QUIC traffic throttled on AT&T residential

Wed Feb 19 19:54:27 UTC 2020

On 2/18/2020 6:00 PM, Ca By wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 18, 2020 at 5:44 PM Daniel Sterling 
> <sterling.daniel at gmail.com <mailto:sterling.daniel at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     I've AT&T fiber (in RTP, NC) (AS7018) and I notice UDP QUIC traffic
>     from google (esp. youtube) becomes very slow after a time.
>
>     This especially occurs with ipv4 connections. I'm not the only one to
>     notice; a web search for e.g. "Extremely Poor Youtube TV Performance"
>     notes the issue.
>
>     I assume traffic is being throttled on AT&T's side. And it's not done
>     with their CPE; I'm bypassing their NAT box and connecting my laptop
>     directly to the ONT.
>
>     A quick google search shows people are aware that QUIC can look like
>     DoS traffic -- but how widely known is this problem? It may become
>     worse if / when sites transition to HTTP/3
>
>     For now I reject UDP 443 on the client firewall. Applications using
>     QUIC client libraries then fallback to TCP. This works well and I have
>     no issues with latency or throughput when using TCP.
>
>     May I naively ask if Google staff are working with AT&T to address
>     this?
>
>
> Sounds like you found the answer, ATT just needs to scale up your 
> rejection approach that is proven to work well.
>
> Yes, most ddos traffic is ipv4 udp and yes Google was made aware that 
> they would be mixing with bad company in the pool of ipv4 udp traffic 
> ... but they have reasons.
>
> I am not a fan of quic or any udp traffic. My suggestion was that 
> Google use an new L4 instead of UDP, but that was too hard for the 
> Googlers.
>
> So here we are.
>
> Just say no to udp.

Isn't this exactly why Net Neutrality is a thing: So that people (or 
companies) are free to develop new applications or enhance existing ones 
without running into a quagmire of different policies implemented by any 
number of different networks between the application developer and the 
application's users?

For what it's worth, Cox cable also treats UDP traffic differently - 
impacting the performance of VPNs using UDP. Cox provides a list of 
blocked ports on their website, but makes no mention that they throttle 
or otherwise treat UDP as a special case. I'm guessing ATT doesn't 
disclose this policy transparently either.

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