adsl bandwidth issue - looking for suggestions!

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bbct
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adsl bandwidth issue - looking for suggestions!

Post by bbct » Thu Apr 26, 2012 7:37 pm

Hi,
I live far enough from the CO that 1.5Mbs down and 384 up has been the norm since I got DSL. Recently, I've experienced an odd issue that nobody seems able to fully understand or address. They all want to blame equipment at my end, which simply is not the case. The following graphs come from my router running Tomato firmware, but I can recreate this issue with my Windows 7 desktop plugged directly into my DSL router. The DSL is clean, I just had a tech here yesterday, and I now have a slightly newer modem showing no errors are occurring. So the issue must be further into the ATT / SBC network.

I have a site to site OpenVPN with the office, over which I use an IP phone. No QOS, but it works pretty well. But it makes this issue very noticeable. While traffic is nicely occurring, when I open a new page or suddenly require more bandwidth, the ATT network seems to respond by cutting off ALL of my downstream for a 1-3 second time period. Below is a graph showing a 10 minute window, during which time I was on the phone, and I lost my signal from the other side of the conversation three times, all three times when a sudden demand for bandwidth occurred. Not only is the page that started loading stalled, but everything is stalled, even my OpenVPN UDP packet stream gets interrupted. Notice, the outbound traffic continues. The person on the other end of the line hears my fine during these 3 second outages. So the DSL is working fine... No errors are reported on my equipment. Perhaps I should have ATT figure out what equipment is the next hop down, and have them run diagnostics on that?

This is so strange, I'm just looking to see if anybody has a plausible explanation for such behavior that I can then try to diagnose. Do you think going to 3Mbs DSL might resolve the issue? I don't see how, but... Should I just go with a new ISP? What do you think? What should I ask ATT to do to help diagnose/resolve this?

Thanks in advance for any advice. Here is the graph of 10 minutes today:

The graph shows way to the left a drop out while on the phone. There was another drop out right before that call ended. I started another call and there was one more drop out of bandwidth during that call.
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duke
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Re: adsl bandwidth issue - looking for suggestions!

Post by duke » Tue Nov 27, 2012 2:20 pm

so what you're saying is that something upstream is throttling your bandwidth sort of like a DDOS protection
are you running encrypted streams ?
is data traffic always going on? or is it burst_y ?
can you try running ping with 1400 packet size to any web address and then perform the previous test if you still see the throttle ?
bbct
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Re: adsl bandwidth issue - looking for suggestions!

Post by bbct » Tue Nov 27, 2012 4:47 pm

Thanks for your interest. I gave up, and traded my 1.4Mb/s $14/mo DSL plan for 12Mb/s $$$ UVerse. The problem went away :-)
The problem did not seem to be between the CO and the house, in that there were no errors found when the techs came. But nobody would investigate any further into the network to give me a straight answer.

While I liked the old price better, I can't say I mind having the additional bandwidth!
duke
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Re: adsl bandwidth issue - looking for suggestions!

Post by duke » Tue Nov 27, 2012 5:12 pm

on a side note u verse tech support is based in india at multiple outsourcing companies here orange convergys and others just a little FYI
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