how bad is ptcl dsl for you?

[Faried Nawaz]

On an 8 Mbit DSL link at home, I normally get under 40 to 50 KB/sec for individual downloads in the evenings.  It used to be better for about a year (I'd have no trouble maxing out my link), but for a few weeks it's been pretty bad.  The other night it took me about two hours to download a 70 MB game off Google Play (the next morning, four minutes for a 120 MB game).  This has nothing to do with the recent fiber break.

I wanted to measure how bad things were, so I wrote some software and let it run over the weekend.  Here's what I found.

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B8zFIYMceP5ERDJXS2FsdU9uQnM&usp=sharing#list

There should be enough information in the above link to let others run the same experiment.  It should even work on Windows.

If I've missed some variable, please let me know.  I'm willing to re-run the experiment to get a better idea of what the problem is.  Something that might be useful to investigate is

https://devsisters.github.io/goquic/

Faried.

[Faried Nawaz]

Download a file (any file) in the daytime, and everything's okay.  Download the same file at night, and get no more than 40 KByte/sec (usually less).  Start four simultaneous downloads, and suddenly the aggregate speed peaks out at 4 x 40 KByte/sec before slowing down to something like 50-80 KByte/sec.  This is repeatable.

Start a busy torrent, and the link maxes out.  But look at the peers list carefully and note that almost all the peers send to you at 10-40 KByte/sec.  I tried three torrents, and after several minutes of waiting I found just one peer that exceeded that limit.