Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AT&T Wireless traffic shaping apparently making some websites unusable

adriano.fyi

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 305 posts

Re: AT&T Wireless traffic shaping apparently making some websites unusable

#41

Post by esalman »

Fun story: I work remotely for an org located in the Bay area. Few months ago I get a call early morning from the IT security person. Apparently someone had been trying to RDP into my work laptop, over a thousand attempts per day for last couple of days.

What changed before the last couple of days? My laptop was frequently dropping WiFi connection- a lot of times in the middle of zoom meetings. We use a router provided by AT&T. My wife complained of the same thing, so I thought I'll ping their customer support.

The customer support person proceeded to tell us they wanted to reconfigure our router to enable "5G". After some bewilderment we realized they were talking about 2.4G vs. 5G WiFi. And they will do it remotely. Ok fine go ahead, we said, and forgot about it.. until I got the call from my office IT security.

Apparently the AT&T support person left our router in passthrough mode. According to their K/B, "Placing a device in passthrough mode will remove firewall protection provided by the AT&T gateway."

I reset my router to default settings, and got myself a 100ft Ethernet cable to fix the issues.

Re: AT&T Wireless traffic shaping apparently making some websites unusable

#42

Post by dublinben »

whatshisface wrote: post #10
exabrial wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easy. goto here: https://www.att.com/support log in. cancel. tell them why. goto https://www.t-mobile.com port your number and sign up. and you're done! You can't legislate good behavior. You can only hit them in the checkbook. Wireless fortunately doesn't have the cable providers do, where local governments have entrenched players into local monopolies. Switching away is the most powerful thing you can do.

This seems like a good idea if t-mobile doesn't have traffic shaping, but do they?

T-Mobile was one of the earliest violators of net-neutrality: https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/publications/t-mobile-likely-v...

Re: AT&T Wireless traffic shaping apparently making some websites unusable

#43

Post by dghlsakjg »

canes123456 wrote: post #19
lopkeny12ko wrote: post #14

While everyone knows that all wireless carriers are universally terrible, I've actually had a fairly noneventful (read: good) experience with T-Mobile over the last decade. I've never observed evidence of traffic shaping or any other shady business (like capturing NXDOMAIN DNS responses and directing you to a sponsored search page). I've also never observed significant performance degradation from congestion-based pr…

Many of their plans downscale video, or at least they used to

On my older plan, they downscale video from some providers to 720, but don’t include that video in my data count.

I can opt out, but then any streaming goes against my high speed data limit.

I think it’s actually a pretty fair trade off.

Re: AT&T Wireless traffic shaping apparently making some websites unusable

#44

Post by reaperman »

jskier wrote: post #24

Ditto, same in a rural area of Wisconsin I'm at a lot, for the past 3 years or so. Like, 3/4 of the Internet is slow through their shaping garbage. What worked for me was using WireGuard to my home network in an urban area (1 gig symmetrical fiber), or, using an ssh ~ socks proxy. Problems no more, until they decide to block those. Support has been awful, best of luck if you go that route. They took us off their unli…

I use a VPN to a cheap server in a lesser-known datacenter. Also works for bypassing government level blocks in middle eastern countries.

But yes, AT&T throttles a wide diversity of content, even on their very highest tier plan (Unlimited Elite, now named Unlimited Premium). This is advertised as never throttling, no matter how much data you use (all other customers are supposed to get throttled first).

Also the throttling happens with mobile hotspot, I have to use VPN on my laptop with many many sites as well, even when I'm inside the "40GB/mo of unthrottled hotspot data".

The speeds instantly go way, way up once I hop on VPN.

Re: AT&T Wireless traffic shaping apparently making some websites unusable

#45

Post by sodality2 »

lopkeny12ko wrote: post #37
canes123456 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of their plans downscale video, or at least they used to

I've never experienced this. How would this even work for encrypted (HTTPS) streams? Even if this were technically feasible, it sounds like a massive infrastructure investment with little to no value. T-Mobile would need to have enough compute and network horsepower to DPI all outbound traffic, intercept every video stream, detect if it's over some resolution threshold, and re-encode it at a lower resolution or bit r…

Throttle video CDN ISP/ASN's

Re: AT&T Wireless traffic shaping apparently making some websites unusable

#46

Post by sgtfrankieboy »

chrsjxn wrote: post #40

You've got to love a website that makes text selection invisible by default. I'd probably double check assumptions on the cloudfront issues. Switching carriers or adding VPN might connect you to a different edge node. Some web assets being throttled for specific AT&T accounts seems a little too targeted to just be traffic shaping. I'd expect them to throttle traffic for all users, like they do with the speed tests.

>You've got to love a website that makes text selection invisible by default.

First time seeing it being invisible, mostly they just disable it. Terribly annoying practice. I often select text while reading articles.

Re: AT&T Wireless traffic shaping apparently making some websites unusable

#47

Post by dghlsakjg »

lopkeny12ko wrote: post #37
canes123456 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of their plans downscale video, or at least they used to

I've never experienced this. How would this even work for encrypted (HTTPS) streams? Even if this were technically feasible, it sounds like a massive infrastructure investment with little to no value. T-Mobile would need to have enough compute and network horsepower to DPI all outbound traffic, intercept every video stream, detect if it's over some resolution threshold, and re-encode it at a lower resolution or bit r…

It is in collaboration with certain video providers.

YouTube over mobile for me is downscaled to 720p. In exchange, that doesn’t get counted in my high speed allotment of data.

I can opt out, but then my data can get deprioritized over a certain threshold.

Re: AT&T Wireless traffic shaping apparently making some websites unusable

#48

Post by chrsjxn »

sgtfrankieboy wrote: post #46
chrsjxn wrote: post #40

You've got to love a website that makes text selection invisible by default. I'd probably double check assumptions on the cloudfront issues. Switching carriers or adding VPN might connect you to a different edge node. Some web assets being throttled for specific AT&T accounts seems a little too targeted to just be traffic shaping. I'd expect them to throttle traffic for all users, like they do with the speed tests.

>You've got to love a website that makes text selection invisible by default. First time seeing it being invisible, mostly they just disable it. Terribly annoying practice. I often select text while reading articles.

Same here!

I think it helps me read faster online, but it's probably just a fidget-y habit.

Re: AT&T Wireless traffic shaping apparently making some websites unusable

#49

Post by dghlsakjg »

maximilianroos wrote: post #31

> for some reason, AT&T traffic to fast.com is throttled. Why AT&T wants bandwidth to appear lower than reality is a mystery to me My guess is that Netflix is throttled, and given that fast.com is a Netflix site, fast.com is throttled too.

Netflix intentionally hosts fast.com on the same IPs as their video sites. It is a very intentional way for consumers to see if their isp is throttling Netflix.

Re: AT&T Wireless traffic shaping apparently making some websites unusable

#50

Post by LoganDark »

esalman wrote: post #41

Fun story: I work remotely for an org located in the Bay area. Few months ago I get a call early morning from the IT security person. Apparently someone had been trying to RDP into my work laptop, over a thousand attempts per day for last couple of days. What changed before the last couple of days? My laptop was frequently dropping WiFi connection- a lot of times in the middle of zoom meetings. We use a router provid…

> Placing a device in passthrough mode will remove firewall protection provided by the AT&T gateway

Did... did they seriously turn the router into a DMZ*, without your consent? Where every port of your computer is just open to the internet?

That's scary.

*that's what it was called on my router, the "forward every single port to one device" mode. Not sure if that is the correct term for it.

Post reply on HN