| geolocates wrong and chooses servers in Kansas.
|
| This is a common failure mode of geolocation, especially
| as it pertains to cloud providers. The databases can
| guess which country the IP address corresponds to, but
| not anything more (and as such, they default to something
| in the middle of the country).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographic_center_of_the_Un
| ite...
|
| Geolocation data tends to be worse for cloud providers
| for whatever reason (I believe it's a combination of
| differing Internet footprint characteristics, as well as
| IP aggregation mismatch on behalf of the geolocation
| database).
|
| (Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_Island for
| another common geolocation placeholder)
| mmastrac wrote:
| No worries.. best of luck with that. As a total aside,
| fast.com is giving me 420mbps which should be impossible
| given my wifi setup. :/
| mlyle wrote:
| fast.com tends to be 10-20% high for me versus what goes
| by at the router.
| CraigJPerry wrote:
| Ha! I'm currently down the rabbithole of trying to understand
| why when connected through nordvpn, i'm seeing ~5% faster
| download and ~10% lower ping latency to speedtest.net when
| connected to an in-country vpn endpoint.
|
| Does not compute. Compression? I can't explain the lower ping,
| traffic shaping?
| causality0 wrote:
| When I use a VPN the measurable ping might go down but the
| noticeable ping goes up. There's always a barely-perceptible
| delay when doings things like using voice typing.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| > I can't explain the lower ping, traffic shaping?
|
| Better routes. Most latency on the internet is not due to c.
| carlhjerpe wrote:
| C being speed of light
| hkt wrote:
| Classic story where this is related:
| https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html
|
| tl;dr timeout was sufficiently low and user sufficiently
| skilled to work out his emails could be delivered only
| within 500 miles
| edwinbalani wrote:
| My favourite aspect of this story is how the academics,
| being academics, took it upon themselves to characterise
| the problem in detail before telling the postmaster about
| it. Could just as easily have said "huh, that's weird"
| and thrown it at them on day one.
| naoqj wrote:
| speedtest.net has a CLI version that is much more reliable than
| the web version.
| tashbarg wrote:
| Some providers provide speedtests that test (only) last-mile
| speed between, e.g., cable modem and head unit. Mine does that
| and reports 1Gb/s just fine. Of course, only to the head unit,
| nowhere else in the universe.
| cj wrote:
| Edit: removed due to downvoting. Original comment pointed out
| that transfer speed is normally measured in Mbps not MB/s.
| djbusby wrote:
| Can't get 100 Megabits on a 10 Megabit line was the point.
| otterley wrote:
| If you want more data points, configure your egress traffic to go
| through various VPNs to see whether you get the same results.
| It's easy enough to do from a computer or a supported mobile
| device, if you're willing to spend a few bucks trying a few
| different services out. I believe several of them offer free
| trials.
| totalview wrote:
| I used to unfreeze my unresponsive safari and chrome tabs by
| opening Firefox. Worked most of the time. Any similar explanation
| or am I nuts?
| bayindirh wrote:
| I was having a similar problem at home, but it wasn't remedied by
| anything like that. Then, one day I've installed DNSMasq on a
| small SBC on my local network, then everything became blazing
| fast.
|
| That day I've found out that my ADSL modem is not very good at
| making huge amount of DNS queries to outside world, and with a
| fast DNS resolver, Firefox is actually as fast as Chrome.
|
| So, make sure that you can access your DNS servers with the speed
| they need to be accessed for a good network experience.
|
| If you want to test whether this is true, make your own
| speedtest. Download the same Linux ISO from different mirrors, or
| try different speedtest mirrors to go further than your ISP.
| darkhorn wrote:
| Use DoH. ESNI would help too.
| kortex wrote:
| I was having issues with slow load times, high latency, dropped
| packets, the works. I had been profiling it and logging my
| bandwidth with (iirc) iperf on a raspi, over the past 48h. When I
| felt like I had collected enough data, I called Spectrum to give
| em a piece of my mind. One of the first things they had me do was
| use _their_ online speedtest. Came up with 100Mbps...I had been
| getting 10 on iperf.
|
| Suddenly, my traffic quality was mysteriously better.
|
| No idea what was actually going on, but the whole thing was a bit
| sus.
|
| I definitely recommend using your own server and profiling tools
| if you are suspicious of speedtest.
| lostlogin wrote:
| Another weird one: Open fast.com and check your speed.
|
| Now reload the page and and run it again but as soon as it
| starts, open another tab and do some browsing.
|
| The second test gives me higher speeds consistently.
| toxicFork wrote:
| Of course, the pipes are unclogged
| b20000 wrote:
| i am using spectrum business and i've been paying close to
| $200/m. this is in LA in a residential building. the speed looks
| good when i run a test but i notice that page loading times are
| total shit at least initially. if i start a download for a video
| game that ramps up quickly in speed but i actually don't need
| that. what i really want is very fast resolving and page loading,
| which is different than just large downloads. i am wondering if
| other people here have the same problem and what they have done
| to fix this. i have been thinking about trying to replace my
| spectrum router with a pfsense box while still using their modem.
| but not sure if that will fix the issue. i use debian
| workstations and have gigabit ethernet for my internal network.
| dboreham wrote:
| My experience with Spectrum is that they allow a large
| accumulation of in-transit packets when traffic rate is near
| the provisioned capacity. Some people call this "buffer bloat".
|
| Some background: If you study traffic shaping, you'll discover
| that TCP behaves poorly if packets are simply dropped when
| throughput approaches the limit (congestion collapse). So
| traffic shaping usually _delays_ packets rather than dropping,
| at least initially. This works in that TCP backs off its send
| rate gracefully and throughput approaches the provisioned
| limit. However you've now introduced a large delay into every
| packet's transit through the shaper box. This isn't a problem
| for bulk TCP flows -- they work ok in the presence of latency
| but it is problematic for unrelated latency sensitive traffic
| (e.g. UDP, SSH). To work around this problem traffic shaping
| usually introduces some notion of delay per flow. This can be
| done in a few different ways e.g. RED (random early detection),
| or per-flow queues.
|
| Ok so back to Spectrum: my experience has been that their
| shaper box does not do anything good as far as per-flow queues,
| RED etc. It seems pretty basic and dumb. The result is that
| latency approaches infinity as throughput approaches the
| provisioned limit.
|
| I work around this by deploying my own shaping on my edge
| router. Through experiment, I have configured it to limit at
| just below the threshold where Spectrum begins severely
| delaying my traffic. I use RED on my router to give good
| latency for traffic unrelated to bulk flows. You'll need a
| router capable of traffic shaping, e.g. Mikrotik, Linux iptraf,
| Cisco IOS.
| orojackson wrote:
| Why recommend RED for client-side routers? Better to use more
| modern AQM approaches such as fq_codel or its successor cake
| [1][2]. Both of them are far easier to apply to client-side
| routers without fussing too much with settings: setting your
| download/upload bandwidth limits is enough to get nearly all
| of the benefits.
|
| Other than that, you're 100% correct on Spectrum's
| ridiculously high buffer sizes on their end.
|
| [1] https://tcpcc.systemsapproach.org/aqm.html#controlled-
| delay
|
| [2] https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/codel/wiki/CakeTechn
| ica...
| b20000 wrote:
| ok, thanks, still wondering what to do, build a router with
| debian or put pfsense on it or buy mikrotik or something
| else that is ready to go :)
| b20000 wrote:
| thanks. would you recommend building a linux router then or
| buying one off the shelf ready to go?
| canadaduane wrote:
| It sounds like you want lower latency?
| b20000 wrote:
| i guess so, i want instant page loads, i care less whether
| transfer is 4 or 5 MB/s
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Welcome to the world of traffic shaping and QoS.
| cscotti wrote:
| +1 - noticed the same thing twice last week. But naturally I
| thought I was just paranoid.
|
| Xfinity?
| peepop6 wrote:
| I observed this as a kid and still experience it these days.
|
| Never even questioned whether it was true because it felt so
| incredibly obvious that the ISP was dethrottling whenever they
| detected a speed test.
| AlexAndScripts wrote:
| Sounds like an opportunity to exploit for faster Internet speeds.
| Work out how they detect it and always have it thinking you are
| running a speed test.
| Proudmuslim wrote:
| I notice this too! I really hope I'm insane, because the
| implications of this are... concerning
| pmalynin wrote:
| fast.com is pretty much the only one I use these days, since that
| uses Netflix's servers.
| jl6 wrote:
| > Is there a way I can test this more scientifically?
|
| How about the following?:
|
| 1. Choose a dozen or so public files on hosts known to have high
| bandwidth (Google or Microsoft perhaps). Maybe choose a couple of
| public legal torrents too.
|
| 2. Write a script to download all the chosen files (either
| sequentially or concurrently), and emit timing information.
|
| 3. Run that script a couple of times a day at random times. Try
| to cover weekdays and weekends, days and nights.
|
| 4. Repeat 3 but running a speed test first each time. See if
| there is any statistically significant difference.
| water-your-self wrote:
| Just have ping running in the background. You can observe the
| difference yourself
| cortesoft wrote:
| A lot of network providers treat ICMP traffic differently.
| lisper wrote:
| Ping measures latency, not bandwidth.
| gerdesj wrote:
| Ping tests the possibility of connectivity and can provide a
| hint at latency. That is not a speed test.
| asdff wrote:
| Test it out by parallelizing a ton of downloads from a known good
| server and really overwhelm your connection. I find that it's not
| my ISP thats doing the throttling, its the content host at the
| other end. Steam/microsoft/even small third parties all throttle
| downloads after a while. If it was my ISP, I would see the
| throttling when I run my tester array on a server that I know for
| a fact doesn't throttle, but I don't, so its clearly the third
| party at the other end of the line trying to save money on upload
| costs. I can't blame them when everything is 4k now.
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