Speedtests, fake values and traffic filters [EN]

[riccardo1991]

Hello, I am sorry to complain again but the situation it is getting every day worse.

I have already complained here and basically there was a congestion on the line during the evening hours but you couldn't say when it would be solved.

In the meantime I have been for a long time away from home and when I came back I tried to run speedtest during evening hours (21 to 23) and I was getting the full 100Mbps in download and 6Mbps in upload.
Then I have opened Netflix, YouTube, my IPTV player, etc. and I have noticed I had buffers every few seconds on all of them. It was strange since the speedtest was saying I had the full speed available. I tried on my Macbook, Windows laptop, both on WiFi (2.4 and 5 GHz) and cable, then on my TV and phone via WiFi. Same behaviour everywhere, every evening, buffers everywhere.

I tried then in the mornings: same speedtest results but then all the services were working normally. So the situation was as back some months ago: internet congested during the evenings but now somehow the speedtest is resulting valid.

I had the idea of trying my 4G network (hopefully not Vodafone but o2) on all my device during the evenings (just to be sure the services are not congested themselves). So with 4G everything was running smooth and I had realistic speedtests around 15/20 Mbps.

Furthermore I made some tests using VPNs. I have two paid subscriptions to premium VPNs with different servers. So first I tried on 4G just to see the delta between speeds with and without it: using a VPN I had always speeds close to the speed without VPNs, tried on many devices again, connection methods and hours. In general values with VPNs are just 2Mbps less than without.

Then the funny moment when I have tried speedtests with VPN using the Vodafone network at home. During the mornings I always got the full speed without VPN and around 90/95 Mbps with VPN. So I consider the VPNs servers again very reliable, as it happened with the 4G.

Finally the surprise, during evenings tests without VPN always went up to 100Mbps but with VPNs they always got 2 to 4 Mbps! Again I tried in the same moment on same servers but with 4G I had again similar values (15Mbps without VPN and 12-13 with VPN, so the VPN servers were not congested). This drop of 96Mbps is insane and according to the other tests I have run it sounds very strange.

Then (without VPNs) I have tried to download big files of some GB from both my cloud and some websites. During the mornings the speeds were around 1GB per minute, so pretty full speed. Instead during the evenings speeds dropped between 50 and 150 Kbps. That's ridiculous.

I have run so many tests, and the only outcome I have is that Vodafone is very likely applying some traffic filters on Vodafone network during peak hours in the evenings. Maybe this to proof a full bandwith available but in reality the situation it is as always with a terrible connection during evenings.

Basically I suppose Vodafone has a list of IP addresses used to do speedtests (ookla, fast, etc.) and it speeds up the connections on such servers. A further proof is when I have run some speedtests on other speed tests services not as popular. In such cases the speed shown was again between 1 to 4 Mbps during the evenings.

So what is happening? Vodafone can you give me a hint? I assume no one will ever tell me that Vodafone speeds up connections on speedtests servers. But I am paying for 100Mbps and after months of complaining during evenings it is still too slow. I have the same speed I had back in 2002.
Can you help me seriously this time?

Best Regards,
Riccardo

[riccardo1991]

And as magic, after 23.30 the speed come back again:

[Tobias]

Hey Riccardo,

well, its the same problem as my colleague mentioned in the last thead. We still got a high load in your area. My colelagues still working on that, it looks like its been fixed the next week - so we have to wait what the feedback will be 🙂

Regards

Tobias