Slow Speeds During Evening Peak
Gary221
Enthusiast - Level 2

Hello,

We have a FiOS service in northern Virginia and experience incredibly slow speeds during the evening peak. I've called three times now about this and I get the usual "please reset your modem, please change your QoS settings" script, which was fine the first time, but it seemed on subsequent calls when I insisted that I'd already done that there were no further steps to try.

Since then I have been recording my speeds on half-hour intervals with speedtest-cli (please don't suggest I use Verizon's speed test app instead unless you have a headless version I can use) and have attached a graph below (the support staff insisted they weren't able to view it). I would appreciate any advice on how I can avoid being throttled during peak.

Thank you.

image

Tags (4)
Re: Slow Speeds During Evening Peak
CRobGauth
Community Leader
Community Leader

I don't see these issues.

I am part of a measurement study that captures Internet performance 7x24.

This is what it reports for the past 2 days:

image

Re: Slow Speeds During Evening Peak
Gary221
Enthusiast - Level 2

Hi CRobGauth,

Thanks for the reply. I don't expect it happens to everyone, though my searching thus far seems to indicate it happens to a significant number of FiOS subscribers.

I'd be interested to know more about the study you're participating in, if you're willing to share. The method by which your connection speed is tested would also be of interest.

Cheers,

Gary.

Re: Slow Speeds During Evening Peak
seitzbg
Enthusiast - Level 3

I used to have FIOS in NOVA but now live in Delaware and have the same issues.  It seems to be caused by congestion at the major peering points where Verizon decides a lot of the time to not upgrade links which are at or near capacity.  It has gotten better but is still quite bad to a lot of places specially FIOS <-> Amazon Web Services.  Do you have a script you used to plot the speeds, i'd be happy to run it here too.

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Re: Slow Speeds During Evening Peak
seitzbg
Enthusiast - Level 3

One thing to note is though, speedtest-cli is about as accurate as throwing a bowling ball at a bullseye target.

CLI:

Testing from Verizon FiOS
Hosted by Comcast (Plainfield, NJ) [146.28 km]: 17.836 ms
Testing download speed........................................
Download: 284.09 Mbit/s
Testing upload speed..................................................
Upload: 89.88 Mbit/s

The web site got me: 510 Down, 537 Up from the same test site.

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Re: Slow Speeds During Evening Peak
Gary221
Enthusiast - Level 2

@seitzbg wrote:

I used to have FIOS in NOVA but now live in Delaware and have the same issues. It seems to be caused by congestion at the major peering points where Verizon decides a lot of the time to not upgrade links which are at or near capacity. It has gotten better but is still quite bad to a lot of places specially FIOS Amazon Web Services.


I've not seen any improvement, in fact it's gotten worse anecdotally. What makes you single out AWS?


@seitzbg wrote:

One thing to note is though, speedtest-cli is about as accurate as throwing a bowling ball at a bullseye target.


Regardless of how accurate or inaccurate the CLI is for anyone in particular, I think we can agree that what we see in the graph I posted is not an effect thereof. You may want to look into those results, the CLI is a fairly widely respected tool, and uses all the same infrastructure as speedtest.net apart from the flash client.

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Re: Slow Speeds During Evening Peak
CRobGauth
Community Leader
Community Leader

No problem sharing.
Here is a link:

https://www.samknows.com/broadband/signup

They have partnered with the FCC in the US to measure broadband.

You get a router that they ask you to plug all your wired devices into (so I connect it to my FIOS rotuer and then my PC to it).

Plus it has wireless that it uses to monitor all of your data.

And it does its own tests as well.

You get access to a monthly report as to what performance it has measured.

Re: Slow Speeds During Evening Peak
Gary221
Enthusiast - Level 2

Thanks CRobGauth, that's very interesting. I have an AP currently that I'm quite fond of (if for no other reason than it's reliable and I get 5Ghz out of it, unlike my Actiontec), and I couldn't find any description of the hardware they provide. Would you mind also sharing the specifications of their setup please?

Cheers.

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Re: Slow Speeds During Evening Peak
CRobGauth
Community Leader
Community Leader

Their hardware does not provide router services.
Their wireless is for their monitoring only.

You have to have your own router and ap.

Re: Slow Speeds During Evening Peak
Gary221
Enthusiast - Level 2

Ah, OK. Thanks! 🙂

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