iBurst to WBS speed

[koffiejunkie]

How's this for weird. The helpdesk.wbs.co.za page opens quicker on my 192kbit adsl at home than on iBurst (with full reception) at work....

 

[JasonH]

haha lol

 

[Roman4604]

than on iBurst (with full reception)

The first thing that comes to mind is over-utilisation of the tower you're on. What time of the day did you test the iBurst?

If its not tower capacity, and you know your signal is good, and we know the WBS site is not rate limited by the bw mgr, then the only thing left is the backhaul link from the tower to the core network (where the site sits).

Does anyone have any visibility on how the towers backhaul traffic to the core (inter-connect point to UUNet & IS). Is it Telkom Diginet, Frame Relay or ATM, private microwave, or some other radio technology?

 

[slimothy]

thing is if you do get it loading slower then you have a major problem because traffic to have from sites/users within the network should always be fast even if you're throttled, because they shape/throttle at the gateway so the internal traffic should never be hindered, you actually found a good way to diagnose problems

 

[Roman4604]

Yep, would'nt it be great if WBS (dream on) included a round trip latency poll (in ms) from each tower to the core network on their network status page.

Then we could all gauge how badly affected a particular tower was from congestion or backhaul link degradation (e.g. tx errors or re-routing).

 

[koffiejunkie]

Roman, I'm comparing six months (geez, it's been so long!) of iBurst use, during which I routinely downloaded stuuf at close to 100kbytes/s, to the last two weeks or so of 192kbit ADSL.

 

[alchamy]

Yep, would'nt it be great if WBS (dream on) included a round trip latency poll (in ms) from each tower to the core network on their network status page.

Then we could all gauge how badly affected a particular tower was from congestion or backhaul link degradation (e.g. tx errors or re-routing).

They already have this feature, if your in the building you can see it on a massive screen. I have asked for it to be included on the website version of the network monitor before, however as expected my e-mail was completely ignored.

Point??? The feature exists and can easily be implemented for public viewing. They don't want us to know tower latency.

 

[Roman4604]

Koffie, I'd agree ADSL is more responsive on http then iBurst. I got 2 512K ADSL test lines at the office so I got a good feel for the ADSL experience.

I put it down to WBS's inferior (to Telkom) transparent web proxy setup. It seems to add a bit of initial response latency (i.e. the pause between hitting enter on a URL and the response page/data starting to arrive at your browser).