Congestion/Slow evening and weekend speeds (Elmhurst, NY)
chhatc
Enthusiast - Level 2

Hi all,

I need help addressing my slowdowns and I'm running out of patience and ideas.

I have FiOS Internet only 50/25mbps plan. My provisioning is around 58/38 when things are working optimally. I have Ethernet based networking from the ONT. I've always had this since the first day.Things have always been rock-solid up until last month.

I've had FiOS for about 6 months and I've made ZERO changes in my networking since the first day. Over the last month or so, my speeds at speedtest.verizon.net during evening (weekdays 7pm-midnight) drop to about 4-5mbps. Thats less than 10% of the theoretical max I'm supposed to receive. Same things happen if I test at speedtest.net servers in NYC. I've also run speedtests at speedof.me and all show identical slowdowns (or what seems like network congestion to me).

During weekends, I see more of a problem when the weather is overcast and raining. People are home and watching netflix/downloading to their hearts content and its apparent in my speedtests. Still speeds do reach about 7-10mbps during weekend congestion.

I've checked for rogue devices doing something so I decided to make sure nothing is connected except one device through the wired connection.

ONT -> Verizon Router (Ethernet) -> Wired Desktop/Laptop

I've called tech support. They have reset the ONT, reset the Router, re-did the "Cross-connects" (whatever that means). They have done this on more than one occasion in the span of 3-4 days. Short of replacing the ONT (which is what the next tech is going to do tomorrow) they have done everything else. I've swapped out the verizon router with my own dual band b/g/n router and still the same slow speeds so its not the routers. I tried with different clients (wired desktop and wired laptops) and still the problem isn't resolved.

My badluck: Tech came on Saturday.  Problem was visible and speeds were slow around 12-20mbps downloads. He was going to replace the ONT however, he couldn't uninstall the existing ONT because he didnt have the tools. He mentioned another tech will come to replace it. Another tech came on Monday at 4PM. The speeds are ususally fine that time. So he does a speedtest and says there is nothing for him to fix because everything is running optimally.  Duh.

I've posted several speedtest results on dslreports.com verizon direct subforum here (https://secure.dslreports.com/forum/vzdirect). Link to my posts (https://secure.dslreports.com/forum/r29131658-). Note that this is confidential so only verizon support staff and the original poster have access to this thread.

It seems to me like this is a congestion issue where Verizon is letting their ports saturate without doing anything. I'm not even watching netflix (how can I when this stuff is happening). This is a more general problem with speeds on the whole. I could understand if netflix alone was being throttled but for me the entire network is slowed down in the evenings.

Can someone please help with this problem. I'm running out of patience and I really want this issue resolved.

Thanks,

chhatc

0 Likes
1 Solution

Correct answers
Re: Congestion/Slow evening and weekend speeds (Elmhurst, NY)
chhatc
Enthusiast - Level 2

I should have replied when they fixed this for me...

Shortly after my last post (sometime before april 10), they ideintified the issue and fixed it.

They told me that because of a router outage, they had re-routed some traffic through the routers in my path, which added more load in my path and caused the slowdowns. It was quite an ordeal. I nearly had them change out my PON card. However, they were on the ball once they identified the problem, my speeds have been as good as the first day I signed up for FiOS. Everything is back to normal.

However, lately there is somewhat of a latency spike to sites which didn't exist before (east to west coast latency has skyrocketed from about 80-90ms to about 150-180ms). I saw another thread here and others are having the same problem but it doesn't seem to bother me just as yet so I will play it by ear.

Thanks,

chhatc

View solution in original post

Re: Congestion/Slow evening and weekend speeds (Elmhurst, NY)
chhatc
Enthusiast - Level 2

Wow 70+ views and no response.

I'll update with whats happening. A verizon tech came by today and it was very clear to him as I described to him the slowdowns that the problem was in the Central Office at the PON Card. He said he took a light-reading at the ONT and it seemed perfectly fine. 

He even went as far as telling me that this is an issue which most people don't realize is happening to them and it's going to take a lot of noise from my end to get Verizon to fix this. He even said that Verizon will want to change out your router, your ONT, change the location of the ONT, your cables to the pole, change out the circuit at the pole, and ultimately this will take 2-3weeks without actually gettting to the bottom of the the main issue.  The tech was sent on several visits to one single home where this problem existed, until finally he pushed and pushed and pushed Verizon to examine his setup at the Central Office where the found the issue with the bandwidth saturation at the PON. 

I can only tell them where to look for the problem. If Verizon wants to fight me and tell me the issue is somewhere else and not do the work then I am sorry but I am going to have to go back to cable, where I know there is bandwidth sharing and my speeds are going to deteriorate for a FACT. Verizon is denying there is any problem on their end. Only difference is that I would not be paying a premium to have my speeds deteriorate to that level.

Has anyone had this sort of issue here? I'm running out of options. If the ONT or the Verizon router or my own router or my PC was having problems, operations would not return to normal within a few hours (after midnight).

I really need some help.

thanks,

chhatc

0 Likes
Re: Congestion/Slow evening and weekend speeds (Elmhurst, NY)
eljefe2
Master - Level 1

When you described the situation in your original post I thought it not likely that the problem was your ONT or router.   It doesn't seem likely that an ONT/router problem would change with the time of day.

The problem you're having is more likely at the PON, or due to saturation elsewhere in the FiOS system.  I don't know that any of your fellow users on this peer-to-peer forum will have a suggestion on how to get Verizon to get with the program, track down the problem in their system, and correct it.  I don't have any such suggestion, except to keep bugging support and hoping that they eventually do what's necessary to help you out.

Good luck. Smiley Frustrated

0 Likes
Re: Congestion/Slow evening and weekend speeds (Elmhurst, NY)
Kestrel3
Contributor - Level 2

I am seeing a similar issue here.   Slowdowns for me are usually at night as well (upload speed only though), so no technician will be there at that time, and no one at VZ phone support will do anything to help besides send a technician to your house, so nothing will be done to fix the problem.

I have been going through this for 5 months now with no resolution. Essentially they will not repair this type of issue unless they recieve a lot of similar complaints from people in the area regarding the issue.  If it isn't an extreme slowdown, or as in my case, involves only the upload speed, an intermittant issue such as this might go unnoticed by most customers, or at least does not result in a lot of complaints.

See my thread below

http://forums.verizon.com/t5/FiOS-Internet/Slow-real-world-upload-speed/td-p/654849/highlight/true

Let us know if you are ever able to have the issue fixed and what did it.

0 Likes
Re: Congestion/Slow evening and weekend speeds (Elmhurst, NY)
chhatc
Enthusiast - Level 2

I posted this in the Verizon Direct forum on DSLReports.com where VZ reps offer support:

I think we are now at an impasse. After 6 tech visits and numerous techs suggesting to have the PON Card replaced, this quest to resolve my speed concerns has took a different path altogether. I am still nowhere close to understanding if and when this problem will be resolved.

Today, as a result of my service ticket <TICKETNUM REMOVED>, foreman <NAMEREMOVED> made a calls to see if he could help escalate this further as it seemed quite unconventional that this problem wasn't being solved. He tried to help. Made a few calls to maybe have the PON Card replaced or serviced. This idea didn't fit well with a rep-higher up so they started to investigate further. A few hours later a verizon representative calls me and states that no-one on my PON Card has reported such issues. I have a few issues with this statement.
1. No one religiously runs speedtests to understand if their speeds are bad, most folks wouldn't even know where to test their speeds unless they are tech savvy. And anyone familiar with proving a case should know that to identify an issue, you need to collect lots of data. And that's why I documented things here on this post as much as I could.
2. A latency based degradation would result in trying to figure out what is wrong with the network. For example, pages taking forever to load or simply not loading, packet loss, etc. This isn't very visible in my problem (and probably others who are on my PON Card are seeing the same thing, except its not apparent to them that there is any problem). So to someone using their connection to browse more than to download, they won't notice these issues. However, when you start using a VOIP device to make and receive calls over the connection, it become fairly apparent that something is amiss when your voice sounds choppy because the packets are being received out of order and then you start investigating. First you blame the other guy, as in the VOIP provider. Then you change the provider and hope the problem goes away. When it doesn't, you finally suspect the ISP is upto no good. Again, most people aren't savvy enough to have either of these setups. I do. And I am savvy enough to know when I'm being shortchanged with respect to my connection.

Let's get back to the investigation after the calls were made to replace the PON Card. A rep by the name of Joe calls me (possibly a tier 2 rep), and asks about the type of degradation and when its happening. After giving him the low-down, he calls me back a few hours later stating that they identified the cause of this issue.

Issue according to him is that due to a Verizon Network router malfunction/outage(not the actiontec one, but the commercial grade routers sitting in the middle which route traffic), traffic was re-routed through the router(s) in my path, which now has some increased load and is processing more traffic. He didn't have any ETA of resolution but said he would follow up by Tuesday the latest. So this means, this certainly won't be resolved by then. NOT GOOD.
Mysteriously, now there is a brand new reason for the issues I'm facing: Traffic is being re-routed through a router in my path for some other verizon customer in addition to the normal load of traffic. Great. So fix it. (This deters away from servicing the PON Card, which I still think shouldn't be ruled out as a possibility).

On another note, on the Verizon main forum here on dslreports.com, there were a few posts about FiOS slowdowns in NYC. A week later their problems were solved by re-routing traffic (this happened about a little over a month ago). That traffic must have gone some-place right? I bet this issue resulted in MORE traffic through the routers in my path. If that is the case, this has been on-going for quite some time and it just makes me question the effectiveness of resolving issues such as these in a timely fashion. Either case, no matter what I still don't believe that the PON Card issue is out of the question. It may still be just that.

Here's the most recent speedtest (taken around 9:05PM, it took me a while to compose this post)

I REALLY want to see a resolution in the coming week.


Checking for Middleboxes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Done
SendBufferSize set to [261360]
running 10s outbound test (client to server) . . . . . 19.30Mb/s
running 10s inbound test (server to client) . . . . . . 6.30Mb/s

------ Client System Details ------
OS data&colon; Name = Windows 7, Architecture = x86, Version = 6.1
Java data&colon; Vendor = Oracle Corporation, Version = 1.7.0_51

------ Web100 Detailed Analysis ------
Client Receive Window detected at 65536 bytes.
2.4 Gbps OC-48 link found.
Link set to Full Duplex mode
No network congestion discovered.
Good network cable(s) found
Normal duplex operation found.

Web100 reports the Round trip time = 78.89 msec; the Packet size = 1460 Bytes; and 
No packet loss - but packets arrived out-of-order 0.06% of the time
This connection is receiver limited 39.26% of the time.
Increasing the the client's receive buffer (64.0 KB) will improve performance
This connection is sender limited 59.38% of the time.
This connection is network limited 1.35% of the time.

Web100 reports TCP negotiated the optional Performance Settings to: 
RFC 2018 Selective Acknowledgment: ON
RFC 896 Nagle Algorithm: ON
RFC 3168 Explicit Congestion Notification: OFF
RFC 1323 Time Stamping: OFF
RFC 1323 Window Scaling: ON
Packet size is preserved End-to-End
Server IP addresses are preserved End-to-End

0 Likes
Re: Congestion/Slow evening and weekend speeds (Elmhurst, NY)
chhatc
Enthusiast - Level 2

I should have replied when they fixed this for me...

Shortly after my last post (sometime before april 10), they ideintified the issue and fixed it.

They told me that because of a router outage, they had re-routed some traffic through the routers in my path, which added more load in my path and caused the slowdowns. It was quite an ordeal. I nearly had them change out my PON card. However, they were on the ball once they identified the problem, my speeds have been as good as the first day I signed up for FiOS. Everything is back to normal.

However, lately there is somewhat of a latency spike to sites which didn't exist before (east to west coast latency has skyrocketed from about 80-90ms to about 150-180ms). I saw another thread here and others are having the same problem but it doesn't seem to bother me just as yet so I will play it by ear.

Thanks,

chhatc

Re: Congestion/Slow evening and weekend speeds (Elmhurst, NY)
chillyspop
Newbie

I am having a very similar issue. I am paying for 25Mbps download and 25 Mbps upload. 

Speedtest shows consistently slow uploads of less than 0.5 Mbps and downloads of 10 Mbps.

After many service calls by phone that said there was no problem to fix that they could detect I took a half day off and waited for a tech to come to my house. He blamed it on the fact that I have a second router isolating my home network from the Verizon router so I connected one of my Macs directly to the Verizon router and got my promised 25 Mbps download but still less than 1 Mbps upload, sometimes as low as .3Mbps. The technician who came to my house said he was sorry but he couldn't do anything to help me. 

I have had the Verizon router replaced with no change in the symptoms. Now that I have seen your post I will keep bugging them till they admit it is a problem rather than switch to Comcast. Thanks for giving me some hope!

0 Likes
Re: Congestion/Slow evening and weekend speeds (Elmhurst, NY)
chhatc
Enthusiast - Level 2

Not sure what other service you have but if you have ONLY internet, I would advise you to have Verizon switch your ONT from COAX to Ethernet. This way you can connect one end of an ethernet cable directly to you ONT and the other side to an ethernet port on your Mac (or even a laptop, preferably with 1gbps port).

This way, you will be directly connected to your ONT without a router and get a consistent speed (whatever that may be). Even though this may not solve your problem, you will know for sure if you have exhausted all your options. This may not be feasible if you have other services bundled together (such as fios tv or fios digital phone). 

It took me about 6 tech visits one after the other. After a while, the noise got to the higher ups and they decided to do something about it. 

Good luck and keep us updated on your progress.

Thanks,

chhatc