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.

[ProTofik]

Ok, so after chatting online for 20 minutes the support person decided that Virgin must send out an engineer to my house and booked a visit for me.

I accepted the offer and played along, but I honestly have a feeling the person I spoke to didn't have technical knowledge to understand my issue properly, and it will only end up being a waste of my and engineer's time. 

I explained my setup and also said I connected PC directly to superhub in modem mode, but the response to this was 'was it connected wired or wirelessly'. Or when I said that the torrent protocol gets my whole connection throttled to 10Mb/s, I was asked 'does it happen on any other sites?'.

If a Virgin Media member here on this forum with networking knowledge could assist me here to avoid this visit, I would be grateful. 

[Moogera]

Do you achieve exactly the same speed no matter which site you download from?

[ProTofik]

Yes, no matter what torrent, from what side, I download, it goes down to flat 1MB/s. If I for example load 4 torrents, they will all go down to about 250KB/s each. If in addition to that I will try to download something from some website (not torrent), then if the torrent is running it will probably go 20-30KB/s.

Switching torrent off fixes it for every computer in the house.

[Moogera]

Can you reset Qbittorent to defaults? 

[legacy1]

Could pfSense be causing the slow down? This is why you need to test with the PC to the modem mode port and you can keep your WAN IP the same for testing if you copy the MAC pfSense is using to your PC.

[ProTofik]

I have already done that.

I switched superhub off, swapped cables so my PC was directly connected to superhub in modem mode, switched it back on and my PC had a public IP address. It didn't change anything. Internet was still capping itself to 10Mb/s as soon as I started a single torrent download. That proves that this has nothing to do with my firewall or the switch, as I have completely bypassed it here.

Now let me show you something. Below is a graph showing traffic on WAN interface of my pfSense firewall. On it you can see that while downloading a game from Origin, everything runs nice and smooth (as much as Origin servers allow). Then, while Origin is still downloading I start a single torrent download. Entire house's broadband drops immediately to flat 10Mb/s. After a while I pause torrent download and whole broadband shoots up to 45MB/s.

And as a bonus here is a ping command executed against 8.8.8.8 while I had the torrent on:

With torrent off, even when downloading from Steam or Origin at full speed of 45MB/s, ping is usually at around 15-20ms with no packet loss.

[Moogera]

Are you by any chance running a VPN ? 

I ask because that's typical of a VPN to have a flat rate

[ProTofik]

No, I am not using VPN.

[Moogera]

I'm surprised your not because the amount of Torrenting you appear to be engaged in usually leads to a copyright notice from a film or music distributor who's product your illegally downloading,sent to Virgin who forward it to you under the "get it right campaign"

Before that occurs you may want to purchase a vpn

Of course this is no answer to your question I am sure someone of more experience of these things will help you out

[ProTofik]

I am aware of that, but torrents are not only used for illegal stuff.