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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

#281

Post by anonymousnotme »

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

I was trying to ask if there was something more that the speed test do other than multiple or divide by 8. Is some other overhead that they add in? If not, then their math or testing seem to be off or curl/wget seem to be different than they get via the browser's javascript engine. To me it seems that the speed test number is inflated or higher than what one will even for the same URL off of netflix or cloudflares URLs used in their speed tests.

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

#282

Post by tzs »

eurleif wrote: post #145
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…

I recently discovered that T-Mobile does this too, but they actually let you disable it on their site. Ostensibly, it's a feature for your benefit (somehow), and they're doing you a favor by enabling it by default. In reality, of course, it's for their own benefit, and they're banking on people not realizing it can be disabled. I suppose giving you the option lets them advertise things like "no throttling" and "4K st…

> Ostensibly, it's a feature for your benefit (somehow), and they're doing you a favor by enabling it by default.

Some throttling by default for video actually is sort of for your benefit, at least indirectly, although I don't know if carriers are throttling more than that amount.

A surprisingly large number of people nowadays watch movies on their phones or small tablets. On screens that size at the distances they typically hold them from their eyes 4K and usually 1080p won't offer any visible improvement over 720p. On some devices even 720p probably won't offer an improvement over 480p.

It is to everyone's benefit if other people on the network don't stream at a higher resolution than is necessary to reach the limit of what is visible. Since most people aren't going to change any settings from the default, defaulting to low speed streams maximizes benefits.

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

#283

Post by Scoundreller »

catminou wrote: post #277
ShroudedNight wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As it turns out, I am a Bell retail customer being held hostage by their refusal to engage in seemingly any settlement-free peering with other Canadian networks. I am only their customer because the third-party providers indicated that they were unable to provide service despite Bell DSL service being subject to local-loop unbundling. As the monopoly incumbent that has received significant subsidy to develop their se…

I agree in that the Canadian ISP market has had a rough ride for a long time. Until the mid 2000s when Cogent and other folks (GTT) rolled into Canada, TELUS, Bell and other companies were charging obscene rates for IP transit. For several years the TELUS and Bell peering PNIs (OC12s back then) would run hot regularly in domestic Canada - for years. You'll never get them to peer openly, but at best you can get them t…

> You’ll never get them to peer openly

Maybe I’ve got it wrong, but don’t my peeringdb links suggest Bell and Telus do peer openly, but only on US soil?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35595697

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

#284

Post by catminou »

Scoundreller wrote: post #283
catminou wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree in that the Canadian ISP market has had a rough ride for a long time. Until the mid 2000s when Cogent and other folks (GTT) rolled into Canada, TELUS, Bell and other companies were charging obscene rates for IP transit. For several years the TELUS and Bell peering PNIs (OC12s back then) would run hot regularly in domestic Canada - for years. You'll never get them to peer openly, but at best you can get them t…

> You’ll never get them to peer openly Maybe I’ve got it wrong, but don’t my peeringdb links suggest Bell and Telus do peer openly, but only on US soil? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35595697

My recollection is that they're still selective in the US. Maybe that's changed.

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

#285

Post by bagels »

bagels wrote: post #192
crazygringo wrote: post #34

But why would AT&T be throttling Cloudfront requests specifically? That's not traffic shaping, it's just dumb. Traffic shaping is slowing down types of traffic like torrents or video in order to prioritize regular sites. But this is degrading regular sites that are usually what benefit from traffic shaping if there's overall network congestion. I'm not questioning anything the author reports, it all seems extremely w…

They are probably targeting video content on CloudFront, and it's easier/cheaper to do by domain or ip vs content inspection (when even possible due to encryption). I experienced the same thing when building a large scale video service, but with Comcast. I did extensive testing to isolate it to any direct connection to aws (CloudFront or other aws services).

Adding to this, the only effective solution I found for Comcast customers was to use akamai, as they paid the Comcast troll toll. It was night and day.

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

#286

Post by pizzalife »

hedora wrote: post #152
bscphil wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Since fast.com is a Netflix ip, and the isp can’t distinguish whether it’s video that is being transferred or a file to measure throughout, It is really trivial to do basic traffic snooping and see what people are looking at. I'm surprised it isn't more common. I figured it would be harder, or perform worse, but I easily wrote a little piece of software that filters the TLS ClientHello for arbitrary domains. Maybe…

People drastically overestimate the security properties of TLS. The correct mental model is that it’s good enough to convince 1990’s US internet users to type their credit card into a web page. (Where the downside of a breach is that you have to dispute some charges and change your CC#.) If you need stronger security than that, then many, many caveats start to apply. For instance, by default, anyone that can reliably…

>For instance, by default, anyone that can reliably man-in-the-middle port 80 on your website can get an acme certificate for your domain from a reputable certificate authority.

You are leaving out a huge caveat here - exactly where the MITM is taking place matters a lot. In 99% cases this isn't possible unless the victim server network is effectively compromised.

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

#287

Post by SpaghettiJimmy »

AlecSchueler wrote: post #258
froggit wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always disliked how wasteful streaming is in respect bandwidth consumption. However, the "efficiency be damned, just make it fasterer" attitude towards bandwidth is, if not the biggest, then definitely among the biggest, drivers behind the ever increasing internet throughput. Thinking about it, it seems like watching habits could make streaming be more or less "efficient" compared to downloading once and storing…

With music it's quite different though, I often have the same albums on rotation and it's great to be able to cache them all locally.

Couldn't agree more. I've stopped paying to stream music entirely and now pay to own FLAC files which I store and use on my PC and phone. Almost like regressing back to having an iPod, and I personally love it.

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

#288

Post by bagels »

chasing wrote: post #181
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…

As I learned the hard way once, when AT&T say “unlimited” they mean up to a certain amount for data. Y’know. Like how Olive Garden offers unlimited breadsticks but then when you get your bill they charge you $40 for each breadstick over the unlimited amount of 2.

Surely that is a joke? They don't actually charge $40 for breadsticks, do they?

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

#289

Post by varenc »

acaloiar wrote: post #140
varenc wrote: post #126

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 w…

Fair nit. Although this is why I chose to focus on transfer rates instead of time. But consider this. When I load Strava's dashboard, open the Network tab and search for "cloudfront", these are the metrics: > 374 requests 15.80 MB / 7.07 MB transferred Finish: 4.89 min This is not a good time, and no amount of compression is going to help the situation.

Oh I absolutely agree! That's some sketchy stuff. Didn't mean to sound like I was discounting the rest of your experience.

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

#290

Post by Dylan16807 »

NoZebra120vClip wrote: post #228
Dylan16807 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what you mean. Most buffets won't limit you.

Buffets have inherent limits in the way they do things. It's just transparent to you unless you know what to look for. Limited buffet hours. Most Indian buffets are lunchtime only, and the restaurant is open, say, 11am-1pm, and then closes until dinner. Indian buffets are often leftovers from last night's dinner, too, so there's a limit to the amount of food that they won't cook more. Size of plates, bowls, glasses.…

It's still fair to say unlimited for all of those except not cooking more. Much like you can easily have an unlimited 1gbps connection. (Or 'unmetered' is advertised sometimes.)
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