4 ms·

Its not always great on Comcast either. It has gotten better over the last 6 months though, I will admit.

by shimshim 12y ago

amalag 12y ago
I bought a VPN and it fixes it. Sad that it is necessary.
- silverbax88 12y ago
  Which VPN did you go with?
  - amalag 12y ago
    I used privateinternetaccess, i am happy with it. I don't even use it all the time but the speed tests hold up against my 50Mb/s connection. Hulu has blocked it if that is a concern, there is some other VPN that has more egress IP's that works with Hulu, but I didn't know about it and it was more expensive anyway.
    - djchen 12y ago
      You can run your own VPN on a VPS and have a dedicated IP without needing to worry about Hulu getting blocked.
- ChuckMcM 12y ago
  I did this on Comcast as well, but its interesting to note they do shoot downs of ssh tunnels. Using IPSEC hasn't been an issue though.
  - Zikes 12y ago
    Can you describe that ssh tunnel issue? Are they monitoring your traffic and actively disrupting anything that looks like ssh?
    - ChuckMcM 12y ago
      Sure, set up an SSH tunnel, make it a SOCKS5 proxy (easy enough to do) to a host in the 'cloud', now proxy you traffic through it (like Netflix). Watch how suddenly you get 'connection reset by peer', look around and discover nobody in your packet path has any cause to reset your traffic. Now do a straight http proxy (varnish works well for this) to the same machine, run it all day night with bits of http traffic. No issues at all. No go back to creating an SSH tunnel between your machine and the endpoint. Run traffic, note the mysterious 'connection reset by peer' when some thing upstream sends your TCP connection a FIN. It could be that their network just has a really hard time with encrypted packets but some how I don't think so. I have tried a variety of port numbers. EDIT: and I went back and verified I still have 'ServerAliveInterval 60' in my config file for all hosts.
  - ohashi 12y ago
    When I was on Comcast, I felt like they were doing this to gaming traffic as well. I have no evidence to back it up except anecdotal experience though.
    - Zikes 12y ago
      When I was on AT&T U-Verse they did this with torrents. I replaced my router, OS, and modem thinking the problem lay somewhere on my end, and once I ruled all of that out I called up AT&T to complain and call out the fact that it happened only when I torrented. Their response was that yes, they do disrupt all torrenting traffic, "because it is illegal and they must comply with copyright holders". Nevermind it was various linux distros I was trying to download and evaluate, all torrenting is automatically evil by association. I had to switch to Cox because they're the only other option in my area. The 250GB data cap on my plan is BS, but at least I can spend that 250GB however I please.
      - digikata 12y ago
        I had problems a while back with any long-running downloads or streaming video on ATT DSL. Basically made some uses impossible - any large remote data that couldn't resume at arbitrary points. Went completely away when I switched to a third-party ISP - using the same ATT-owned DSL lines.
        Zikes 12y ago
        I signed up for a VPN service right at the end, and that cleared everything up for me and completely confirmed they were intentionally shaping and disrupting traffic.
- IgorPartola 12y ago
  I currently have a 6in4 IPv6 tunnel through Hurricane Electric. At least netflix.com seems to load over IPv6. I wonder if my Netflix experience is fine precisely because my traffic appears to go to HE first, then to Netflix. Edit: in the past I have had similarly good experiences with YouTube problems. They seem to go away as soon as you start accessing YouTube over IPv6.
  - boredinballard 12y ago
    Interesting. I'm going to have to start trying Netflix and Youtube over IPv6.
spuiszis 12y ago
I have Comcast as well and it's gotten because of the deal Netflix struck with them... http://knowmore.washingtonpost.com/2014/04/25/this-hilarious-graph-of-netflix-speeds-shows-the-importance-of-net-neutrality/ http://knowmore.washingtonpost.com/2014/04/25/this-hilarious... EDIT: John Oliver also talks quite eloquently about this as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpbOEoRrHyU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpbOEoRrHyU

Its not always great on Comcast either. It has gotten better over the last 6 months though, I will admit.

amalag 12y ago

I bought a VPN and it fixes it. Sad that it is necessary.

silverbax88 12y ago
Which VPN did you go with?
- amalag 12y ago
  I used privateinternetaccess, i am happy with it. I don't even use it all the time but the speed tests hold up against my 50Mb/s connection. Hulu has blocked it if that is a concern, there is some other VPN that has more egress IP's that works with Hulu, but I didn't know about it and it was more expensive anyway.
  - djchen 12y ago
    You can run your own VPN on a VPS and have a dedicated IP without needing to worry about Hulu getting blocked.
ChuckMcM 12y ago
I did this on Comcast as well, but its interesting to note they do shoot downs of ssh tunnels. Using IPSEC hasn't been an issue though.
- Zikes 12y ago
  Can you describe that ssh tunnel issue? Are they monitoring your traffic and actively disrupting anything that looks like ssh?
  - ChuckMcM 12y ago
    Sure, set up an SSH tunnel, make it a SOCKS5 proxy (easy enough to do) to a host in the 'cloud', now proxy you traffic through it (like Netflix). Watch how suddenly you get 'connection reset by peer', look around and discover nobody in your packet path has any cause to reset your traffic. Now do a straight http proxy (varnish works well for this) to the same machine, run it all day night with bits of http traffic. No issues at all. No go back to creating an SSH tunnel between your machine and the endpoint. Run traffic, note the mysterious 'connection reset by peer' when some thing upstream sends your TCP connection a FIN. It could be that their network just has a really hard time with encrypted packets but some how I don't think so. I have tried a variety of port numbers. EDIT: and I went back and verified I still have 'ServerAliveInterval 60' in my config file for all hosts.
- ohashi 12y ago
  When I was on Comcast, I felt like they were doing this to gaming traffic as well. I have no evidence to back it up except anecdotal experience though.
  - Zikes 12y ago
    When I was on AT&T U-Verse they did this with torrents. I replaced my router, OS, and modem thinking the problem lay somewhere on my end, and once I ruled all of that out I called up AT&T to complain and call out the fact that it happened only when I torrented. Their response was that yes, they do disrupt all torrenting traffic, "because it is illegal and they must comply with copyright holders". Nevermind it was various linux distros I was trying to download and evaluate, all torrenting is automatically evil by association. I had to switch to Cox because they're the only other option in my area. The 250GB data cap on my plan is BS, but at least I can spend that 250GB however I please.
    - digikata 12y ago
      I had problems a while back with any long-running downloads or streaming video on ATT DSL. Basically made some uses impossible - any large remote data that couldn't resume at arbitrary points. Went completely away when I switched to a third-party ISP - using the same ATT-owned DSL lines.
      - Zikes 12y ago
        I signed up for a VPN service right at the end, and that cleared everything up for me and completely confirmed they were intentionally shaping and disrupting traffic.
IgorPartola 12y ago
I currently have a 6in4 IPv6 tunnel through Hurricane Electric. At least netflix.com seems to load over IPv6. I wonder if my Netflix experience is fine precisely because my traffic appears to go to HE first, then to Netflix. Edit: in the past I have had similarly good experiences with YouTube problems. They seem to go away as soon as you start accessing YouTube over IPv6.
- boredinballard 12y ago
  Interesting. I'm going to have to start trying Netflix and Youtube over IPv6.

spuiszis 12y ago

I have Comcast as well and it's gotten because of the deal Netflix struck with them... http://knowmore.washingtonpost.com/2014/04/25/this-hilarious-graph-of-netflix-speeds-shows-the-importance-of-net-neutrality/ http://knowmore.washingtonpost.com/2014/04/25/this-hilarious... EDIT: John Oliver also talks quite eloquently about this as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpbOEoRrHyU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpbOEoRrHyU