Throughput issues on Wave G/CondoInternet (Redmond, WA)

Sun May 10 20:41:22 UTC 2020

Hi NANOG mailing list,

I have Wave G "Gigabit" service in Redmond, WA, and download speeds have 
been slow. Wave G is Wave Broadband's MDU-focused Gigabit offering, and 
was formerly CondoInternet, although I joined only this year on a Wave 
G-branded service.

To Seattle, I cap at about 600-750 Mbps download while I get 900 Mbps 
uploads. To servers far away, it does gown to 10-30 Mbps while I can 
upload at 200-500 Mbps. The downloads speeds are far lower than what's 
normal from TCP (I **do** know higher latency == slower downloads).

The issue appears to be the window size being smaller on downloads on 
the routers on Wave G's side and that limits download throughput.

This is a Wireshark screenshot of a download test: 
https://i.imgur.com/2gXbNSZ.png

The green line is the window size, and the blue line is the outstanding 
bytes.

In comparison, this is a Wireshark screenshot of an upload test: 
https://i.imgur.com/WOGvpWx.png

The download test shows a small window size and spikes in the 
outstanding bytes and this gets reset very often after the first 
increase instead of gradually using the pipe's full capacity and then 
resetting, showing the window size can't get higher.

The upload test shows a larger window size and a sawtooth shape of the 
outstanding bytes which is what should normally happen.

This happens on both FreeBSD 13-CURRENT and Windows 10, both hardwired 
and Wi-Fi. My work Windows 10 PC via RDP and personal FreeBSD VPS 
servers have no issues whatsoever to the same exact servers, both being 
in the Seattle metro.

"Tech Support" hasn't been helpful since they insist on a tech visit 
which I believe isn't needed ("Wave G" isn't Wave's DOCSIS offering, no 
HFC issues here), or blame the issue on something outside their network 
(these issues **don't** exist outside Wave G). Ziply/Frontier and 
CenturyLink aren't available here, and why would I go to Comcast's 
overpriced, asymmetrical, capped garbage?

If someone works for Wave Broadband, or more specifically on the Wave G 
service, please shoot me an private email so we can get this resolved 
(and I can share my service details and pcap file if necessary in the 
said private email).

-Neel Chauhan

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