NBN slow in the morning

[bojan]

It's been a week I switched to NBN (I stayed with the same provider, Iinet, basic package with phone).

Since the day one, practically I have no internet in the mornings before 11AM (yes, it is there but just barely, it is unusable for browsing. Before that I had ADSL2, no problems).
Interestingly, telephone (VoIp) works normally.

Now I am thinking, I should have stayed as long as possible with the previous arrangement.


Anyone has a similar experience?

[Nikolas]

Tried contacting them? You are not getting what you paid for hence either they fix it or you demand a refund or go elswehere.

Ombudsman is always the last resort as well

[bojan]

I contacted them over the phone today, but the guys from support tried to convince me it is my browser (like, I don't know what I am talking about..)
As to fee payment for upgrade, i can't complain - I told them I wanted free upgrade because:

1) It is not MY wish to go to to NBN, I was perfectly happy with ADLS2 and I did not want to make copper wires obsolete
2) I was an old customer, so I earned the fee they wanted to charge for transfer many times over.

[skysurfer]

Absolutely nonsense. When the same browser works flawlessly with your DSL, it should work perfectly. Usually they put students at the helpdesk with few knowledge.

Do you have fiber ? Not all NBN connections are fiber.
And it can be a DNS problem. The DNS can be different from your old provider, but luckily you can change it yourself. A good one is Cloudflare DNS (https://www.cloudflare.com/en-us) :
Adresses:
1.1.1.1
1.0.0.1
They include ad blocking as well.

Another one is Cisco OpenDNS (https://www.opendns.com):
208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220

These are more reliable than the privacy offending Google DNS.

[bojan]

I have HFC (so fiber is further up the line).
Good point re DNS, thank you - (it occurred to me as well sort of.. because phone is working OK) - I will try your suggestion asap, I left the previous settings (automatic) as it worked OK... most likely I was on Telstra server with ADSL2, and now that the physical line changed (cable), DNS was also changed.
My mistake.
My apologies, IInet.

[bojan]

Tried this morning with suggested DNS (and 8.8.8.8)... it seems this solved the problem, however, the effect of changing DNS was not immediate like I expected (change from automatic to specifis DNS), it seems reboot was required?
Anyway.. looks like all works now :-)

[skysurfer]

You should reinitialize network connection, e.g. turn off and on wifi or unplug and plug again the network cable if you have wired network. That is all.

[bojan]

Makes sense.. Thank a lot :thumbsup:

[Exfso]

I'd be very wary of IINet, they are a bunch of shonks in my opinion, they told me all sorts of lies, and at one stage I had less than dial up speeds on my 100/50 service. They blamed everything except their ability to provide bandwidth. I had to get the ombudsman involved to get out of their contract, now with Aussiebb and never looked back.

[The_bluester]

The slowdown times are odd too, the usual NBN lack of bandwith issues crop up in roughly a 5PM to 9PM or so slot, basically when people get home and start watching Netflix.

Currently I am in NBN fixed wireless congestion hell. Anywhere down to about 1mbps download in peak times since a tower "Upgrade" two months ago and they just keep auto closing tickets, we have established pretty solidly that it is nothing to do with my network or my RSP (Aussie Broadband)

[bojan]

This morning NBN is slow again (VERY slow actually, every webpage times out), even wih DNS settings that apparently woked OK (or so I thought)).



So far I know for certain that in the morning:
- VoIP (phone) works OK
- Browsing does not work
- Skype does not work (not sure if it depends on DNS setting ?)

[skysurfer]

Probably the provider takes Voip priority over browsing or other internet services.
Skype has nothing to do with DNS settings, different to other internet use.
And, indeed, complain at your provider.

But as "The_bluester" says, all the streaming services are indeed a bandwidth hog. When using Netflix, rather pre-download it in low load times (e.g. night) and watch later.

[bojan]

Yesterday we were even without phone service.. it was resored at ~8PM.

This morning - same... Internet access is there, phone works, internet browsing and Skype unuseably slow (~1bit/sec or so /-: )

[The_bluester]

You need pages to load to do it but I would be doing some speedtest.net tests to see what you connection is actually doing, run them at various times of day to build a profile that shows if you have congestion issues. Unfortunately there is not a lot you can do to show where slow speeds are coming from. All we could do was traceroutes which showed in a 100ms round trip, almost all of it was in the (Invisible) hop through the NBN to our RPS's network.

Ours is finally sorted after I would have to say, two months of obfuscation and BS from NBN.

Another month of anywhere down to 0.9mbps download later and suddenly it is working properly. Unfortunately we are due for more "Scheduled maintenance" later this month, that was the start of this last little escapade in customer service.

They would smell much more of roses if they did not work so hard to gaslight their customers or just tell them porkies. At one point when a ticket was lodged we suddenly had no connection, then really good speeds for about ten minutes then no connection, then good speeds, then back to it's "best". The no connection was because they forced a recycle of the NTD at our end, and then they closed the fault as having no speed problems. Suspicious me wonders if they performed the test while recycling all the NTD's on our sector of the tower, knocking a lot of customers offline and reducing load for the duration of the test so it looked better than it was.

[bojan]

Well... again I have to put a blame to myself - or my comp.
Almost every time, when I power it up, there is no internet (phone works always)

However, my laptop (via WiFi or LAN) behaves as it should - internet is always there after power up.

Suspicion fell on LAN cables, of course.. so I fiddled with cables, and the pattern started to emerge: after physically disconnecting and reconnecting LAN cable, internet usually started working.
But I could not prove to myself the cable was faulty.

So I tried another approach - disabling and enabling LAN adapter.. and this worked every time.


What could the cause of this?

[acropolite]

Could possibly be an IP address conflict, if so disconnecting and re-connecting the Lan cable and or disable/re-enable of the Lan adapter would refresh any DHCP allocation.

It’s good practice to assign a static reservation in your router DHCP table for every device (particularly wireless iDevices) you have connected either physically or wirelessly.

I’ve seen many instances where cabling is blamed and address conflicts are the cause, smartphones and tablets are the worst offenders. FWIW If your internet connection was abysmally slow your VOIP connection would be the first to suffer.

[Ukastronomer]

I complain when mine goes below 70Mbs

[JimsShed]

I had very slow NBN initially. AussieBB suggested I physically disconnect unused phone points in the house. I did this and my speed doubled. Apparently NBN is very sensitive to signal “reflections“. Might be worth looking into.

[bojan]

Hmm.. that sounds strange - "reflections" explanation could be applicable for ADSL, in principle... but filter/diplexer should eliminate any issues like that.


Telephone (via VoIP) is completely separate circuit, and can't affect HF cable or fibre...

[JimsShed]

My unused phone points initially had nothing plugged into them. No splitters or devices. What I had to do was disconnect them. "cut the wires" so to speak. Now my only phone point in the house is the first one in the line from the street, and my NBN modem is plugged into that point.
This may not be the solution to your problem but it was for me.

Jim

[bojan]

So, what physical connection exactly do you have to connect to NBN at your house?
Is it coaxial cable, fibre or pair of wires?

BTW, apparently my problem was DNS conflict, as mentioned by Phil (and corroborated by my experiments - disbling and enabling LAN adapter from Control Panel does the trick - however I would still like to know why this is happening since switch to NBN ... maybe drivers are not loaded in right order upon power up?)

[acropolite]

Bojan, address conflicts can be caused by several factors including cascaded data switches, poorly behaved smartphones and tablets, duplicated DHCP servers, and static assignments that conflict with the dynamically assigned IO addresses allocated by your router. I see them all too often in my day to day work.

Check to see if you have any devices with static assignments, if you need static assignments the best way is to put an entry in the DHCP table of your router and set the device to get that IP via DHCP.

One common problem I’ve seen is the use of old routers as Wireless Access points without turning off the DHCP in the second device.

I’ve lost count of the times I’ve resolved issues reported as cabling problems where sloppy IT contractors have introduces IP addressing problems.

As I said before, the best advice is to reserve all addresses in the DCHP table of your router. Unfortunately some routers supplied by the biggest ISP (Telstra) have a very limited range of reservation entries available.

[bojan]

Phil,

The router was supplied by iinet...

Interestingly, when I experienced those problems, another lap on the same router worked immediatelly (this is what gave me idea to look into LAN cabling etc.)
I think I tried old router in the beginning (with incorp[orated ADSL modem) and the observed behaviour was the same (desktop funny, laptop worked every time).

Anyway.. it doesn't matter, now I routinely toggle the LAN adapter (DNS server is set to 8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4 and that helps every time.

[redbeard]

Hi Bojan,

After reading this post, Phil's response is the best so far.

I'd like to add that Phil is talking about IP conflicts, NOT DNS issues.

On iiNet's website the information states that the DNS you should be using is 203.0.178.191 with an alternate of 203.215.29.191. This entry should be in the router for a start. If you have configured your PC AND all other devices to get their IP address via DHCP then that is all you should need to do as they will automatically get an IP address and the correct DNS address.

If any of your devices have been configured with a static IP address then this would have had to be entered in manually and also a DNS address will have been manually entered in those devices so it's worth checking. If that is the case, then you need to check all of your devices that use the router, wired or wireless, and see how they are configured. If you find that more than one of the devices have the same IP address, (you need to check the devices themselves), then there will be an IP conflict. If you have a mixture of DHCP and static IP addresses, then there is bound to be an issue.

The DNS entry stated above should be the same in the router as all of your devices.

So as mentioned by another in this thread, the best way to ensure that you do not have an IP conflict is to set all of your devices to get their IP address via DHCP. Also ensure that the router is setup correctly to dish out those IP addresses correctly.

An IP address conflict will only affect the devices with the same IP address, not any other device that is unique, that may explain why your laptop works all the time.

All the best,
Damien.

[bojan]

I tried the recommended DNS for iinet and result was the same (as automatic and as 8.8.8.8)....



When I tried to troubleshoot problems (in Control Panel, W'7) the it says "DNS problem".

[JimsShed]

Ye olde copper phone wires from the street.

[bojan]

OK, so it is ADSL - like.. that explains your problem from hardware point of view - if you use filter / diplexer, it should go away.

[GodsPetMonkey]

There are several NBN ‘technologies’, thanks to political butchering of the whole thing, which makes it harder to suggest solutions.

Basically we have:
FTTH (fibre all the way) - best there is, period.
FTTN (still uses copper to deliver VDSL).
FTTC (like FTTN only much less copper).
HFC (using pay TV cables; aka. Cable internet).
Fixed Wireless.

For FTTN connection you need to remove all phone points but one. Actually, get a cabler or sparky to come out and rerun the phone line from the entry to your house to your chosen outlet point - makes a huge difference for FTTN connections, though sadly the copper running the rest of the way to the node is a pile of rotting crap.

Bojan suggests he has a HFC connection, so this won’t help him at all.

Bojan, the problem with HFC is that it is a shared medium, with everyone in your ‘local loop’ sharing a limited amount of bandwidth. This means if all your neighbours are furiously downloading, you will be throttled to death. ADSL (and VDSL, so FTTN and FTTH) don’t have the same design, so your ADSL bandwidth is from the exchange to your house was all yours. From the exchange, you shared the backhaul with everyone else, but that was in the order of gigabits/s, so you wouldn’t likely notice.

Then there is the way NBN sells capacity to ISPs (called CVC). So iinet would buy so much bandwidth to use in NBNs backhaul, and that is shared among all iinet users in your local area (which could be 100,000s of connections). Too little CVC for peak demand and you and your fellow customers end up shafted. It is common for ISPs to under-purchase CVC - the two ISPs known for over-purchasing CVC are AussieBB and Telstra.

Probably too late to change any of this mess, but the geniuses that came up with this digital train wreck did just call an election...

So, it could be your PC has issues. It could be all your neighbours decided that it was time to download the latest Game Of Thrones about the same time. Or it could have been everyone on iinet in East Melbourne wanted HBO and dragons with their breakfast. Or a combination of all of this.

Hard to troubleshoot without being able to look at your network and machines, but I’d suggest you reset your router to iinet factory settings, then change the DHCP settings in the router to the cloudflare DNS servers (or Google’s if your prefer them). Then on your PC set the network options to purely get everything from DHCP - basically testing to see if there is a setting someplace that is causing problems (ie. it’s your computer’s fault) by making the router tell it exactly what to do. Then see if that works. Feel free to unplug/replug your network cables, or replace them completely.

Worry about things like reserving IPs (or static IPs) when you have solved the problem or eliminated everything else. Going manual on your home network config is a possible source of problems unless you know exactly what’s what.


At least you are not on fixed wireless. That’s a service that is well and truly stuffed. Oh, and every time we get heavy dew and condensation getting into my rotting copper feed my FTTN turns into a yo-yo, so I have a hate-hate relationship with my FTTN service - so we all suffer in some way.