Frustrated...Horrible download speeds...only in the evenings?

[matt_g]

Been battling with this issues for the past couple of weeks now. During the day, I can get 25-30Mbps Down/20-25Mbps Upload. Testing is mostly being done from my desktop on a wired connection, plugged directly into the router, already downloaded and installed the FIOS optimizer several times now. However these symptoms also occur on mobile and wireless devices as well.

Normally around 530-600pm my download speeds plummet to 500Kbps-1Mbps. Besides simple web browsing, my connection is almost unusable at that point. Contacted support, went through all the normal troubleshooting of rebooting all my equipment, the ONT, etc, they said my router was old and no longer supported and replaced it. Wait a few days for the replacement router and still having the same issue. Call back and talk to support and kept troubleshooting. We're not watching any VOD movies, etc, no streaming when this is going on and it effects any device connected, wired or wireless. Done virus/rootkit scans on my desktop and laptop. I've even disconnected all of my devices and just had 1 machine at a time connected directly to the router and it still happens.

Couple more calls to support checking my MTU settings, TCP receive window, dozens of speedtests and tracerts. Finally one tech says he is seeing discards at the ONT when we're testing, they schedule someone to come out today. Tech comes out during the day (of course the speeds are fine 30/25) and I had to go through the whole story with him. He says he can't see any other issues with the equipment, but agrees that the issue is strange and he's going to escalate to his manager to see if they can check at the CO for any potential issues there that might be causing it. He leaves and shortly after, I get a message that my repair case has been closed. WHAT??

I call back to support, the support case was closed with no trouble found. I have to go through the ENTIRE thing all over again and open a new case, told I have to wait 24-48 for another tech to even look at my ticket again...

Sorry for the rant, just frustrated and at my wits end with support. I love FIOS...have had it 4-5 years now and this is the first real issue I've had with it. Don't know if it's some sort of weird routing issues, issues at the CO, maybe oversubscription?, and I'm not completely ruling out anything on my end either...just haven't found any evidence pointing the the culprit.

Anyone else have any suggestions?

[llloyd3]

Same thing but I'm not FIOS, but normal 3mb down / 800kb up DSL and during the day I can stream YouTube videos live fine, after 8pm forget it, can't get enough bandwidth to do that, I have to let it queue up quite a bit (for a long time) to play them. If you find a solution or find a way to make Verizon cough up it's their problem then please, tell me. >.< Thanks!

[Johnny_Utah]

I am having the SAME PROBLEM!!!

Going on two and one half weeks now.  I live in Long Beach, California.  Where do you guys reside?

Between 7,8pm-10:30pm or 11pm my speed (DOWNLOAD ONLY my upload stays at 35Mb/s and is NEVER affected) drops from 80Mb/s to 7Mb/s or LESS.  I cannot do ANYTHING.

I have placed 4 calls and nobody can fix the problem.  I am ready to ditch FIOS as their help center is a joke as their computer "techs" are clueless and two blamed the fact that I had 4 computers set up on the network (ALL of them were off btw). I am very frustrated as I am sure you all can tell.

What can we do? 

Update:  I am waiting on a call back tomorrow from an "escalated ticket".  This is certainly a backend problem that Verizon really needs to work on. 

[matt_g]

I'm actually in the Dallas/Ft Worth, TX area. But same thing. Started the week of Jan 20th, but I thought maybe there were service issues going on and waited on it a couple days before contacting support. Peak hours hit and my connection is pretty much paralyzed. Even browsing these forums are slow as heck! Upload speeds are fantastic, download is horrendous. Just ran a test again on the Verizon Speed test site...

Analysis information:

Checking for Middleboxes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Done
SendBufferSize set to [261360]
running 10s outbound test (client to server) . . . . . 24.64Mb/s
running 10s inbound test (server to client) . . . . . . 583.09kb/s
Information: Network Middlebox is modifying MSS variable
Server IP addresses are preserved End-to-End
Information: Network Address Translation (NAT) box is modifying the Client's IP address

Edit: The sad part is, I think the part that bothers me the most is the dispatched tech closed my case minutes after telling me he would escalate to his manager and the C/O....essentially making me start the entire weeklong+ process from the beginning.

[Johnny_Utah]

It's now 10:24 PST and my speeds have gone from 8Mb/s up to about 40Mb/s.  I am certain that by 11pm or so they will be back around 75-80Mb/s.

This is simply unacceptable.  I hope that others will report similar issues if they have them.  How the heck are we the only 3 people affected?

[matt_g]

Mine finally came back up to the 12-15Mbps range at about 11:30pm CST, but still flaky. I gave up and went to bed. Checked this morning and back up to 30/25.

[Johnny_Utah]

There must be something down so that during peak times it provides problems?

I will be back on tonight and report my findings.  I generally game at night and that is where I first noticed my problem.  It looks like this is quite widespread.

[jk1112]

There are a lot of people having this issue, ranging from state to state.  Here's some threads to check out.

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r27957080-Southwest-Problem-with-Fios

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r27949925-Northeast-High-pings-bad-routing.

Like you say, the problem comes and goes.  Everything seems to be normal until peak times, seems like the backbone gets overloaded.  Then returns to normal around 11pm - 12am.

Worst part is, Verizon refuses to admit there is a problem, if you look at a traceroute the timeouts and high latency occurs at alter.net jump, however alter is owned by Verizon.

[matt_g]

I was actually just reading one of those a a few minutes ago. Definitely seems like a widespread issue....reminds me of my old DSL days and dealing with oversubscription. I was hoping those days were long gone....apparently not the case anymore.

[Johnny_Utah]

What can we do?  I will NOT pay these high fees for FIOS 75/35 if I cannot use them when I get home from work, period.

I can just as easily move to Charter...just more of a hassle.  What are your plans guys?

[matt_g]

Really not sure. Haven't been able to game or do anything really for the past couple of weeks. I don't want to disconnect my service (especially with the early disconnect fees)...I'll keep trying until it's resolved or can't stand it anymore and cancel my service. Like I said before, I've had FIOS for about 4-5 years now and never had an issue until now. 😕 Good news though, after closing my ticket they sent me a free Video On-Demand movie rental that I can't use because my connection is horrible....

[Johnny_Utah]

RIGHT on cue tonight 8:15pm or so, speeds cut to 25Mb/sec with packet loss/lag etc.

Nothing has been fixed.

[matt_g]

Same with mine last night. Still no call back on new ticket either.

[Johnny_Utah]

Matt,

I have a Verizon tech on his way out here..He already told me that he has had many of these tickets and he is getting pushback from above.  He is going to have to come BACK at night when the problem is occurring because right now everything will test fine.

I will keep you updated on his findings.

J

[Johnny_Utah]

Okay guys here is my update:

A WONDERFUL (I mean it, AWESOME 15 yr + on job) knowledgable tech came out today,  and we talked for 2 hours about this as he tested all my equipment.  He had personally had 5 of these exact calls within a 4 mile radius of me just yesterday.

He thinks that this issue may be a problem with an edge router with either ATT or Alter.net..however after I run a tracert for him tonight, he will know more.  HIS boss is now aware of the problem.  We ARE getting somewhere guys.

I will keep you all updated!

Johnny

[matt_g]

Interesting....I still have not heard back from support yet. Glad things may be moving along for you!

[Johnny_Utah]

Matt, I have also been in touch with VerizonSupport on twitter.  They seem interested also.

[matt_g]

I'll have to check that out. I've been trying to play some Diablo 3 lately and it's hardly playable...i started reading the community sites there and even Blizzard is trying to collect data to give to Verizon about the issues going on. They have posts on their forums for both World of Warcraft and Diablo 3 about FIOS customers having the exact issues we're having:

Here is a link if you're interested:

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/7864916450

[b_conlan]

I've been having the same issue with Diablo 3 for the last week or so.  Im in socal, a bit north of LA.  Only occurs during peak hours

[Johnny_Utah]

---

@b_conlan wrote:

I've been having the same issue with Diablo 3 for the last week or so.  Im in socal, a bit north of LA.  Only occurs during peak hours

---

Exactly the problems here my friend.  Tonight here in Long Beach my problems started around 9:12pm and lasted until 11:15pm or so.  At times, I had 2Mb/s (from my 75Mb line!) with normal upload.  I got some timeouts here (this is a Blizzard server that I was tracing to):

Tracing route to 64.240.104.93 over a maximum of 30 hops

  1    <1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  Wireless_Broadband_Router.home [192.168.1.1]
  2     2 ms     2 ms     2 ms  L100.LSANCA-VFTTP-127.verizon-gni.net [173.51.202.1]
  3     4 ms     7 ms     3 ms  G0-9-1-6.LSANCA-LCR-21.verizon-gni.net [130.81.185.172]
  4     3 ms     6 ms     3 ms  so-3-1-0-0.LAX01-BB-RTR1.verizon-gni.net [130.81.151.236]
  5     6 ms     4 ms     3 ms  0.xe-10-1-0.BR1.LAX15.ALTER.NET [152.63.112.245]
  6     4 ms     4 ms     4 ms  209.144.222.249
  7     *        *        *     Request timed out.
  8     *        *        *     Request timed out.
  9     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 10     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 11     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 12     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 13     *        *        *     Request timed out.

[matt_g]

Still experiencing the problems here. I contacted @VerizonSupport on Twitter about my issues and about to submit more info to them. Still not able to get someone to call me back from Support as promised. Here is my tracert to D3 server and current speeds:

Tracing route to 12.129.209.68 over a maximum of 30 hops

  1    1 ms    1 ms    1 ms  Wireless_Broadband_Router.home [192.168.1.1]
  2     8 ms     6 ms     6 ms  L100.DLLSTX-VFTTP-58.verizon-gni.net [173.71.9.1]
  3    12 ms    11 ms    11 ms  G0-5-0-6.DLLSTX-LCR-22.verizon-gni.net [130.81.107.128]
  4    15 ms    17 ms    13 ms  so-4-1-0-0.DFW9-BB-RTR2.verizon-gni.net [130.81.151.244]
  5     *        *       49 ms  0.xe-3-0-1.BR1.DFW13.ALTER.NET [152.63.98.241]
  6    13 ms    11 ms     9 ms  192.205.37.125
  7    74 ms     *       50 ms  cr2.dlstx.ip.att.net [12.122.212.14]
  8    47 ms    52 ms    51 ms  cr2.la2ca.ip.att.net [12.122.28.178]
  9    73 ms    64 ms    73 ms  gar29.la2ca.ip.att.net [12.122.129.241]
 10    55 ms    43 ms     *     12.122.251.190
 11     *        *       50 ms  mdf001c7613r0003-gig-12-1.lax1.attens.net [12.129.193.254]
 12     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 13     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 14     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 15     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 16     *        *        *     Request timed out.

Analysis information:

Checking for Middleboxes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Done
SendBufferSize set to [261360]
running 10s outbound test (client to server) . . . . . 24.45Mb/s
running 10s inbound test (server to client) . . . . . . 324.06kb/s
Information: Network Middlebox is modifying MSS variable
Server IP addresses are preserved End-to-End
Information: Network Address Translation (NAT) box is modifying the Client's IP address
Server says x.x.x.x but Client says [192.168.1.2]

This is killing me! Can barely browse these forums right now. Slow as all heck...