no they say we prioitize time senstive traffic, not high bandwidth traffic.

ie they are ment to respect my gaming traffic over abit of content on webpage that in my view is ok to come down a couple of seconds longer than normal than effect voip and gaming.

am not saying its right for web browsing to be choppy, just that in my view am glad some akami web page traffic is not slowing my xbox down as one issue means i cant play but the other issue just means waiting a few seconds for the page to fully load

p.s i see that markeplace downloads on XBL must all be classed as 0x80 now as everything ive downloaded lately has come down at line speed and thats from limelight CDN

" a bit choppy" doesn't begin to describe how bad the experience is ... I'm guessing people who are waiting 5-15 seconds for every page to load might not find it a consolation that as a result you and others are able to game better

It's definitely not "working as intended".

When Akamai and Limelight were first introduced, they were used to offload the 'heavy lifting' of large downloads.  Things like Microsoft updates, and downloads that aren't "time sensitive" (waiting an extra 20 minutes for a download, versus something like iPlayer that is streamed).

When Plusnet decided to throttle these things, they were absolutely correct, in terms of the climate at the time.

However, nowadays the CDN networks are used to provision all sorts of web content from web pages to streaming data, to XBox updates.  The old classification of "downnload servers" is not so clear cut.

The problem is that you need increasingly more sophisticated signatures to identify if traffic coming from an Akamai host should be streamed or not.  These signatures need time  to be developed (look at the time it took to get the XBox stuff right).

It may be time for Plusnet to review overall how they detect Akamai hosted content?

B.

I can accept that when I want to download a gigabyte of Linux updates, it does not matter whether it takes two hours or two hours and ten minutes. I would prefer that it did not take four hours because if my computer crashes (something it is inclined to do on occasions) then I sometimes end up having to download it all again. In four hours it is twice as likely to crash as in two hours - therefore I prefer reasonably quick downloads but five minutes in an hour is OK.  (I would not bother trying to achieve those times in the evening though, and the one gigabyte is after its been uncompressed.)

I also try to watch programmes on IPlayer - the kids monopolise the TV and their choice of programme and mine differ - so I want to use IPlayer. This, I have given up on. It stutters, it pauses, it gives up entirely. Maybe it is Akamai who cannot serve it quickly enough but it seems more and more likely that it is PN and their Ellacoyas.

I am not interested in excuses about unbalanced loads, dropped pipes, Ellacoya signatures that get the wrong material or Microsoft Tuesdays. I pay good money to get a competent level of service and if that means that PN cannot live quite as close to the edge of chaos as they seem to, then so be it.

My view is that PN have no business limiting Akamai streaming downloads - that is a step too far.

I remember the days when PlusNet were held up as an example of a competent organisation that knew how to run a network. I am astonished at the long saga of extra pipes that BT seem unable to make work, network machines that are CPU limited and network engineers who are "looking for the problem". We have had innumerable false dawns and promises that  "we are going to announce something soon".

So come on PN, what is going to happen and when - put your mouth where my money is.

Jim

Yes, the traffic that gets prioritised is time-sensitive. Some sensitive traffic (video streaming, gaming...) is also high bandwidth.

The stated need for traffic shaping is that there is too much demand for bandwidth at peak times. So, by taming any high bandwidth non-time-critical traffic it has less impact on the time-critical (implied low bandwidth) stuff.

I agree, the principle is that your gaming experience shouldn't be glitchy for the sake of a webpage taking another half second to appear. However, when the low-bandwidth, sporadic, not-hammering-the-network action of viewing a webpage is made unusable for the sake of the high bandwidth traffic, that is also no good.

So if both the low and high priority traffic is unacceptable, that means PN have run out of bandwidth. If you accept the basic premise that the sales do not cover the peak bandwidth costs, you have to conclude that either prices must rise or the nature of the traffic management must change.

We can be pretty sure that few would accept significant price increases to cover everyone streaming iPlayer. That leaves shaping. And you can only have a material impact on the traffic by addressing the highest bandwidth traffic, not the lowest.

P2P has taken the brunt of this concept, being definitively both high bandwidth and low time-criticality. But even there, people who actually want a file today and not tomorrow are moving away because it's too slow. What traffic can be addressed next? Do you think an ISP where the fundamental activity of web browsing is unreliable is going to remain in business?

IMO, PN had the right idea by offering premium-priced packages to get the prioritisation. That causes people to question whether they really do need to let their kids watch YouTube all evening.

Implied low bandwidth (what the hell), makes no diffrence high or low bandwidth, if its time senstive it needs to get from a to b as fast as possable.
please link me to where on the plusnet pages does it have even a hint of surgesting that the titanium queue is mainly low bandwidth 


yep it took some grey matter for them to work out how to fish the streaming vids on the dashboard from the non time critcal stuff on there which all comes from limelight, it took me asking to see if they could look into fishing them out and also doing some wiresharks and passing some of the streaming limelight across my connection why they watched my traffic pass over the network ( and yes i gave permison for them to snoop on my traffic)
It took alot of attempts for them to get this right and alot of wiresharking finding the vids after any changes that the sig didnt pick up so they could modify the sig again to pick them up, all this  on just a few streaming vids on a very limited source (the marketplace)

i still dont think its perfect now either as pretty often they fail to buffer up right and just looking at my internet light blinking on my router i can tell its in the gold plated queue, where if i jump to a diffrent vid and that loads up straight away and shows its gold then i can go back to the gold plated one and that to will then be picked up right on the gold queue. so even on a very, very,very,very small part of the net the sigs dont work 100% for limelight cdn

where with this your asking them to pick out every bit of akami and limelight traffic on the net which should be in the 0x80 (gold) queue and not the 0x60 (gold plated), i can asure you to do this they would take very small steps before puting any changes live as if they got it wrong you would certainly be complaing of speed issues on the network then

i do want this to happen thoe dont get me wrong, but from seeing first hand how hard it was on the XBL marketplace i dont hold my breath that its done any time soon, more like PN will carry on trying to get the network into its old state of operation before turning its attention to a project like this

p.s my 5 days of usage so far this month as you can see my gaming uses alot less then any  akami web page content , mind me leaving tvcatchup running nearly 24/7 at 800kbps and my 3000kbps bursting iplayer habbit sure takes its toll on your akami sources  dont worry guys i insure these types of traffic are stoped on my connection when ever i go near the xbox, dont want it effect my gaming now (asbo runs and hides and promises not to come back here  )

also you will find your webpages load hell lot faster if you use an ad blocker, the ads are my biggest pain for slowing web browsing these days

Of course it doesn't. It's implied by the argument "restrict A to allow B" that B is in some way less troublesome than A. If the Titanium queue becomes the bulk of the traffic, it's prioritisation becomes immaterial because the traffic getting in the way of it is in the same queue.

The rest of my post is trying to discuss the basic impracticality of trying to please everybody, when each person thinks that their personal choice of traffic should be the one being prioritised. This coupled with the prospect that some of the most network-detrimental traffic is what gets prioritised does not bode well for anyone being happy with the result.

Some of the changes that Dave has made recently should mean we're able to make some changes as regards Akamai content. We're still checking what impact the changes have made (these are the ones we posted about at half ten this morning on http://portal.plus.net/supportpages.html?a=2), but if we can make the alterations to Akamai we'll be updating that service status post. I'll make sure to post here as well.

Hi guys,

Appreciate both your patience and the frustration that is being caused.

We hope to have some further information for you in the next 24 hours or so.  I'll keep you posted.

Was there an update James, I didn't see it.
 

Here is another example - want to try the iplayer on the new wii channel, but first I must do a wii system update. So I've kicked it off, and after 15 minutes it is less than 10% complete. Clearly on a restricted protocol, but of course I have no way of knowing what or why.

Which all means that for the 2-3 hours the wii will now have to take to update itself:

1 - I can't use it
2 - it is at risk of knackered update via power cut.
 
I am increasingly feeling that the plusnet product line is unsuitable for my needs. If I want to do something *today* it is only possible if that thing is surfing the net, or sending an email. Last night I was unable to install a wubi ubuntu install on the laptop for the same reason, left it overnight, and the laptop crashed (no idea why, I was in bed). In the morning, I had to go to work (like most) now it is evening again, and of course I can't install it.

So looks like I must wait for the weekend to do anything other than surf/email.

*despair*

Check if you are on gateway pcl-ag03 - it's badly overloaded!

I'm on that gateway tonight - its really bad.

thn-ag3

Links on my sig.

I just switched to pte-ag2 and my download speed has gone from 6KB/s to 35KB/s 

I'm only trying to download a 43.7MB graphics driver file and so far I have failed for three evenings in a row.

Well there we go - we finally have the straw that broke...
I player is unable to stream "insufficient bandwidth to play without interruption"
http://yacf.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=26471.0

Now I cannot play trailer videos on IMDB without them stalling.

Come on plusnet - I think it is time to sort this out.


Related - am I correct in thinking that traffic management is operated as a whitelist system. That is - everything is throttled unless manually identified and added to the system as higher level traffic? If so, then it is naturally going to be completely inadequate.