My 350Mb connection is throttled to 10Mb

[ProTofik]

Hi,

I have been Virgin Media (and NTL) customer for the past 12 years. Starting with 2Mb/s connection, I went through multiple upgrades, currently at 350Mb/s.

In the past weeks or maybe months, I have noticed that as soon as I turn torrenting on any computer or server in my house on, the WAN download connection drops to 10Mb/s flat on every device in the house (total). On top of that, I experience massive, 25% packet drops (tested by ping -t 1.1.1.1 and 8.8.8.8). Turn torrent off, and bam, problem solved.

My SuperHub 3 is setup in modem mode. My edge firewall is virtualized pfSense 2.4.4 and VLAN routing is done on Cisco 3560CX. Pretty basic setup that works fine.

Has Virgin Media introduced some sort of policy recently that throttles customer's connection down to make it feel like 2007 again for torrenting, or is my SuperHub 3 modem acting up?

Paying over £50 for 10Mb connection does not seem like a good deal for me any more. There are unthrottled 70/20 options out there for half the price.

[Outcasst]

I've been researching this strange behaviour for a few years now. I made a post with a video back in 2017 that sees exactly the same symptoms as seen here. https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Speed/Vpn-throttling/m-p/3509177#M172096

I also run Pfsense, however that is irrelevant as I've tried to connect my PC directly to the Super Hub 3 in modem mode and it still does this.

In my case I am running a VPN.

Turns out it's the uTP protocol that's triggering the SuperHub or VM's network (I'm not sure which yet) to throttle the connection down to roughly 10Mbps. 

This is actually a very strange occurrence since I'm not sure how VM's network is detecting whether the packets are using TCP or uTP within the VPN tunnel. It's very possible that the way in which these packets are being transmitted could be overloading whatever hardware is in the pipeline, whether that be from the Super Hub 3 end or the cabinet. With the problems we have with the Puma 6 chipset, it would not surprise me at all if the Hub is just getting overloaded for whatever reason that seems to be unique to when uTP is being used.

In Qbittorrent in particular, you have to set the connection to TCP only.

Basically the general fix is to disable uTP protocol in your torrent software. This got rid of the issue 99% of the time for me, however there are some occasional torrents that this does not work on for some reason.

I'm going to be receiving the Super Hub 4 this week, so I'm going to test to see if it still throttles when uTP is enabled. This will tell us whether this is a specific problem with the Hub 3 or whether it's a more widespread issue with VM's infrastructure.

[Moogera]

I will be interested in the results of your findings

Thanks

[Outcasst]

Can confirm it still happens with the superhub 4, but it does cap a little bit higher at 1.7MB/s to 2.0MB/s.

Super Hub 3 capped at 1.4MB/s

[Max2020]

Can you change the LAN IP on the SH4 to for example 172.16.x.x or 10.115.x.x (not just the octets on the 192)

Thanks

[Moogera]

Not good

[Topbloke]

ignore

[Topbloke]

ignore

[Topbloke]

Max2020:

I tried this (switching to TCP) and thought it cured the issue but that is the issue VPNs providers require UDP protocol (for max speed and performance) so I think even switching to TCP on your torrent app or disabling uTP it's a temporary workaround the errors will occur again sadly and a drop to 10Mb will occur.

You can test this more by queuing up 30-40 torrents (after you have gone to tcp mode or switched off uTP in utorrent or qbittorrent) than leave it for an hour or two and you will see your torrent speed working fine one minute then randomly dropping to 10Mb, what's happening is this issue is hard to spot since no one really sits and watches torrents downloading for an hour or two since we have better things to do but you will spot this happening.

Course the fuller fix is using TCP with your vpn provider and TCP for your torrent app but you may like myself get the 60-80% speed drop, so its not really a fix.

[Topbloke]

karimkanji:

In qB click Tools / Options / Connection, change Enabled protocol to TCP

You can try but it did not work for me its also if you are using a vpn provider or not too. You can change vpn provider from udp protocol to tcp and torrent app to tcp but this is a temp fix, only real fixes are change isp or move to newsgroups to download your ubuntu isos or switch to WireGuard vpn providers (not recommended due to privacy flaw)

[Topbloke]

I always wondered who made this great video 😉

When I first disabled uTP and saw my torrents flying was thinking its finally fixed ! But as I said in the other post keep checking your torrents or que up a good amount like 40-50 torrents and also keep an eye on your VPN logs for errors, the bad packets arrive and your speed gets cut to 10Mb again it just happens lesser.

So sadly not a full fix, I have spoken to one networking guy who is aware of Virgin Media hub 3/4 failures with UDP processing but even he can't find a fix, and he works with data packets in I.T.

Still, id recommended people ditch torrents and move to newsgroups or wait for WireGuard to fully replace Openvpn protocol since WG fixes the issue also but it's not recommended in its current privacy flawed state.