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AT&T Wireless traffic shaping apparently making some websites unusable

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

#211

Post by gnicholas »

egberts1 wrote: post #198
anonymousnotme wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It definitely looks like testing sites are prioritized. The fastest download speed that I have gotten is maybe 7 MB (bytes) per second; generally it is 2-5 MB per second. The speed test sites generally get 100 Mb per second dowload. In general the best I seem to get is about half the speed of the speed test sites. To me the real speed of the ISP is how fast one can download something one wants, not the result of a te…

MB = megabyte Mb = megabits 1 byte = 8-bit

For years, AT&T sales reps would refer to MB when they meant Mb. Soon after I started service with them, I called to ask about the promised speed, and the tech insisted they sold Mb/s. He conferenced in a salesperson and was embarrassed to discover that the salesperson talked exclusively in terms of MB/s.

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

#212

Post by ilikehurdles »

quanticle wrote: post #57
survirtual wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, except they leak customer data regularly and have offshored tons of customer service to India -- including onboarding. When I tried to sign up, they didn't know what an esim was and wanted my SSN, along with other data that could easily be used to steal my identity. I don't want to spend my days arguing with people, definitely not about the existence of esim; but I did that day. It went all the way up their cus…

ATT has provided the best service of any carrier while traveling, so I will use them. Really? My experience with AT&T while traveling has been pretty awful. In the US, in rural areas, Verizon is better. And outside the US, Google Fi gives you international data roaming as part of the base package. One of the reasons I switched to Google Fi is because it's so much better when traveling.

For coverage it’s Verizon > AT&T > T-Mobile. So maybe it was awful compared to Verizon, but it can be worse. I remember a doctor friend I was hiking a mountain with (La Plata, a 14k ft peak in Colorado) who took a patient call at the very summit.

As a tmo customer I know I’m essentially off-grid in much of the country when I’m outside many metropolitan areas.

But tmo is great for traveling internationally.

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

#213

Post by riceart »

kerkeslager wrote: post #205
dhosek wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Early in the pandemic, I spent a while without wired internet using a wireless hotspot from the library which would not connect to Netflix but any other streaming video service was fine. I forget who the wireless vendor behind the hotspot was—I think it might have been Verizon.

So there's a bit of a weird fact about public libraries, which is that it probably wasn't on the normal internet (Internet1) but was in fact on Internet2 (see [1]). Internet2 is used by hospitals, among other things, and as such has higher robustness requirements than Internet1. The pandemic created much higher demand for bandwidth from hospitals, forcing Internet2 providers to scramble to keep up in areas. As such,…

Not quite sure I understand - what do hospitals need a ton of bandwidth for? Why would those bandwidth requirements rise significantly during the pandemic. Sure there were a bunch of people on vents in the MICU, but pretty much every elective procedural service plummeted.

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

#214

Post by uni_rule »

riceart wrote: post #213
kerkeslager wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So there's a bit of a weird fact about public libraries, which is that it probably wasn't on the normal internet (Internet1) but was in fact on Internet2 (see [1]). Internet2 is used by hospitals, among other things, and as such has higher robustness requirements than Internet1. The pandemic created much higher demand for bandwidth from hospitals, forcing Internet2 providers to scramble to keep up in areas. As such,…

Not quite sure I understand - what do hospitals need a ton of bandwidth for? Why would those bandwidth requirements rise significantly during the pandemic. Sure there were a bunch of people on vents in the MICU, but pretty much every elective procedural service plummeted.

I'd imagine telehealth played a fairly large roll. White crispy video calls are not that demanding individually 10s to 100s of them at scale per location (and an exponential increase of calls in general) might be something more of a problem for that sort of infrastructure.

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

#215

Post by BLKNSLVR »

baby wrote: post #156
patmcc wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your ISP entirely blocked netflix? That's incredible shitty.

Heh, just revert back to pirating. That’s what I do whenever things don’t work.

From the above thread it looks as if piracy might actually be a more bandwidth economical option than streaming services. Spread the load of the bandwidth around a bit more. Download any time other than peak streaming hours to then watch, self-contained, during peak streaming hours.

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

#216

Post by riceart »

uni_rule wrote: post #214
riceart wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite sure I understand - what do hospitals need a ton of bandwidth for? Why would those bandwidth requirements rise significantly during the pandemic. Sure there were a bunch of people on vents in the MICU, but pretty much every elective procedural service plummeted.

I'd imagine telehealth played a fairly large roll. White crispy video calls are not that demanding individually 10s to 100s of them at scale per location (and an exponential increase of calls in general) might be something more of a problem for that sort of infrastructure.

There are very few medical centers where there are 100s of simultaneous clinic visits. During the pandemic a lot of providers did home telehealth. Even 100s of simultaneous telemedicine visits don’t take much bandwidth compared to HD video streaming. Also from a QoS perspective - these are still terminated on the public Internet.

It might have been difficult relative to the infrastructure at some hospitals - but that is to my point that hospitals in general are not very demanding bandwidth wise and I would be a bit surprised they’re more than a rounding error on the Internet2 in general - especially compared to all the academic research involving large models and just video streaming in general that blew up during the pandemic.

I’m curious if the GP was speaking from some firsthand experience or is just making some conjecture.

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

#217

Post by acaloiar »

kevin_nisbet wrote: post #207
acaloiar wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I considered switching APNs, but didn't want to run afoul of any AT&T rules. I went ahead and gave it a try anyway, switching from `broadband` to `NXTGENPHONE`. I wasn't able to authenticate with `NXTGENPHONE`, so I switched it back to `broadband`. After re-authenticating, I'm no longer being throttled. I'm both happy and deeply dissatisfied with this outcome because I think now I'm less likely to get to the bottom o…

You're welcome. This just reminded me of the IT Crowd... Have you tried turning it off and on again. By disconnecting / reconnecting by trying the APN switch, it might've just put you on a different P-GW that has a different traffic shaping configuration or current state.

It'll never get old or become poor advice :)

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

#218

Post by canadianfella »

fjni wrote: post #35

> I already knew from previous experience that 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, but I digress This I think is because they throttle ip addresses for known video streaming sites. That is one of (the only reliable) ways an ISP can get the streaming provider to drop the stream to a lower quality one by default. Since fast.co…

[dead]

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

#219

Post by nine_k »

alexpotato wrote: post #177

Back in the early 2000's, I worked for a small company that was hired by the law firm representing one of the big cable companies (let's call them Company A). Company A was suing another big cable company (Company X) b/c A claimed that X was throttling customers without telling them and advertising what were in effect unthrottled bandwidth numbers. In order to prove this, the company I worked for went out and hired p…

Businesses, like teenagers, always keep probing the limits of what's allowed or tolerated.

As long as it's an out-of-court settlement for a moderate sum, it's just a cost of doing business, a cost of R&D of sorts, only in the legal area. (Similar with taxes.)

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

#220

Post by noobcoder »

neurostimulant wrote: post #75
avianlyric wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Said the other way around: fast.com is great to see actual throughput from Netflix as opposed to some fake throughout from a dedicated speed test site for the exact same reason. Yup. This is pretty much the reason Netflix created fast.com. They wanted a speed test service that couldn’t be gamed by ISPs. Many ISPs will prioritise traffic to know speed test services (like Ookla’s speedtest.net), making their services…

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…

Mine did the same and charged for bundles of HBO Max, Netflix, Disney+ Until recently they reverted it after bunch of complains and tonnes of people changing their ISP
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