The Great New Zealand Internet Slow-Down

I have been having problems recently with my international Internet connection slowing down during peak times in the evening.

Do you remember the bad old days when you got home from school/work and the modem couldn’t dial up your ISP because the line was overloaded?

Well it appears we have similar congestion back for a lot of people on heavily contested networks.

I personally have a few factors playing against me.

1) I live right at the edge of the Mount Eden exchange – my line attenuation is 32.6 dB (downstream) / 16 dB (upstream)

2) I’m not in Telecom’s plans to upgrade in the next two years - https://telecomwholesale.co.nz/maps

All that said I get a pretty good connection

Downstream rate: 6183 kbps
Upstream rate: 995 kbps

This leads me to the troubling trend that I have been noticing:

My international connection is slowing down to a crawl every evening between 6-8pm!

In a “grass is greener moment” I moved my Internet from Snap to Orcon a process that completed yesterday.

Unfortunately it didn’t improve my slow evening broadband problem.

So during the worst time last night I thought I’d conduct a twitter survey to see what sort of speeds others were getting.

Unfortunately as you see from the results below there appears to be no rhyme or reason as to the results.

Orcon

My connection to Washington @ 8pm last night

@themorgan around the same time with the same ISP

@nzben around the same time with the same ISP

@nakedgeek about an hour later on the same ISP

Snap

@nzadhall around the same time with SNAP

Telecom

@venzann on Telecom about an hour later

@dean_m from Telecom an hour and a half later

Telstra Clear

@chakkaradeep from Telstra Clear in Wellington about an hour later

@nathanm from Telstra Clear

Vodafone

@DylanReeve two and a half hours later

On the face of it the data above points to a congestion problem that seems to affect some isp’s/ exchanges more than others during peak times. What it doesn’t explain is why @themorgan’s Internet was rocking while others on the same ISP couldn’t get any sort of decent throughput at all.

Incidentally I did run another speed test on orcon from home at 6:30am this morning and my connection is back to normal.

I see more rants about this stuff over on the geekzone forums.

My question now is am I going to be better of with another ISP? Is it worth moving again after only one day with Orcon? If so who should I go with?

Comments

• Anonymous
  November 03, 2009
  Interesting, I went away for Labour weekend came back Monday and had the same thing happen all week. Based in Ponsonby on Vodafone. Be keen to hear a response from the ISPs. -Ben

• Anonymous
  November 03, 2009
  I experience the same nightly drop off (manifest mostly with impaired youtube performance). I can usually get great ADSL1 speed - around 7MB down. Between 6pm and 9pm it slows markedly - down to well under 2MB. My ISP is World Exchange. A friend who works there lets me know when they have just bought more international bandwidth, and I see a corresponding increase in speed, but it gets absorbed in a manner of weeks.

• Anonymous
  November 03, 2009
  One thing of interest in last nights figures is that your result was from Olympia WA whereas everyone elses was from Seattle WA. This could explain the difference between your result being half that of the others from the same ISP. Would also be interesting to poll who is on straight ADSL vs ADSL2+ and compare each local connection speed at the same time.

• Anonymous
  November 03, 2009
  Yeah I made a mistake and clicked the wrong server. That said straight afterwards I did try on Seattle WA and got very similar results. I think everyone was ADSL2+ except for the two Wellington Telstra users who were on Saturn fibre I think.

• Anonymous
  November 03, 2009
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  November 03, 2009
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  November 03, 2009
  I think perhaps Morgan's suggestion of exchange congestion might be correct. Airdale St is probably hooked right up to the Auckland peering point? That means Orcon gets massive data speeds? Whereas on all other auckland exchanges they're using whatever gammy backhaul Telecom wholesale provides?  

• Anonymous
  November 04, 2009
  I've been having severe problems with TelstraClear (cable) for a few weeks. It's particularly with international traffic, but not just in the evenings. I regularly have to VPN to my work, and go out through my work ISP (Xtreme) or use my 3G vodafone card to get any work done. It's really only the last few weeks and it's not a problem all the time (but more often than not at the moment).

• Anonymous
  November 04, 2009
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  November 05, 2009
  In response to Steven Quick. My local connection during peak times is pretty constant. I am on Orcon+ so I am using Orcon equipment in the exchange and Orcon backhaul. That said of the last couple of nights things have been better and my international connection on Orcon has remained over 2MBps during peak times.

• Anonymous
  November 09, 2009
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  November 10, 2009
  Today I have been having issues myself. With my speed down to roughly 0.17 Mb/s.. With my normal speed normally at 3-4 Mb/s. This is connecting to an NZ Server.