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Vodafone, throttling?

dabigm

ULTIMATE Member
I've recently got the 1.6Gbps Vodafone package installed, and when I do speedtests most of the time it gives me full speed (actually sometimes, more than what I pay for). But i've been testing various other places. I have been testing using Hetzner the German hosting company and each time I test their speed test files I see an initial higher speed (still not amazing) but then it gets lower and lower and lower as the speed test progresses.

Is this throttling? Is vodafone doing traffic shaping on international data? Traffic shaping? I've tried all the Hetzner speed test data centres and they all do this to me. I never noticed this on my previous internet connections, but they were not fast anyway.

It's a bit odd to be seeing < 100mbit when you have a 1.6Gbps connection and I know Hetzner has a lot of bandwidth

Here's a quick screenshot of the ethernet throughput in task manager. Machine is plenty fast enough and has a 10Gbps card in it. This is me doing a speed test by downloading the 10GB.BIN file from two different Hetzner data centres. Initially hits close to 500mbit, then drops to below 100. Each and every time, in any data centre.

1723036194279.webp
 
OK some further testing.

Left one is VPN on. Right, same file downloading from same place, VPN off.
VPN sustained 800+mbit. This looks like traffic shaping I think. Anyone else ?

1723036474506.webp
 
It's probably whoever they peer with for where you are going. Each ISP has to connect out to various other networks in order to get their customers connected to the internet. When you use the VPN, whoever hosts that VPN has their own arrangements, for example they may have some direct peering arrangements to the server you are going to, whereas Vodafone may not have a direct connection arrangement or have paid for less capacity.

Doing a trace route via the VPN and then via Vodafone may give some insights.
 
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OK some further testing.

Left one is VPN on. Right, same file downloading from same place, VPN off.
VPN sustained 800+mbit. This looks like traffic shaping I think. Anyone else ?

View attachment 17337
How are you downloading the 10G file? Http or https? Any difference if you try either?
 
Is this behaviour reproducible on all your devices? Even WiFi devices should get better speeds
 
How are you downloading the 10G file? Http or https? Any difference if you try either?
tried http and https. no difference https://hel1-speed.hetzner.com/ or http://hel1-speed.hetzner.com/ for example (There are others)

Is this behaviour reproducible on all your devices? Even WiFi devices should get better speeds

yes it's the same on any device. wired desktop, wireless laptop, phones. VPN on = much much faster and no drop off. I did some tcpdumping to see if there were retransmissions but not that I can see. I'm guessing as @Phil2021 mentions this could be peering (the routes are different vpn on or off, but as expected I guess). I wouldn't expect it to be *so* bad without the VPN though. But I can live with turning the VPN on
 
Here's the traceroute that I get from my Vodafone connection:

traceroute to hel1-speed.hetzner.com (95.217.255.81), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
1 DimmockRouter (10.98.0.1) 0.498 ms 0.605 ms 0.858 ms
2 84.65.64.1 (84.65.64.1) 5.989 ms 6.093 ms 6.077 ms
3 63.130.172.39 (63.130.172.39) 6.787 ms 6.784 ms 6.888 ms
4 90.255.251.47 (90.255.251.47) 10.923 ms 11.042 ms 11.021 ms
5 ae2.2.edge1.hel1.neo.colt.net (171.75.10.35) 43.316 ms 43.313 ms 43.557 ms
6 212.133.6.2 (212.133.6.2) 47.049 ms 54.519 ms 54.472 ms
7 core31.hel1.hetzner.com (213.239.224.38) 42.439 ms 42.506 ms 42.449 ms
8 hel1-speed.hetzner.com (95.217.255.81) 43.803 ms 45.547 ms 45.681 ms

On the 500Mb/s package I seem to get the expected download speed:

--2024-08-08 08:40:03-- https://hel1-speed.hetzner.com/10GB.bin
Resolving hel1-speed.hetzner.com (hel1-speed.hetzner.com)... 95.217.255.81, 2a01:4f9:0:a010::20
Connecting to hel1-speed.hetzner.com (hel1-speed.hetzner.com)|95.217.255.81|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 10737418240 (10G) [application/octet-stream]
Saving to: ‘/dev/null’

/dev/null 100%[=========================================================================================================>] 10.00G 59.6MB/s in 2m 55s

2024-08-08 08:42:58 (58.6 MB/s) - ‘/dev/null’ saved [10737418240/10737418240]
 
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