Slow ISP Connection

zorric.sia · ‎05-27-2008

Hello,

We've had a 20M Internet connection with AT&T for a while now and it's been working fine. When my laptop is directly connected to the circuit, I can run various speed tests and get close to 18M-19M which I'm fine with.

We recently just implemented a 30M Time Warner Internet connection. When i run the same tests, my results average 7M-10M. This is unacceptable based on the fact we are paying for 30M. I spoke to Time Warner and together we ran iperf tests against servers on their internal network. Within their network I'm getting 30M, and based on that they keep telling me I'm getting what I paid for. My argument is I'm paying for a 30M internet connection, and not for 30M within Time Warner's internal network.

I was told by a manager at Time Warner that AT&T has better peering arrangements than Time Warner. Does this have anything to do with the performance issues I am having?

Any thoughts or recommendations on what i should do?

Thanks in advance.

Pavel Bykov · ‎05-29-2008

First, you need to quantify your problem.

What is speed, really? Network cannot send data at other rates than wire speed. So it depends what speed limiting mechanisms they implement.

I feel that your problem could be because ATT implemented SHAPING and TW implements policing.

Policing drops packets, and TCP connection suffers. There isn't much problem when there are a lot of TCP connections, but still this could be one of the reasons.

What you need to do first is run a raw End-to-End throughput test. ICMP, UDP... any connectionless protocol without higher intelligence (TFTP has higher intelligence and uses UDP).

jaleelahmed.sd · ‎07-31-2008

pls. checke with your both providers for shapping device placed on thr networks and also make sure the policing/rate-limiting are done for your subscribed bandwidth only.

more over you can use wan killer (bandwidth testing tool) for end to end bandwidth availability.

regards