topic Re: iOS6 launch and Network performance tonight in Community Announcements

iOS6 launch and Network performance tonight

prichardson — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 14:44:48 GMT

Last Wednesday evening some of our customers reported broadband performance issues on real-time applications, including gaming and streaming, much of this occurring during the Apple Keynote speech announcing the iPhone 5.
Tonight is set to bring more demand to the network again, as Apple release the iOS 6 for download to many iPhone and iPod devices, coupled with the European Manchester Utd Match.
Our network capacity has been built out to support this and we announced additional capacity ahead of normal for these events.
We are as ever though, looking for customer feedback on their broadband experience of these events. So what are we after exactly?
First off, those that witnessed the problems last week first hand, we would really love to hear your experience tonight. This has obviously hurt your experience of the service already, so it's important to see what happens tonight. We would like this regardless if you see problems.
For anybody seeing problems tonight though, we would appreciate if you can perform the following tests.
Important: Please perform these tests before you attempt to reconnect or gateway hop.
[list type=decimal]

Locate the IP of the hostname you are seeing problems to

Perform a traceroute to this IP and capture the output

Perform a Wireshark packet capture

Perform a second packet capture, but restart your download, game or stream when capturing, so we can see the start of the data flow

I appreciate you may not be a be able to do points 1 & 2 if you are unsure how to locate the IP, but we would really love the packet captures.
By all means, once you have compiled this data, try and reconnect or gateway hop to see if the experience is any different. You can then also report on the experience from that as well.
How can I get the information to Plusnet?
First off, tell us all about it here on the Community Site. Share the experience so others can see the information you capture and help them to share similar and/or different information from what you are seeing.
Getting the packet captures to us is a little more complex. Traditionally, submitting these via our ticket support system has been problematic. As such, we have setup a one time email address for you to use.
Send these to: wireshark@servicestatus.plus.com
Please note: This address will only be available as part of this experience investigation, it will be disabled within the next 7 days. We will be unable to provide any direct support from this address.

Re: iOS6 launch and Network performance tonight

bobpullen — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 20:36:30 GMT

Phil, I can't really capture any of the traffic as it's OTA but updating a 4S to iOS6 here isn't looking great tonight. Started at 8.50pm and more than half an hour later it's telling me it's going to take nigh on a day to complete!

Re: iOS6 launch and Network performance tonight

dvorak — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 20:38:22 GMT

same here, mine's reporting 6 hours to complete.

Re: iOS6 launch and Network performance tonight

awkelly — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 20:41:59 GMT

iOS6 download is currently taking ages, mine has restarted that many times I've lost count. Web and Gaming traffic looks OK though.

Re: iOS6 launch and Network performance tonight

Chris — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 20:51:37 GMT

Right my experience tonight, testing between 8 and 9.45pm.
Streaming - fine, no issues. Watched most of the Chelsea game via Sky Go and it was smooth.
Gaming - fine, ping very close to normal. No stuttering and running as I'd expect.
Browsing - fine, snappy page loads.
Speedtests - much worse than normal.

usually it's

These went back to

shortly before 10pm
Steam downloads - I tried to pre-load a game tonight and normally on Steam I get 7.0MBs (yep capital MB), tonight I was getting the screenshot attached.

Unfortunately wireshark doesn't like my home machine and won't recognise the network interface.
Tracert to the Steam CDN I was hitting

C:\Users\>tracert 87.248.210.253
Tracing route to cdn-87-248-210-253.lon.llnw.net [87.248.210.253]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
  1    52 ms   100 ms    98 ms  dsldevice.lan [192.168.1.254]
  2    43 ms    41 ms    39 ms  lo0-central10.pcl-ag05.plus.net [195.166.128.186
]
  3    49 ms    44 ms    29 ms  link1-central10.pcl-gw01.plus.net [84.93.249.128
]
  4    38 ms    42 ms    41 ms  xe-8-2-0.pcl-cr01.plus.net [212.159.1.8]
  5    55 ms    35 ms    57 ms  ae2.pcl-cr02.plus.net [195.166.129.7]
  6    28 ms    30 ms    44 ms  ae1.ptw-cr02.plus.net [195.166.129.2]
  7    36 ms    35 ms    32 ms  tge2-3.fr4.lon.llnw.net [195.66.236.133]
  8    30 ms    30 ms    33 ms  ve8.fr3.lon.llnw.net [68.142.125.89]
  9    28 ms    60 ms    60 ms  cdn-87-248-210-253.lon.llnw.net [87.248.210.253]

Re: iOS6 launch and Network performance tonight

bobpullen — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 21:34:46 GMT

Quote from: Chris
Speedtests - much worse than normal.

Ouch! You're not wrong about the speedtests (normally ~60-70Mbps):

Re: iOS6 launch and Network performance tonight

bobpullen — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 21:41:01 GMT

Hmmm, few more and it's back to normal though.

Not using the Internet heavily but I must admit, I like Chris haven't noticed any other problems aside from the dog-slow iOS download and a few dodgy speedtest results..
Edit: FWIW, there's a fair few people on Twitter complaining about how long it's taking to download and they're certainly not all Plusnet customers.
Edit 2: I was on pcl-ag03 BTW.

Re: iOS6 launch and Network performance tonight

RPMozley — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 21:56:12 GMT

Had a few issues here with iPlayer on the Wii between 9 & 10. I'm not planning on updating to iOS 6 anytime soon, will be waiting for untethered jailbreak to come out first, for my iPod Touch 4.

Re: iOS6 launch and Network performance tonight

Kelly — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 22:01:14 GMT

"issues"? What does that mean? Can you answer some of the questions above? We can't help fix with out more info 😕

Re: iOS6 launch and Network performance tonight

RPMozley — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 22:17:58 GMT

Well, what issues would you expect to see from iPlayer streaming? Buffering problems of course.
Obviously wire captures are impossible for the Wii, so can't really provide those. Sorry I can't provide much help, just a users experience.

Re: iOS6 launch and Network performance tonight

Kelly — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 22:19:20 GMT

true!
I presume it just fixed itself after 10?

Re: iOS6 launch and Network performance tonight

pnf — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 22:21:59 GMT

Just noticed this thread having downloaded iOS 6 earlier onto an 8GB iPod Touch.
I started the download just before 20:00 and the whole process was complete by about 21:15. It's difficult to know what proportion of this time was for the download itself. When the download initially started it reported that it would take 22 minutes, then 1 hour but after a few minutes this dropped to 6 minutes. When checking my router a few minutes ago I noticed that my connection dropped at about 20:30, right in the middle of the update process, but I wasn't aware of this at the time.
Browsing has been OK this evening with no noticeable slow downs.
Edit: corrected a typo

Re: iOS6 launch and Network performance tonight

RPMozley — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 22:24:51 GMT

You presume correctly Kelly. Things got better at around 10pm.

Re: iOS6 launch and Network performance tonight

jelv — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 23:10:30 GMT

A sort time ago I finished watching an hour long program on ITV player. No issues whatsoever.

Re: iOS6 launch and Network performance tonight

spraxyt — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 00:01:10 GMT

No problems streaming a programme from iPlayer 23:05 to 23:50. Gateway ptn-ag01.

Re: iOS6 launch and Network performance tonight

Anonymous — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 02:22:51 GMT

There are / were lots of other Apple OSX update downloads overnight too.
OSX 10.8.2, iPhoto 9.4 updates
And MS Office 12.3.4, around 1.3GB total

Downloaded around 9pm on Wednesday 19th @ around 7mb/s. 7 + 3 minutes to download.
Plus
Mac OS X 10.7.5
Apple also released a security update for Snow Leopard
Plus
MS Office update

Downloaded @ 3am.
At around 7mb/s. 5 minutes to download.
After the Apple updates, my download [color=blue]speed test had reduced from it's normal 19.5mb/s, down to 5mb/s, after midnight[/color]

This may be down to all the updates, or just the notified .....
Service: Broadband
Posted: Mon, Sep 17 2012 at 15:53:49
Subject: Planned BT Network Maintenance - Week commencing 17th September
This work typically takes place between Midnight and 6am.

Re: iOS6 launch and Network performance tonight

bobboulby — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 08:17:31 GMT

My son updated his iPhone and iPad this morning before he left for school (around 7:45). Each download took less that 10 minutes on a 15 Mb connection
Bob

Re: iOS6 launch and Network performance tonight

Kelly — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 08:30:48 GMT

RPMozley: You had quite a bit of packet loss over peak last night. Something odd is happening to your connection I think, probably unrelated to what we've been doing on the network.

Re: iOS6 launch and Network performance tonight

dave — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 08:59:49 GMT

iOS6 was released at 6pm, initially we had a 4Gbps rate limit in on Apple traffic across the whole platform to protect all the other traffic and we temporarily switched it into Gold Plated. Normally we see less than 2Gbps of Apple traffic at peak. By 6:30 the traffic was hitting the 4Gbps limit, with spare capacity on the network we increased the limit to 8Gbps until just before kick off in the Man U game then took it back down to 4Gbps and then decreased the per user limit to 4Mbps to try and give everyone a decent chance of downloading it. At the end of the Man U game we removed the per user limit and increased the global limit back to 4Gbps and by 10:30pm we'd pushed the global limit to 8Gbps.
Note: some products (such as Pro) weren't included in any of these limits
You can see the comparison of traffic between yesterday and today in the attached graph (each colour is represents a different traffic management device).
Traffic peaked at 7.72Gbps last night for the Apple updates. We'll keep an eye on things throughout the day and tonight in case we need to do anything, without Man U on Sky we shouldn't have to do much with any luck.

Re: iOS6 launch and Network performance tonight

Anonymous — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 10:01:03 GMT

Quote from: PlusComUK
There are / were lots of other Apple OSX update downloads overnight too.
OSX 10.8.2, iPhoto 9.4 updates
And MS Office 12.3.4, around 1.3GB total
++++++++++++++++

After the Apple updates, my download [color=blue]speed test had reduced from it's normal 19.5mb/s, down to 5mb/s, after midnight[/color]

This may be down to all the updates, or just the notified .....
Service: Broadband
Posted: Mon, Sep 17 2012 at 15:53:49
Subject: Planned BT Network Maintenance - Week commencing 17th September
This work typically takes place between Midnight and 6am.

Download speed stayed low till approx 11am, when, as usual, it increased of it's own accord back to normal 19.5mb/s