[LINK] South American FTTH - my experience + http per session throttling

Fernando Cassia fcassia at gmail.com
Mon May 28 06:43:49 AEST 2012


I recently got FTTH installed on my home from one of the entrant players in
Buenos Aires, Argentina (not the incumbents who still keep a local loop
monopoly and only offer ADSL).

Plans go from an entry level 5Mbit to 50 Mbit downstream in the pricier
plan.
Downstream to upstream ratio is 10:1 in all cases

Prices, translated to USD:

 5 Mbit $13 USD
10 Mbit $35 USD
30 Mbit $90,21 USD
40 Mbit $112 USD
50 Mbit $135 USD

I decided to go with 10Mbit down (with its 1Mbit upstream). This in a
country where ADSL is currently still offering ADSL1 speeds with maximum
upstream in the order of 512K, with 7 Mbit in the current ADSL TV
advertising, and where most coax (cable) ISPs are still using DOCSIS 2.0
and their advertised speeds are 6 Mbit down, with only 512K to 640K
upstream.

I ran some tests and was positively impressed with my 10Mbit down, 1 Mbit
up FTTH link, specially since it comes with no data metering or traffic
limits at all. And because the FTTH infrastructure means that going forward
there´s virtually no speed limits as far as the last mile is concerned (the
Huawei GPON ONT they installed at my home has a 2Gbit down, 1.2 Gbit up
maximum speed limit).

http://speedtest.net/result/1958889770.png

What´s best, the FTTH network is fully underground, unlike the DOCSIS cable
modem providers which have an aerial network through street poles (not to
mention the general unreliability of the coax technology and its shared
last mile with all the buildings in a given node).

However, I started discovering the ugly truth: this telco seems to be doing
bandwidth throttling per http connection. Ie. you can´t get more than 2.5
to 3Mbit down per http session on international downloads.

If I download a single file, ie latest Java from Java.com, I get 2.5 to
3Mbit. If I open multiple simultaneous downloads, each http connection gets
its 2.5 to 3Mbit. So if I open 4 simultaneous downloads, I saturate the 10
Mbit link.

This is the same for every big file downloads from international servers
I´ve tried. (Apache OpenOffice, etc)

Still not sure if this is the local ISP doing it, or the upstream
international provider of its uplink (which would be Telmex, or any
American ISP that provides it with its peering agreement).

Instead, if I download from .edu.ar, or .com.ar, or gov.ar, I get the full
10 Mbit for a single http download. IE I downloaded the latest Ubuntu ISO
from ftp.uba.ar at 9.8 Mbits.

Of course, if I download a torrent download, the several simultaneous
downloads of file fragments also saturate the 10 Mbit. So this is a
nuisance only for individual big file downloads done with the browser.

Strange and odd.

Upstream on the other hand doesn´t seem to be limited in any way...

Thoughts? Comments? is this throlling per http session a common practice?
Or should I demand I get the full speed for EACH http session?.

FC



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