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AT&T Wireless traffic shaping apparently making some websites unusable

adriano.fyi

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

#121

Post by Tarball10 »

ekosz wrote: post #91

We've been hearing complaints from AT&T users for months now that our website ( https://vstream.com ) doesn't work for them. I've tried hunting down the reasons & tried getting in touch with AT&T to no avail. This seems like it could be the very thing that's causing the issues for our users. Now I just need to figure out what to tell our users that are having these issues...

This appears to load fine for me on both AT&T fiber and AT&T cellular. It looks like all content on that site is being loaded from Cloudflare, so I'm curious if those users would be having issues with other Cloudflare protected sites as well?

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

#122

Post by [deleted] »

dspillett wrote: post #120
neurostimulant wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now that my ISP bundles Netflix subscription into their internet plans, access to netflix and fast.com now practically saturate the fiber link, while before it was outright blocked. Hooray for no net neutrality I guess. Another fun part: when netflix IPs was blocked by this ISP, it's pretty much impossible to use netflix because the only way to get around the block was to use VPN, but netflix itself blocks VPN access…

> Now that my ISP bundles Netflix subscription into their internet plans, access to netflix and fast.com now practically saturate the fiber link They may have an ISP-local netflix cache, from Netflix themselves not some home-grown hack, so they can achieve that with some reliability without it costing as much as it otherwise would for bandwidth peering.

[deleted]

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

#123

Post by mikeryan »

Animats wrote: post #96

Remember how 5G was supposed to support "the metaverse"?[1] I've been working on a high performance metaverse client. All Rust, all multi-threaded. Designed to max out a gamer PC. Supports Second Life and Open Simulator. Second Life had a reputation for being sluggish. Fixing that. I'm pulling content from the servers at 200Mb/s, sustained. 400Mb/s in tests, but don't need to go that fast. The servers (AWS front-ende…

In theory yes? But 5G deployment is still catching up to LTE so It’s still going to be dependent on how saturated the bandwidth is. I’ve found that in some crowded situations (conferences and the ilk) switching to LTE actually performs better.

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

#124

Post by DangitBobby »

dboreham wrote: post #119
Animats wrote: post #96

Remember how 5G was supposed to support "the metaverse"?[1] I've been working on a high performance metaverse client. All Rust, all multi-threaded. Designed to max out a gamer PC. Supports Second Life and Open Simulator. Second Life had a reputation for being sluggish. Fixing that. I'm pulling content from the servers at 200Mb/s, sustained. 400Mb/s in tests, but don't need to go that fast. The servers (AWS front-ende…

Unlimited is a term of art that means "limited".

Can we just start calling fraud by its own name?

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

#125

Post by Tarball10 »

acaloiar wrote: post #67
Tarball10 wrote: post #52

AT&T uses different APNs for regular phone plans and data-only hotspot plans. It's very possible that the phone traffic is being routed completely differently than the hotspot traffic, with congestion at a peering point occurring on the hotspot. AT&T tends to be known for having poor/congested peering. You could try changing the DNS server on your hotspot to a different public resolver like 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8. If Clo…

Good tip. I just tried with both and wasn't routed to a faster point of presence with either. I'll add a traceroute from the phone and one from a device connected to the LTE router to the updates section next. [update] Traceroutes added

It's definitely odd that you're getting routed across the country to an east coast pop. Ideally in your location you'd be routed to a west or central pop. Perhaps a bad combination of Cloudfront getting geolocation wrong for your IP range, and poor performance of at&t's network for that specific source-destination combination.

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

#126

Post by varenc »

One nit of the author's analysis:

The Strava javascript file used for speed tests is 1.68MB uncompressed. But in a browser and most all other situations it should be requested with `Accept-Encoding: ...`. In Chrome, Strava responds with a gzipped response that's 463kB in size.

This doesn't really matter for the CLI speed tests, when its requested without compression, but it does mean that the speed test performance won't correspond with the actual in-browser performance and the traffic shaping may not be comparable when the request is made without compression. Adding `--compression=gzip` to the wget command will fix this.

To quickly show the difference:

   $ curl -s 'https://web-assets.strava.com/assets/federated/find-and-invite-friends/827.js'  --compressed -w '%{size_download}\n' -o /dev/null
   462525
   $ curl -s 'https://web-assets.strava.com/assets/federated/find-and-invite-friends/827.js' -w '%{size_download}\n' -o /dev/null
   1759662

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

#127

Post by Meleagris »

fjni wrote: post #113
kevin_nisbet wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I had this conversation with one of the traffic shaping vendors many years ago. At the time when encryption still wasn't that common, they didn't sound too worried about the shift to all encrypted connections. Their product was already starting to use a behavioral analysis to shape the traffic most of their customers were interested in. So to detect bittorrent, they'd build a profile about how many bit torrent cli…

This is great insight. Thank you for that. I imagine lots of people are or have spent lots of money and time trying to figure out the type of data or connection from patterns as you say. A more nuanced and correct statement would have been to say that it's much harder to do than it used to be, when you could just look at the mime-type or similar to figure out what to throttle.

If you're interested in learning more, deep packet inspection, and specifically "encrypted traffic classification" are fairly mature in industry. Many traffic shapers are using products like Enea's Qosmos ixEngine or home-grown equivalents which can identify thousands of applications and protocols.

Most providers that use traffic shaping don't care about content, and the encrypted traffic classification is enough to make traffic policy decisions.

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

#128

Post by PhilippGille »

Animats wrote: post #96

Remember how 5G was supposed to support "the metaverse"?[1] I've been working on a high performance metaverse client. All Rust, all multi-threaded. Designed to max out a gamer PC. Supports Second Life and Open Simulator. Second Life had a reputation for being sluggish. Fixing that. I'm pulling content from the servers at 200Mb/s, sustained. 400Mb/s in tests, but don't need to go that fast. The servers (AWS front-ende…

I'm interested in more info about your client. Is it open source, is there a website or blog post about it?

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

#129

Post by ehPReth »

Bell in Canada is doing the same with their new 'unlimited' (vs the previous generation 'unlimited') and their cheaper data plans.

Even if you have any amount of 'fast data' left you're throttled to SD speeds for streaming video unless you pay for the higher tier of their plans. Data isn't equal any more. Their higher plans say "HD video is up to 1080p" so I suppose no 1440p/4K/60fps/etc either.

It's honestly fucking infuriating but there's nothing that can be done except use a VPN I guess. I'm on the previous generation so "data is data" and they don't throttle me yet but if I ever change plans it's there.

I'm not totally sure if the other carriers do (or their 'competition' in forms of MVNOs that they themselves own) but they tend to have a habit of copying each other, at least after a little delay.

https://www.bell.ca/Mobility/Cell_phone_plans/Unlimited-plan... (select your local area or just choose Ontario)

bonus fun bs:

every so often when you try to log into the web portal they try to trick you into letting them build a profile off your browsing/usage data so they can make even more money off of you. a popup with 'advertising is a reality in today's world' comes up with the nice attractive 'get this out of my face so I can do things' blue button being 'yes please opt me in'. shady dark pattern!

back when, they used to opt people in by default and make you explicitly opt out... but then the regulators said hey that's illegal. so now they resort to stuff like that to get the numbers back up.

here's some of the blurb if anyone is interested: "Advertising is a reality in today’s world, and people find that they receive ads that are irrelevant to them. With our tailored marketing program, Bell will work to ensure that the offers participants receive when using our services may be more relevant, rather than random marketing ads. In other words, participants won’t see more ads, just more relevant ads."

full text: https://pastebin.com/ESskYEUy it's honestly super gross what they collect and how they try to trick people into agreeing.

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

#130

Post by judge2020 »

radicaldreamer wrote: post #115
judge2020 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing with Fi is that it is T-Mobile, and you'll always be in a lower priority block of customers compared to people paying for T-Mobile directly, which mean you'll see slower traffic in congested areas at peak times (including e.g. during rush hour traffic).

Thats not true, Google Fi has the same priority as postpaid T-Mobile. This is something MVNOs negotiate in their contracts with carriers, not something thats true across the board. Discount MVNOs increase their margins by buying wholesale deprioritized data while Google Fi has negotiated the no deprioritization.

Is this talked about somewhere? All I see is this reddit post[0] by u/Peterfield53, which looks like a very active user on r/GoogleFi but doesn't seem to be a Googler or otherwise a Google Fi support agent.

0: https://old.reddit.com/r/GoogleFi/comments/ulc1t5/perks_of_f...

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