On 05/06/2015 21:06, Dave Taht wrote:
63% F bloat grade for
http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest/results/isp/r3895-Orange%20Broadband

I was disappointed to see the numbers for free, but wish I had insight
into up vs down for their bloat scores.

http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest/results/isp/r2816-Free%20France

but... so wonderful to sit on a vantage point across the world! Way to
go justin!
Hi Dave,

I'd like to urge caution about using 'whole ISP' bufferbloat figures.  In the UK there are quite a few aspects that are quite simply out of an ISP's control.  If I were an ISP I'd get rather annoyed by the 'ISP ranked by speed results' sites out there, adding bufferbloat, certainly without up/down split out is adding insult to injury.  This is going to be a long post so feel free to skip/delete :-)

In the UK for example the delivery technologies are cable (1 supplier, Virgin Media), adsl (many suppliers), vdsl (1 supplier, BT)  Virgin have most control over CPE kit.  ADSL is a free for all.  VDSL2 was down to 2 modems (Huawei & ECI) but this is expanding outward toward free for all status.

ADSL cpe is mostly 1 box combined modem/router often supplied by ISP.  VDSL is mostly so far a 2 box solution with 100mbit ethernet twixt modem/router.  Heading more towards 1 box solution (modem/router/wifi)

In cabled areas Virgin control network.  Each region/cabinet has own level of contention/congestion.  Where not cabled area they use adsl solution provided by BT.

ADSL on exchange by exchange basis may have BT only presence or 'a.n. other suppliers' presence, known as LLU eg Talk Talk, Sky etc.  If supplier has no local presence then offers service via BT kit.

VDSL at present is BT Openreach only kit in near-to-home cabinets.  BTO trunk all data back to the exchange and then (I assume) it's split out across the various ISP backhaul vlans.

Backhaul links between exchanges to ISP POPs may be provisioned by own supplier (eg Sky, TalkTalk) or BT, all at differing bandwidths etc.

Some ISPs are much better at monitoring lines, latency, usage etc both CPE and backhaul.  A&A are excellent at doing this, not only do they have the tools, they actually use them!  They frequently identify latency increases (and in extremis packet drops) on backhaul links from their suppliers (mostly BT)

A&A are a good example here: A&A are the ISP but they use BT backhaul and BT Adsl kit to supply service all over the country.  They monitor links and provision (ie purchase) bandwidth from BT with the aim of not being the bottleneck for their customers.  A.N.Other ISP may provide service in exactly the same way, using the same BT kit but not purchase sufficient bandwidth.  For the sake of completeness, A&A in 'TalkTalk' enabled exchanges can also use 'TalkTalk' backhaul

Aside from any ISP backhaul issues or not, 'speed' is fundamentally limited by 'the last mile' of copper, changing ISP doesn't change that last mile unless changing technologies (ADSL->Cable->VDSL)  There's a fundamental lack of understanding in this country as to how 'broadband' actually works and I get dismayed by the many conversations I hear that go something like "You should use ISP A, they're great, ISP B are crap.  Oh but I use ISP B and they're great and ISP A are crap".  This is aside from 'what do you mean by crap?', slow all the time?, slow when up/downloading? (ahh, bufferbloat!)  (note to self:  You really should finish your blog post on this topic Kevin!

BT for all their faults, do run rate limiters on the 'downlink' side so as to not (hopefully) overfill the pipe from ISP to customer (A&A have a means whereby they rate limit before BT if desired) so I'd like to think that 'downlink' bufferbloat should be reasonably controlled in this country.  Where it all turns to rat shit is on the uplink, many, many different types of CPE, little under ISP control/specification (3rd party adsl router/modems available freely in stores)  Add routers running 3rd party firmware to the mix (OpenWrt, Tomato, Merlin's AsusWrt)

I guess I'm concerned that another means of beating ISPs is being developed where the signal to noise ratio is actually very low and sensible interpretation needs to be applied.  If going anywhere near this I think showing up & down bloat ratings mandatory.

In the interests of full disclosure I'm not actually an A&A customer (though I was a few years ago)  They're an excellent ISP with superb customer service and clue.  They are probably more expensive than I wished to pay for...customer service and clue isn't cheap.  Whilst my current supplier (Sky...VDSL2 so actually BTO) is good and so far reasonably reliable I *instantly* lose the will to live and want to slash my wrists when speaking to their customer service.  I do keep looking at A&A muttering 'native IPv6, unfiltered, customer service with clue' though.  Breaking away from the 'triple play' service from Sky with the associated discounts and benefits is going to be hard.  Clue isn't cheap.

I've rambled enough.  There's some fun to be had reading Adrian's battles with his favourite telco, example here: http://www.revk.uk/2015/02/congestion-case-study.html

--
Cheers,

Kevin@Darbyshire-Bryant.me.uk

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