CW is then preemptively shaping iOS?
Can't say this was joyish as I need 7.1.2 to do a repair on my phone...
The support agent didn't bother to read past line one of my mail which was related to the slow speeds on iOS. *shakes head*
This is not the first time I had to sent multiple mails because the mail was not read properly, responded properly to.
Why bother then?
Not shaping it at all. But there's a limit to the pipe size we have, and when you've got everyone and their dog streaming, and all other traffic as usual passing through, and Apple run a massive update for the world to download,
and they serve content from an international source, capacity takes strain. Rather than manage it like other ISPs do where everything just gets shaped to the ground, the capacity at this time of night typically goes to streaming services, so on the odd occasion when downloaders all across the network are trying to pull just as much or even more data on downloads, the contention increases dynamically on certain protocols. The contention simply increases on the download protocols. If we spread this across all protocols,
everyone would be unhappy at the same time.
The problem is that IPC is not a dynamic thing that we can increase and decrease on a whim. Takes about a month to provision. You can't simply call them up, and increase the pipe size then decrease it later when the Apple updates are done.
So I apologise about this. Contention on downloads can increase at certain times of day, and does impact on latencies to an extent during "streaming hours" when someone like Apple releases an update, or when MS release a service pack. There's not much that we can do about it short of raising prices to maintain a buffer-fund of some sort for when this sort of thing occurs. Or we allow contentions across the board to increase, which is really not the right way to do it.
So while we haven't had much of an issue with the Apple update, it does cause increased contention on some protocols, at certain times of day. The other thing to consider is that the server serving you the content is under pressure. Happens plenty to companies releasing these large updates. Their host server's capacity takes a little strain and the contention increases on their end - or a maximum number of concurrent connections is reached for their routers and things start failing. It's not always the ISP.
In this case though, we're happy to accept some responsibility, but to be honest I reckon the network has run quite superbly all things considered, especially when compared to what's happening on other ISP networks at the moment.
