Well, that can soon be rectified if you so wish
but TBH, I'd just about given up as it seems to be a sad fact of life now that evening performance is most often way more than a bit grim
I've not noticed any particularly obvious DNS looking probs this week but browsing certainly has been difficult at certain times and particularly so on certain sites. PN internal ftp has been somewhat less than good or reliable at various times as well. eBay for instance has been virtually unusable again every single evening this week. The typical average DL speed I'm getting when browsing eBay is around 5KB/s at best which, to put it quite mildly, is absolutely [insert random expletive here] ridiculous.
Now, don't anyone suggest that it's probably an eBay server problem or suchlike because I'm reasonably sure there would be shedloads of peeps complaining if everyone in the UK was getting dial-up stylee performance at best. In fact there would be shedloads of PN customers complaining if all PN customers were getting this level of (non) performance for that matter. But it has to be PN traffic management related I think and most likely due to the treatment of Akamai traffic in particular on certain A/C types doesn't it ? I say this because other sites where I've been experiencing quite similar issues often appear to use Akamai somewhere along the way.
I have no idea how correct or even relevant the stats on
this page are these days seeing as all references seem to be to A/C names/types that have long since been obsolete. However, "non-interactive" packet loss running at anything up to 20% every evening this week doesn't look good to me esp when considering that all Akamai traffic may well be being quite inappropriately classified as non-interactive regardless of whether it is or is not.
If browsing is to be considered "interactive" then interactive traffic that just so happens to pass via Akamai (or similar) should be classified accordingly rather than presumably clobbering all such traffic quite severely for whatever reason(s) PN may have for trying to do so.
Does anyone honestly believe that browsing at 5KB/s at best is in any way acceptable on a 'n' Mb broadband connection where a significant amount of money is changing hands every month for provision of same ? Nope, thought not !
I don't particularly want to hear reasons why Akamai is a problem or whatever as it's of no concern to me (or indeed anyone else) really. If I'm generally browsing then I don't care how the data is actually routed to me and nor should I have to. If a particular site wants to use bean tins and string or a carrier pigeon rather send stuff direct down the wires then so be it. It's not up to PN to require random websites around the world to only use Heinz bean tins or a certain colour of carrier pigeon or they will to all intents and purposes prevent their customers from using the websites is it ?
Obviously if it's not some weird issue with the classification of Akamai traffic then it's something else entirely but I've absolutely no idea what in that case. The only thing I do know is that it's almost totally unacceptable to routinely have to put up with dial-up stylee performance on a lightly used broadband connection.
Some typical data from the other night just to demonstrate:
Logging into eBay and then browsing to 4 random sites
Browsing to google to find the BT speedtester URL and then running the test
Gateway packet loss at the time
And here's the same logging into eBay and a few random sites just now (no cached data)
Akamai transparently mirrors content — sometimes all content including HTML and CSS, and sometimes just media objects such as audio, graphics, animation, and video — from customer servers. Though the domain name (but not subdomain) is the same, the IP address points to an Akamai server rather than the customer's server. The Akamai server is automatically picked depending on the type of content and the user's network location.
The benefit is that users can receive content from whichever Akamai server is close to them or has a good connection, leading to faster download times and less vulnerability to network congestion or outages.
Unless you're unfortunate enough to be using a PN connection of course where it will apparently be slowed down very significantly when compared to any 'normal' server in addition to being seriously interrupted so that the average data transfer rate equates to the performance generally expected on a dial-up connection, if indeed it works reliably and consistently at all that is !
This or no doubt similar unwarranted management perhaps also explains other things like the problems I have seen fairly regularly with youtube in the past as well as with content from AD houses various etc. Very poor, very erratic and very inconsistent download speeds plus content delivery often giving up part way through or generally screwing up, all of which leads to an overall extremely poor browsing experience in general.
Browsing through treacle again