Unable to update any Apple Software on Home Network

[Hubrisnxs]

The reason your vpn works for you (mind you it's unnecessary, you just needed to change your DNS, and also that isn't a working solution for 100% of the people that try it)  is because it's routing you around congested links.  Apple sold 10 million iPhone 6's in 3days. Try to imagine the capacity to handle that plus their older devices (also in the millions) trying to download that update. 

The only way for your statement to be true is if the vpn took the exact same path from your home to apples CDN in your area.    

At that point you would be able to say, "that because the traffic was encrypted it passed unaffected through Verizon' network" 

The problem with you saying verizon was throttling your bandwidth is that your traffic did not even hit the same server let alone take the same route from point A to B.   

This is definetely not throttling.  If it were, then simple changes to the DNS without the secrecy of A VPN, would not fix the problem.    Today, between this and various forums, we find that the DNS change has fixed more people's IOS update than switching to A VPN . 

[Chris-FH]

Well, I did try the downlaod about 5 times without VPN, which in theory would hit different servers, but each time it came up over 40 hours. Help me understand how VPN magically finds a server that isn't being hit?

[Hubrisnxs]

One of our Senior Posters Shared this in a different Forum, but you might be surprised.

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I don't believe this is a Verizon issue at all. The attached screenshot is from work, on a 1Gbps connection to the Internet (datacenter) and with no dependence on Verizon. The download didn't stall, but was trickling in steadily at a few bytes a second. I had to restart this download a few times for the user to get acceptable speeds.

I'm quite certain this lays with Apple's new CDN. Some people have been complaining about poor performance from the App Store on many providers, which utilizes the same CDN setup

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His graphic won't cross post over here, but click this permalink to see for yourself.   Looks eerily familiar, no?

[Hubrisnxs]

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Chris-FH wrote:

Well, I did try the downlaod about 5 times without VPN, which in theory would hit different servers, but each time it came up over 40 hours. Help me understand how VPN magically finds a server that isn't being hit?

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Well that's exactly how VPN's and CDN's work.  VPN's not only encrypt your traffic, but they also hide who you are, and where you're coming from.  What would be the point of hiding who you are if they know where you live?

So when you connect to a VPN, you're IP changes into their's, which is definetely in a different part of the state, and more likely you will be seen as being in a completely different part of the country, and even the world.   My VPN host allows me to pretend that I am in France if I wanted to.  Once you're showing up to the known free world as being in a different part of the country or world, then things change for Apple.  

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Imagine you're in the US and that you are on a carrier that existed in multiple states and time zones, you can VPN to the West Coast from the East Coast and end up getting the idle servers that are there, just sitting and waiting for people to get out of school and off work and so on

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This gentleman explains it in more detail.  Apple uses CDN's to deliver it's content.

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Fundamental aspect of how DNS and CDNs work. When you get pointed to a specific DNS name for a server, your PC contacts the DNS server and requests that IP associated with that host. If the server doesn't happen to have that information already cached, it looks up the authoritative DNS server for the domain, and asks that server what the IP is. On something that isn't distributed, that is always going to be the same IP, no matter where you're coming from. No matter where you are, www.dslreports.com is always going to come up as 64.91.255.98. On a distributed network, however, the DNS server knows the IP of your DNS server, and knows that it is coming from Verizon FiOS in the PA/NJ/DE region (because the assigned DNS server is always close to the user to minimize lookup times). It knows that a server at some specific IP has been designated to reach users in that area, based on the ASN or however else they have it divided up. That IP gets returned to the server, and back to you. You connect to it, try to download, and see how that goes. When you switch to Google's 8.8.8.8/8.8.4.4 (or 4.2.2.1/4.2.2.2, or OpenDNS, or whatever else) you're tricking the server into thinking you're somewhere else, so you get pointed to a different server, one that is less loaded because there aren't nearly as many people hitting that server.

The actual distribution of servers and connections from them to various ISPs is a complex, ever-changing game. Akamai and the other big players pay people a lot of money solely to manage that sort of thing, and they've gotten to be pretty **bleep** good at it, and have a lot of big names like Apple, Microsoft, and Neulion (who runs most of the legal streaming sports packages) listed as customers. Apple is just starting to get into the game themselves, and they don't have it all figured out yet, especially when it comes to multi-gigabyte files.

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[tns2]

Remember the choice of route to your home is from the other side.  I.e. Apple is picking a crowded path.

YOUR DNS IS NOT PART OF THE INFO PASSED.

[BIgbmn]

I just got off the phone with Verizon Technical support.

I knew it would be frustrating, since this is a relatively obscure issue, but NOT like THIS!

Calls to first level support were OK.

It took a bit to get past the fact that it wasn't a connection issue, but a specific issue with the apple download site from my home network and where the connection is initiated.

Transferred me to Second Level Support, that wanted to charge me to solve this.

Very Very Very Frustrated

I'm pretty convinced it is a FIOS issue and am trying to figure it out.

Using the apple download link, directly in a browser will fail

http://appldnld.apple.com/iOS8/031-05446.20140917.vuup2/iPhone6,2_8.0_12A365_Restore.ipsw

Works fine if I'm using VPN.

Also tried using the IP address (circumventing any DNS) and that didn't work

I'm of the opnion that this is clearly a Verizon issue that they are not owning up to.  

I want my money back for the time and effort I'm spending trying to figure this out and the days wasted.

[xShaney1]

after 4 days of trying to fix the itunes update and recovery by doing DNS, changing firewall, etc... I gave up today and changed everything back to the way it was and decide to reinstall Kaspersky Internet Security and when my KIS updating my PC crashed [went BSOD] and I came back on my PC and to check and see everything has been changed back but it seem the same and I decide reupdate kaspersky again, then I decide to plug in my iPhone and I got a "A new update is available" message when itunes comes up and I think to myself "It is never gonna work -_- so what the point?" then I decide to click on "Download only" and BAM! my download worked and it download really fast. Made my eyes open wide  

I guess BSOD does the trick! Lol! Or probably it is because of kaspersky being reinstalled again and updated.

[Hubrisnxs]

That's odd. Verizon has a pay tech support simplify to geek squad but they do pc issues. Best they would have done would have been the things talked about here. If they couldn't have found a good dns (they likely would have) then they kudu have tried the null route configuration, but those are pc configurations that get you around the bad cdn in your area. They shouldn't be charging if it's a verizon network issue.

[Kestrel3]

xShaney1:  just make sure that the ios is version 8.0  (NOT 8.0.1)  before you intall it , or you will have even bigger problems, since Apple pulled the ios 8.0.1 update this morning after many users lost the use of their phones due to upgrading.

Glad you got it working, but it would be good to know exactly what causes the issue and which step fixed it.

[xShaney1]

Kestrel - That is an iOS 8.0.1, all I did was click "Download only" and I didn't even install it on my iPhone and of course I am aware of the issues. I always go to engadget.com and they will always tell us what is going on. They save me from installing an iOS 8.0.1 

Then again after I restart my PC and try the download from itunes by clicking on recovery to download the iOS 8.0, my problems comes back! OH WOE IS ME!!! I am so done... 4 days of trying and trying so hard to fix everything to work, I think I am going to switch back to Optimum since they never give me any internet problems. 

I got to think really hard if I want to stay with verizon FiOS or if I want to switch back to Optimum... Decision... Decision....