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Author Topic: Are BT throttling connections?  (Read 36829 times)

Dray

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Re: Are BT throttling connections?
« Reply #45 on: December 13, 2014, 02:42:19 PM »

I pointed out on the BT forums that certain banned websites were banned intermittently which suggested that BT were toggling the DNS interception off and on. Almost got banned as someone complained. Anyway, the "banned" site is now fully accessible, which I assume means the DNS interception is "off".
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kitz

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Re: Are BT throttling connections?
« Reply #46 on: December 13, 2014, 03:09:03 PM »

I pointed out on the BT forums that certain banned websites were banned intermittently which suggested that BT were toggling the DNS interception off and on. Almost got banned as someone complained. Anyway, the "banned" site is now fully accessible, which I assume means the DNS interception is "off".

lol.   Ive lost my old forum login which I used to post under years ago when I was a BT customer, but I happened to notice that my BT account is still active, and from there I could set up my forum account again.

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kitz

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Re: Are BT throttling connections?
« Reply #47 on: December 13, 2014, 03:33:13 PM »

I guess Im wasting my time.   They dont get it.

Showing that its off NOW, doesnt mean it wasnt on for the past few days :(
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simoncraddock

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Re: Are BT throttling connections?
« Reply #48 on: December 13, 2014, 05:37:51 PM »

It often feels like your talking to the wall in there, your not alone. I have suspicions that there are undercover BT staff deploying 'smoke and mirrors' when discussions point out wrong doings by BT.
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NewtronStar

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Re: Are BT throttling connections?
« Reply #49 on: December 13, 2014, 06:35:34 PM »

It often feels like your talking to the wall in there,

I know what you mean SC that's why the Kitz forum is the 1st port of call for any issue's we my run into.

still even with the BT DNS fixed my US rate is just the same it has to be throttling or a problem with the TBB speed tester

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simoncraddock

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Re: Are BT throttling connections?
« Reply #50 on: December 13, 2014, 07:31:40 PM »

It does seem to bounce during the test, here's mine...



I get a much smoother test using www.speedtest.net so it could just be TBB
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NewtronStar

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Re: Are BT throttling connections?
« Reply #51 on: December 13, 2014, 08:00:18 PM »

Yes is does look smoother on speedtest.net.

I remember years ago the grade for my line on speedtest.net was A now it's B- this line has not changed much over 3 years it's just users line's global/national seem to be getting faster  ::)
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pedro492

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Re: Are BT throttling connections?
« Reply #52 on: December 13, 2014, 08:28:11 PM »

I have suspicions that there are undercover BT staff deploying 'smoke and mirrors' when discussions point out wrong doings by BT.

Good call, Simon!  In common with most other corporations, governments and the military, BT likely uses third party PR teams, or propaganda units, for "online perception management" on public forums.

The opinions of the "common man" often hold more weight than official corporate statements.  Thus forum shills play an important role for boosting trade and deflecting criticism; when dressed up as happy, smiling, satisfied customers.

Shills are great. They come dirt cheap, they work all hours God sends - vital for rapid rebuttal and "crisis management" - and best of all.... when the shill operates at arm's length to the business itself, he can make brazenly untruthful statements, without risk of damaging the corporate reputation.  Something that the company could never do itself, for fear of censure.

As the nights draw in, a favourite hobby is scouring TripAdvisor for fake reviews.  There are many "online consultancies" working sites like Tripadvisor, providing "perception management" or "reputation optimization" for businesses.   Fake online reviewing is an entire industry in itself.  Posting favourable comments about a hotel, or restaurant, or cafe, (or telco!) for a modest fee.  Some of those outfits will even leave fake nasty reviews for rival businesses to damage their trade!

The real fun - it's almost an evening party game(!) - is in 'busting' these shills.   Lots of little hallmarks - e.g. forensic linguistics, implausible narratives, and inappropriate posting frequencies and distributions  - can all help to blow their cover.  Though even when they are exposed, they tend to just fade away, only to be re-born soon afterwards under a new persona.  It's like the fairground game of Whack-a-Mole!

On a more serious note: a company that uses fake favourable comments to drum up business, is likely not reputable in more critical ways.  Should we trust a restaurant that relies on fake TripAdvisor reviews to unjustly boost its own trade? Since it's an unprincipled business, will it be safely managing its food hygiene, for example? 
« Last Edit: December 14, 2014, 01:38:30 AM by pedro492 »
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pedro492

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Re: Are BT throttling connections?
« Reply #53 on: December 13, 2014, 11:27:49 PM »

It's fixed now

Well it was fixed, maybe.  But since this morning, there's another eight pages of complaints on the BT forums.  Here's a sample:













So maybe BT's DNS Hijacking was a red-herring.  Another problem perhaps, but clearly not the major cause of these ongoing customer grievances.

The reports of web pages taking far too long to load, or where only some images on a web page are loading  - e.g. not all the thumbnails showing up on an ebay listing, suggests something else altogether.

Possibly it's a problem with web proxy caching.   BT used to rely on Squid for web proxy caching. Maybe it still does; if so it was/is known to be riddled with insecurities; many ways to cripple it with DDOS.

Hunch still says that BT is under cyber-attack. With the attackers perhaps targeting multiple services at BT including its nameservers, web proxy caching servers, its core routers even, to bring down its xDSL services.

Otherwise it's very hard to believe the Official Explanation for this prolonged outage.  Recall, BT initially claimed that (unnamed) "faulty equipment" was the cause, but that had now been replaced, it promised. Clearly that "remedy" (if indeed it was true) still hasn't solved these problems.

A company of the size and prestige of BT shouldn't normally be felled for two weeks by "faulty equipment", nor any other predictable happening.  There should be contingency plans that instantly switch to backup systems for resilience.

Of course, if the cause of these problems is beyond BT's control - the handiwork of a malicious outside body, maybe - then that might explain why it still can't solve them.

« Last Edit: December 13, 2014, 11:39:53 PM by pedro492 »
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NewtronStar

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Re: Are BT throttling connections?
« Reply #54 on: December 14, 2014, 12:05:38 AM »

Its sometimes good to let your anger out and then relax and tell us what is your problem with your broadband pedro492 ?
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pedro492

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Re: Are BT throttling connections?
« Reply #55 on: December 14, 2014, 12:29:34 AM »

Just another BT account holder and observer here. Luckily with a separate DSL service on a second line from a different provider. Pitying those without.

It's noteworthy that BT's terse explanation of the outage being due to "faulty equipment" doesn't hold water.
With that "equipment" now replaced (or so we're told) the problems are still ongoing.  How so?
In fact, according to some, the problems are worse than ever...

What do you make of that, NewtronStar?  If it wasn't the DNS servers after all, what is causing this massive outage??
Why won't BT tell us?  What's to hide?




« Last Edit: December 14, 2014, 01:18:28 AM by pedro492 »
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HPsauce

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Re: Are BT throttling connections?
« Reply #56 on: December 14, 2014, 09:28:10 AM »

Interesting. I have noticed some of the behaviour described here on my PlusNet ADSL connection in recent days.
The worst site (though not the only one) for me has been the BBC as I use it quite a lot.
As of a few minutes ago I have switched to Google DNS to see how that behaves.

I'm not sure if PN would be affected by the same problem though, but given various comments I've seen re authentication etc. I suspect a lot more is common with BT than most ISPs.
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kitz

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Re: Are BT throttling connections?
« Reply #57 on: December 14, 2014, 11:06:48 AM »

Quote from: pedro492
The reports of web pages taking far too long to load, or where only some images on a web page are loading  - e.g. not all the thumbnails showing up on an ebay listing, suggests something else altogether.

Possibly it's a problem with web proxy caching.   BT used to rely on Squid for web proxy caching. Maybe it still does; if so it was/is known to be riddled with insecurities; many ways to cripple it with DDOS.

Im not sure.

Re Web caching - I didnt think BT used it on their network.  afaik AOL was the only UK ISP that used to do any sort of web caching. AOL users tended to run into difficulty on a couple of pages on my main site such as the 'rate my ISP' page because of web caching.

PN dabbled with squid many years ago for a very short period and very prompty ditched it as one massive failure.
Unlike 10 yrs ago, theres far too many dynamically generated pages for it to be of much use at an ISP level.  AFAIK web caching these days is just mostly used for business/organisations/education who may be on a slowish connection and need to conserve downstream bandwidth.

Web caching doesnt save the ISP that much bandwidth where it matters most -  its core bandwidth that is the most expensive so web caching is a waste of time. Transit bandwidth is comparitively cheap. They do DNS caching though.


-------

Re the problem with ebay, that could still be a DNS issue.

The structure of the ebay site means that there are going to be lots of DNS calls per page. 

When you visit most websites images will be stored on the same domain.  ie for this site images will likely be in a folder kitz.co.uk/images or say kitz.co.uk/adsl/images.   Because you are already on the site calling for an image in a sub folder on the domain doesnt require DNS lookups.

AIUI DNS is needed though each time you call a new domain or subdomain.  so that for example would be anything designated with a . (dot) rather than than the afterwards / 

eg the subdomains for the forum when on the main site would require a new DNS call because they could be hosted on a different server.

forum.kitz.co.uk/index.php
wiki.kitz.co.uk/index.php

So going back to ebay, all the images are scattered all over the place and held on many different servers and locations.
Youve already looked up ebay.co.uk and the page is trying to load, but then note where all the images are coming from, theyre not held on the same domain..  but broken down into lots of subdomains on a separate domain.

Code: [Select]
http://thumbs.ebaystatic.com/d/
http://thumbs1.ebaystatic.com/d/
http://thumbs4.ebaystatic.com/d/
http://thumbs3.ebaystatic.com/d
http://s1.thcdn.com/

Surely such a page is going to be very intensive for DNS?
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kitz

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Re: Are BT throttling connections?
« Reply #58 on: December 14, 2014, 11:20:48 AM »

Quote from: pedro492
It's noteworthy that BT's terse explanation of the outage being due to "faulty equipment" doesn't hold water.
With that "equipment" now replaced (or so we're told) the problems are still ongoing.

Has it been replaced though?

The official reply on their service status says:
Quote
We were aware of an issue, which was causing some customers to experience intermittent issues when attempting to load web pages.
We have fixed the problem and apologise for any inconvenience caused.

On their forums a member of staff says :
Quote
The tech team have got back to us to say that the issue has been fixed after some faulty hardware was isolated and taken out of service.
 We are sorry for any issues that this caused.

No where does it say anything has been replaced.  Just that faulty hardware was taken out of service.
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kitz

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Re: Are BT throttling connections?
« Reply #59 on: December 14, 2014, 11:44:16 AM »

Interesting. I have noticed some of the behaviour described here on my PlusNet ADSL connection in recent days.
The worst site (though not the only one) for me has been the BBC as I use it quite a lot.
As of a few minutes ago I have switched to Google DNS to see how that behaves.

I'm not sure if PN would be affected by the same problem though, but given various comments I've seen re authentication etc. I suspect a lot more is common with BT than most ISPs.

I had some DNS weirdness about a couple of  months or so ago.   I have something running on my PC which contacts my server every 10 mins to automatically clear spam.  Every morning I'd notice that there were errors logged at about 3am whereby it had been unable to contact my server.  I know it wasnt my server so I added my plusnet mail as a check, and sure enough the next morning I saw that it had been unable to contact my plusnet mail.   At first I thought that perhaps my internet connection had been dropping, but checking my router logs there were no resyncs nor loss of PPP.  This happened practically every night for about a week.

That same week, one night I couldnt sleep and I was watching streaming TV (hoping that David Attenborough's voice would lull me to sleep) when the stream just stopped.  I got up to investigate and realised that webpages wouldnt load.  I tried tracerts to the bbc but they were unresolved, same with google, but I could tracert complete a trace to 8.8.8.8.   I didnt get much further because suddenly things came back up.  I had a quick look on the PN forums and since no one else appeared to be reporting problems I didnt bother and just changed my DNS settings in my router to google and Ive had no problems since.   

Judging from the error logs DNS would usually fail each night at around 2.30 to 3am and could be down for anything up to an hour.   
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