Chilling_Silence's blogIs Big Time really worthwhile?
(26/12/2009) Edit 2: It seems that Telecom are truly trying their best with this plan, and the few employees I’ve spoken who have anything to do with Big Time and its implementation are almost zealous about making it the best possible plan that they can! They’ve even been watching the likes of geekzone, gpforums, pressf1, helping out where they can, and adding certain gaming traffic to the ‘whitelist’ so it’s not slowed:
http://www.geekzone.co.nz/forums.asp?forumid=39&topicid=43761
(2/12/2009) Edit 1: Have changed DNS to Telecoms DNS servers instead of OpenDNS. YouTube now flies down regularly, even at peak times!
It sounds too good to be true, flat-rate broadband in New Zealand, there has to be a catch, right? Well, here’s a summary of my experiences, which are all documented in slightly longer posts on PressF1.co.nz
Prior to switching I had one kick-ass connection with Orcon. It wasn’t super fast, I would sync at around 4m/bit. Not too bad, but not too great. I’d obtain almost max line speed each time when I ran speed tests, download tests, and any other kind of throughput test I could, with the exception being when I classified it as lower-priority traffic in my QoS.
I could honestly be downloading from several different places at once, at around 3200kbps, my wife could be on a VoIP call and browsing, I could have a torrent trickling in, and HOST games via my VPN service DotALAN, and it never missed a beat!
However when TiVo was announced, and I saw it was Telecom-only I had to investigate it.
A quick bit of background, my Boss who is also a church friend happens to live 1K down the road, closer to the actual Exchange. He sync’s at approx 14m/bit with his Orcon connection and regularly attains that on downloads both national and internationally. Wanting to see who was “better” after my parents (Who live approx 400m CLOSER to the exchange) had an absolutely terrible experience with Xnet wholesaling off Telecom, my boss signed up for the Pro plan on a second line. Long story short we setup two identical routers, one with an IP ending in .1 and the other with the IP ending in .254. Thanks to a quick batch script I whipped up we could quickly switch between the two. Long story short, the Orcon would download at about 30kbps faster (30 out of 14000-odd, so not noticable) and the Telecom one would consistently upload at about 20kbps faster (20 out of 900-odd, again you cant notice it). Both just as reliable as each other, so when it came time for me to try out Big Time, I figured I should be safe.
Prior to switching I ran speedtests (Not that I needed to, I knew my line well enough) and traceroutes to several NZ-local and Australian international websites. Aside from a small amount of packet loss on Big Time, things seemed pretty good! The packet loss has sufficiently diminished now to the  point where I can’t specifically blame it on Big Time.
Speeds are something people complain lots about, however in my experiences of Warcraft 3 (I don’t really play much else) on both Battle.NET and DotALAN (PPTP VPN) the connection was just as good as the Orcon one. They even state that they deliberately lower the priority of SSL & VPN connections, yet it’s never missed a beat!
I’ve had some issues around speeds from specific websites, such as Rapidshare / Hotfile, but I don’t really care much about that.
VoIP calls still work brilliantly. Ping times slowly degrade from around 6ms to 19ms to 2talk on my connection, depending on if it’s peak time or not, but there’s never more than 1-2ms jitter while on a call.
YouTube sucks like you wouldn’t believe 🙁 Videos take *so* long to buffer it isn’t funny … well they’ve sort of improved a little in the last week (Not sure why) but it’s still sad knowing that YouTube videos don’t *need* to be that way. They never were before on my Orcon connection, nor are they for my boss on his Telecom connection, even if we rate-limit him with our own QoS.
TVNZOnDemand was another “test” streaming video site, all their videos appear to be encoded with 1-pass CBR. Im assuming that because ALL the Shortland Street (FYI – Not a fan of the show, but my wife is, hence using it for testing)Â videos I used as test subjects had exactly the same amount of time taken to buffer, then playback. It was 16 seconds of buffering for 7 seconds of playback. The Ads beforehand didn’t seem to obey that rule however.
Anyway, Telecom have since acknowledged they “accidentally” put TVNZOnDemand in with the Big Time Traffic Management, and are now working to remove it. This could take some time though. I don’t mind, it’s not high priority for me now they’ve fixed TiVo which also wasn’t working, but it turns out that was an issue with TiVo, independent from the Big Time traffic management. Still, with YouTube being the size it is, so much is shared via it these days, it’s a shame it’s got such a low priority. Target bittorrent users I think.
Interestingly enough, they’ve also targetted Usenet with their Traffic Management. Kind of surprised that they “know” of it 😉 but yeah basically now Usenet downloads are horribly slow, even multi-threaded, so if you do a lot of that then you’ll be disappointed.
However when all is said and done, I’ve managed to do 14+GB for 4 days solid earlier this month when I had a bit of stuff queued up, and that’s *after* my own QoS is applied so I could no doubt do more if I really tried. People have complained about it in other forums and things, gaming not working as well as it could, slow sites, but it’s hard to say to everybody: Go use OpenDNS, replace your crappy router with something nice like an NB6Plus4WN, check your sync speeds / SNR / Attenuation, fluff around with interlacing if you must, use a real browser, heck use a LiveOS as a test to see if things speed up … people just aren’t interested in “fixing” things like I am.
Big Time works for me…Â Thus far I’m very happy 🙂
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