Traffic Shaping on ISPs

Thu Sep 10 10:45:04 UTC 2009

BT/Virgin throttling information:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/11/virgin_media_throttle_extension/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/07/bt_samknows_bandwidth_throttling/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8077839.stm
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/5431052/BT-admits-limiting-download-speeds-and-throttling-iPlayer-traffic.html

It looks like the throttling window lines up fairly well with the
times you're seeing problems. Now, if that's the throttling, or just
BT's network being oversubscribed... who knows.

Good luck getting your problem cleared up.

---- Harrison Grundy

On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 4:49 AM, Jake Vargas<jvargas at crypticstudios.com> wrote:
>> While I cannot confirm officially, there is a lot of rumors, that several
>> larger UK ISP's are throttling traffic at that time period.
>> I am not sure who to contact, but the individual ISP's to solve this, from
>> your point, maybe another NANOG'er knows.
>
> Hi Lasse,
>
> Thanks for the reply. We wrote an app to reveal troubles.
>
> Just to satisfy any curiosity and get some facts out, I will provide a real world example (1 of many) from a direct test of one of our BT sourced customers (this is from a 08-29 test at ~22:04 hours GMT):
>
> Date                    IP                      RTT     Port    ActualRecv      NicSent NicRecv
> 090829 22:04:24 86.128.0.0/10   103.5   80      199     13      214
> 090829 22:04:24 86.128.0.0/10           103.5   80      199     13      214
> 090829 22:04:24 86.128.0.0/10           103.5   443     200     12      215
> 090829 22:04:24 86.128.0.0/10           103.5   443     199     12      214
> 090829 22:04:24 86.128.0.0/10           103.5   7255    2       2       5
> 090829 22:04:24 86.128.0.0/10           103.5   7255    3       1       4
> 090829 22:04:24 86.128.0.0/10           103.5   7003    3       2       5
> 090829 22:04:24 86.128.0.0/10           103.5   7003    4       1       5
> 090829 22:04:24 86.128.0.0/10           103.5   7202    27      3       32
> 090829 22:04:24 86.128.0.0/10           103.5   7202    24      2       29
> 090829 22:04:24 86.128.0.0/10           103.5   7499    27      3       32
> 090829 22:04:24 86.128.0.0/10           103.5   7499    25      2       31
> 090829 22:04:24 86.128.0.0/10           103.5   80      195     13      206
> Idle NIC bandwidth  Send:     0 KB/sec   Recv:     0 KB/sec
>
> To remove any doubt we also measured idle bandwidth utilization on the NIC when the test wasn't run to remove any other culprit such as torrent download, A/V streaming and etc in the background. In this case, 0/0 on idle use. All results are in KBytes
>
> I withheld the actual IP address of this test and replaced it from the source prefix. We have quite a few iterations of similar results from other source addresses from this prefix alone. All appear to exhibit the same issue.
>
> I've already written British Telecom and they never replied.
>
>
>