TRUE Throttling

[nwh1]

Hi all, just moved to Minburi and I've got a serious case of the throttles from TRUE!

I previously had zero problems with 3BB when I was living outside Bangkok province!

Any suggestions on a workaround? Forwarding ports? Router settings adjustments?

Dying slow death here!

[Pib]

Assuming you mean throttling to international sites/servers. If so, using a VPN conneciton may help a lot to speed up your international connections. It sure did for me with True.

But a VPN connection will not help with a slow domestic/in-Thailand connection. If your connection is slow "within" Thailand you just have a problem with your local connection and need to call True to fix it.

[muratremix]

new 3BB is not so fast against international destinations.

True with singapore vpn works great.

[dtaanic]

I was looking for new answers on this matter and it seems there is more Throttling by True now compared to a couple of month ago.

i Started to use VPN connection a year ago. Until around 2 month ago i had fast connections through VPN. Now it is clearly Throttled too after 5 min connection.

[Pib]

4 minutes ago, dtaanic said:

I was looking for new answers on this matter and it seems there is more Throttling by True now compared to a couple of month ago.

i Started to use VPN connection a year ago. Until around 2 month ago i had fast connections through VPN. Now it is clearly Throttled too after 5 min connection.

What VPN protocol are you using?  OpenVPN/UDP, OpenVPN/TCP, PPTP, L2TP, SSTP, etc.   PPTP and L2TP will usually give you the best speed...and even SSTP can give very good speed....depends on your internet provider and internet service provide.  

 

Also, if could be your VPN service provider or the particular VPN location/city/country you are connecting to...if not already tried, you may want to try a VPN connection to a different country/city and see what happens to your speed.

[Strange]

3 minutes ago, dtaanic said:

I was looking for new answers on this matter and it seems there is more Throttling by True now compared to a couple of month ago.

i Started to use VPN connection a year ago. Until around 2 month ago i had fast connections through VPN. Now it is clearly Throttled too after 5 min connection.

 

A few months ago I had True Fiber 30/10 and 3BB 30/10 in the same house because true was driving me CRAZY. Torrents did not want to download seemed like I could not get any peers. Netflix Through DNS Changes would NOT work and when they did they buffered forever and then only got terrible 240p SD. Wife was having trouble simply watching Facebook videos. Speed tests and all the regular tests showed we were getting the supposed speed. Got 3BB in the house and switched networks and all of a sudden Netflix is in 1080P and torrents are downloading at 3-4 mbps. 

 

This was the third time I had true over the years and they would not let me buy out of the contract or help me out without killing me in fees so I just stopped paying them. Now I have 3BB 50/10 for 700 baht and life is good. 

 

There are limitations on the international gateway but you can get around that with a VPN to singapore sometimes. 

 

Im not the most switched on about internet settings and all that but I gave up. 

[sniffdog]

3bb doesnt throttle ... Most of my (private) torrents reach 13-14MBs.

[lamyai3]

How is AIS in terms of this problem, throttling the speed to international websites? 

[bkkcanuck8]

8 hours ago, sniffdog said:

3bb doesnt throttle ... Most of my (private) torrents reach 13-14MBs.

 

Typically 3bb gives full speeds from 12:00am (midnight) until 6:30pm (18:30) the next day, and slightly lower speeds internationally (60% or 50%) of max connection speed for prime-time hours (5.5 hours).  

 

I would not consider this to be "throttling", more of bandwidth management during peak hours for connections that do not pay for guaranteed bandwidth (consumer accounts do not pay for guaranteed bandwidth - it is shared bandwidth that needs to be managed during congested times -- much cheaper than guaranteed bandwidth [i.e. on the order of 10% the cost]).  

 

When I lived in Canada 7 years ago Bell would "throttle" the lines during the day (only letting it open up during the early morning hours).... basically if it detected torrent activity it would throttle the line down to 60kps maximum... i.e. it was traffic specific / not managed bandwidth.

 

As long as a torrent has multiple seeders (i.e. multiple connections) you would be able to hit full bandwidth on the line during most of the day.  Usually the international providers will limit connection speed per connection.

[jonwilly]

For what it is worth.

I stopped using True/3BB over a year ago.

I switched to CAT Optical fiber, very fast when first installed but the system has slowed over time. A friend who installed CAT fibre reports the same effect.

 

john

[chiang mai]

I don't know about True but certainly ToT throttles users watching porn movies, I know this because I spent much of my career in the telecoms industry and have friends who work at ToT. Sooo, if you're being thottled.......!

[mtls2005]

8 hours ago, lamyai3 said:

How is AIS in terms of this problem, throttling the speed to international websites? 

 

I have AIS Home 50/10 FTTH, and 3BB 100/30 FTTH. I honestly have not noticed any impacts to my usage which one might consider "throttling". Thai said, I'm not spending every waking moment testing my connection(s).

 

Every ISP has limited domestic and international bandwidth so it is a resource which they must manage in order to meet their commitments to government/regulators, businesses and consumers. How and when they manage that limited resource probably varies by ISP, but my sense is that the process is reasonably automated, where only specific alarms require manual intervention. Dropping packets is probably the simplest way to manage basic consumer bandwidth, and is easily accomplished (unless you're running a VPN). I have no clue as to peak usage periods but if I had to guess I'd say some major sporting events, like EPL, where a lot of people are trying to stream in-bound over limited international links? I think most of the gaming is local, and a lot of Thai application usage is focused on social media which tends to be somewhat less bandwidth intensive.

 

These were updated ~ 10 days ago: http://internet.nectec.or.th/webstats/internetmap.current.iir?Sec=internetmap_current

 

My guess is that government organizations like CAT and TOT are probably not the most efficiently operated, and if they are controlling bandwidth it might be more a result of incompetence?

 

[Peterw42]

Until recently, I was using True 30 mb, (speedtest would show around that speed), streaming movies from outside Thailand was always a bit hit and miss. I moved to a new place and only TOT is available, 20mb (speedtest shows 8-10 Mb).

Although a slower speed now, any streaming from outside thailand works really well, no Buffering.

I think it has a lot to do with what happens at the internet Gateway, different companies have different bandwidth for different traffic, to the outside world. A lot of people report better speeds using a VPN, because its leaving Thailand as different traffic, on a different link.

[Peterw42]

2 hours ago, chiang mai said:

I don't know about True but certainly ToT throttles users watching porn movies, I know this because I spent much of my career in the telecoms industry and have friends who work at ToT. Sooo, if you're being thottled.......!

 

Interested to know how they could throttle based on content, a lot of those sites are blocked, but If I find one thats not, how does the internet provider know whats in the movie. 

[chiang mai]

1 hour ago, Peterw42 said:

 

Interested to know how they could throttle based on content, a lot of those sites are blocked, but If I find one thats not, how does the internet provider know whats in the movie. 

 

It's based on known locations, streaming, file types and then a colour sensor is deployed, if more than a certain percentage of a frame is flesh coloured it's flagged up, checked and throttled - in ToT's case these checks are done at their international gateway The problem is not so much porn per se but the fact that it uses up so much band width which is costly. 

[Peterw42]

10 minutes ago, chiang mai said:

 

It's based on known locations, streaming, file types and then a colour sensor is deployed, if more than a certain percentage of a frame is flesh coloured it's flagged up, checked and throttled - in ToT's case these checks are done at their international gateway The problem is not so much porn per se but the fact that it uses up so much band width which is costly. 

 

Thats interesting, I get it in theory but the practicality of opening up every stream to check for boobies seems mind boggling. I still dont get the logic behind doing it, a 1GB movie at full speed or half speed is still 1 GB of data. They are not saving data.

[mtls2005]

"It's based on known locations, streaming, file types and then a colour sensor is deployed, if more than a certain percentage of a frame is flesh coloured it's flagged up, checked and throttled"

 

"flesh-colored" 

 

Thanks for that technical explanation, it explains why my ethnic, midget and bear pron comes though fine, but beach volleyball is throttled.

 

 

 

[chiang mai]

1 hour ago, Peterw42 said:

 

Thats interesting, I get it in theory but the practicality of opening up every stream to check for boobies seems mind boggling. I still dont get the logic behind doing it, a 1GB movie at full speed or half speed is still 1 GB of data. They are not saving data.

 

The idea is the user stops watching hence it's a censorship issue rather than a comms issue.

 

The following link describes some of the options and skin colour is obviously a key one. Many porn sites change their domain name on a regular basis because of block lists that are circulated amongst ISP's.

 

https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/479-Slip-Me-Some-Skin.html

[dtaanic]

22 hours ago, Pib said:

What VPN protocol are you using?  OpenVPN/UDP, OpenVPN/TCP, PPTP, L2TP, SSTP, etc.   PPTP and L2TP will usually give you the best speed...and even SSTP can give very good speed....depends on your internet provider and internet service provide.  

 

Also, if could be your VPN service provider or the particular VPN location/city/country you are connecting to...if not already tried, you may want to try a VPN connection to a different country/city and see what happens to your speed.

I Use ExpressVPN on OSX, set to choose Protocol Automatically. VPN location changes does give different speeds, but after 5-10 min the speeds drops to near 1/100.

Torrents download speeds were 0.5 to 1.2 MB/s and drops to 1 figure kB/s on a TRUE 30M/3M connection.

I will try with selecting protocol manually and see if it makes any difference.

Thanks for the advice.

[Strange]

23 minutes ago, dtaanic said:

I Use ExpressVPN on OSX, set to choose Protocol Automatically. VPN location changes does give different speeds, but after 5-10 min the speeds drops to near 1/100.

Torrents download speeds were 0.5 to 1.2 MB/s and drops to 1 figure kB/s on a TRUE 30M/3M connection.

I will try with selecting protocol manually and see if it makes any difference.

Thanks for the advice.

 

Are you talking about pirate bay/movie torrents? Or some other kind of torrents? 

 

What happens when you try and DL torrents with the VPN off? What kind of DL speeds are you getting then?