alter.net issues continue for months - verizon doesn't care
tzm
Newbie

I have had multiple reoccurring issues with Fios and alter.net here in NYC for the past 6 months. Upon searching the web I see it's a reported problem by other users. I have 150/65 and going to multiple sites that pass traffic through alter can be extremely slow.

 
Talked with Verizon and they won't do anything about it. They will ask you to run a speed test through the Verizon Fios site. Of course everything checks out fine since it is one hop directly to their servers. They will say that anything else is third party and won't help.
 
My suspicion, though I have no facts to back it up, is they know about it but perhaps use it as a way of limiting your bandwidth. Primarily this happens on the weekends and from 11am to 1am week days. Anything that doesn't route through alter.net works at full speed.
 
Perhaps it is also that other ISP's pay for only a limited amount of bandwidth which jams up the highway.
 
I don't have enough technical knowledge to know but my traceroutes show the problem clearly.
 
For those users thinking about switching to Fios you should do traceroutes to the sites you most often use. If they hop through alter.net…. find another provider…….or stay where you are if it works well……
 

 

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Re: alter.net issues continue for months - verizon doesn't care
gracieG1
Newbie

 Dear tzm,

Today I encountered the same issue you had (my route trace stops at  3.et-2-0-1.TL2.NYC1.ALTER.NET) which blocked my access to my employer's web site and severely impacted my work. I made the call to Verizon and got the similar response as you - they can't do anything like: help contacting ALTER.NET, provide ALTER.NET contact info to me, or dispatch technician to my home for further diagnosis, etc. And they made it clear if I call later I will get the same response so no use to escalate this issue. Basically all I can do is waiting and praying.

May I ask has your issue been solved? If yes, how? Or you just switch to another service provider?

So frustrated...

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Re: alter.net issues continue for months - verizon doesn't care
ronzie1
Contributor - Level 2

A whois search shows the domain alter.net belongs to Verizon Business Global LLC. www.alter.net takes me to www.verizonenterprise.com, a business service of Verizon. Their contact information can be found at https://www.verizonenterprise.com/Support/contact/

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Re: alter.net issues continue for months - verizon doesn't care
nick_d
Enthusiast - Level 3

I have been having the same issues. My company uses an Akamai edge platform to shuttle large media files back and forth; I started to notice I could get about 30MB (yeah megaBYTES, not bits) per sec during the morning hours but after about 1pm or so that would drop drastically - down to about 900KB per sec - and stay there until after midnight. No way that should happen.

I talked to VZ support and they blamed someone else of course... then we contacted Akamai and since we spend thousands per month with them they actually took the time to at least look into it. They see the slowdown occurs at the handoff in miami at an x.alter.net hop with an IP that begins with 153 but it's outside their network so there wasn't much they could physically do. They did say there's no way I should see speeds drop that drastically due to any kind of congestion which is the excuse VZ support gave me. 

So I decided, while the miami connection was super slow, to try connecting to a chicago akamai IP. I achieved 11MBps -- switched back to the miami server and still saw between 600 and 900KBps.  Makes no sense to me - I can't figure out what's going on.  I see lots of people complaining about their connections bottlenecking at the miami alter.net junction - mostly Central Florida based customers. Is there not a phone call someone at Verizon can make to the owner of that junction asking them to have a look at their logs? This has been happening for months with me but I see posts going back at least a year. 

On a related note, iTunes streaming slows down during those periods as well -- I checked and they use akamai so I am being routed through that malfunctioning juncture for that as well. During the same period I can get 11 to 15MBps downloading from a shared host in Seattle so it seems to be something specifically wrong in Miami. 

Verizon Support - can you help us?

Thanks,

Nick

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Re: alter.net issues continue for months - verizon doesn't care
Namronorman
Contributor - Level 2

Netflix is using primarily a combination of Level 3, LLNW, and Akamai for content distribution these days... Verizon is probably not too keen on keeping decent connections with the above providers as a result. I regularly see slow downs with all three anymore. I guess the best way to defend junk product (Redbox Instant) is to eliminate any sort of playing field for the competition.

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Re: alter.net issues continue for months - verizon doesn't care
artty1
Newbie

I experienced some intermittent connection drops, that increased over the past few days. I did a traceroute and I see it's at 3 different alter.net hops, with packetloss from 10-100%, usually 30%. Called verizon up and do the "have you tried turning it off and on" schpiel. Since my internet is generally connected, apparently it's working to them, and they said it would cost $91/half hour for a technician to come out if there was nothing wrong. In what world does it cost me extra to make sure a service I already pay for is working? And at that rate is almost a $400k/yr salary.

I can't believe I'm saying this, but I'm going back to Comcast. At least when I contacted tech support they actually fixed the problem without trying to gouge more money out of me.

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Re: alter.net issues continue for months - verizon doesn't care
jt881
Enthusiast - Level 2

wow seeing your post basically seals the deal for me to cancel fios after less than two weeks.  They keep on giving me the runaround after I gave them trace route info that shows timeouts happening at alter.net.  First they denied it was them, then they said it's another division so they can't troubleshoot it.  They insisted on sending a tech out, which was a waste of time of course.  Signed up for 50/25 and frequently get as low as 2 Mbps during evening hours.  Pathetic.

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Re: alter.net issues continue for months - verizon doesn't care
nick_d
Enthusiast - Level 3

I have worked with my company's IT department to trace the slowdown and it's most definitely ALWAYS at alter.net. Interestingly I read about Verizon purposely allowing the ports at Alter.net junctions to become saturated with traffic. Rather than open more ports to balance the traffic they just turn a blind eye -- why? Because they own a 50% stake in Redbox and the want customers to choose their VOD services rather than Netflix, iTunes and Amazon Prime. So the best way to do that is to make those kinds of services so slow it's unusable.  Cogent and Akamai (which provide CDN services for iTunes and Netflix) are well aware of Verion's shady practices and have repeatedly (and publicly) requested a solution from Verizon but nothing has been done.  Partially you can blame the FCC for deregulating broadband to begin with - a move which they now openly regret. Remember when Google had the big push behind net neutrality? Well they suddenly got quiet about it -- why? Verizon offered them a deal to ensure their traffic goes through is the speculation. I have the 300Mb plan and if I connect to my akamai hosted FTP at say 9am I get close to 30MB per sec.  11:30am/noon-ish until about midnight I get 600KBps to 900KBps. There is absolutely NO WAY the internet as a whole would slow me down that drastically, especially to Akamai who has built its entire business on providing faster and more reliable transfer rates during congested times.

What will it take for Verizon to listen to their paying customers needs instead of playing this childish 'you can't play in my treehouse' games with other networks. 

I hope Google FIber comes here soon because if this isn't resolved I'm jumping ship in an instant. This affects my business.

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Re: alter.net issues continue for months - verizon doesn't care
Sarsfield1
Enthusiast - Level 2

I just bumped my thread from November concerning this issue with the hopes that someone from Verizon could consolidate the threads and give us some type of answer regarding this MAJOR issue.  Why are they totally ignoring this topic?  It makes you wonder what's happening with the data streaming through those alter.net hubs.

Maybe they're NSA collection points?

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Re: alter.net issues continue for months - verizon doesn't care
Rick851
Newbie

Did this ever get resolved for any of you?

I just started having issues routing to some of my servers today around 2:45 AM.  Had the same issue where FIOS support told me it wasn't their problem.

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