CloudFlare Throttling Issue (FTTH)

[andyxl987]

I have EE's Full Fibre package and hadn't had any problems in about 10 months of service. However, for the last 24 hours (maybe longer) I am experiencing extremely slow speeds to certain sites. For example, loading a discord channel may take 4 minutes to load. The emoji panel makes dozens of requests in a short frequency and also fails to load correctly.

I do not experience this issue while connected to a VPN.

I experienced something similar on Friday using 5G (also with discord) but put that down to signal issues.

Discord is not the only site that is affected. I host some public services on a remote server (Germany) and use CloudFlare proxy in front of these. Speed issues are also apparent for these, which again, do not reproduce when using a VPN. In fact, if I edit /etc/hosts to bypass CloudFlare's proxy, everything loads instantly. Note, that Discord also uses CloudFlare.

While it's possible the issue is my end, e.g. my router, Friday's issue while on mobile has me wondering if there's some issue between EE and CloudFlare? There appears to be severe throttling where the first several requests are fine and any subsequent requests are exponentially slower to send/receive.

I've also encountered similar while pulling images from docker hub and github container registry (although I do not believe either use CloudFlare).

[Leanne_T]

Hi @tofuy @Heaving0551 

Have you reported this to CloudFlare to get this looked into?  

Leanne.

[Heaving0551]

Yes, I doubt it'll be much help as its an EE node that the packet loss occurs, but worth a shot....

[XRaySpeX]

@Heaving0551 : Node 3, a BT infrastructure node, always fails to responds or takes ages for everybody cuz it's too busy doing its own thing.

[PodRED]

@Akiyama8641 absolutely. I've tried to report this to both EE and Cloudflare in the hopes that someone who knows what they're doing will see it and get their heads together but it's proven very hard to get anybody to take an interest. 

[Spikefire]

I just upgraded to full fibre 2 days ago and am having the same issue, cloudflare is reporting 30% packetloss, discord is taking forever to load channels where it was instant on fttp, ive reported it to EE and they are sending out an engineer, ill show them the diagnostics in the hope that they escalate it up the chain, because as it stands, i was getting better service on fttp and that is ridiculous.

this will also massively affect my work as i work from home for a domain registrar this issue means i wont be able to correctly diagnose issues with cloudflare websites which is a good 30% of my work.

[Spikefire]

Update: i called and had this information added to my notes on the case, tomorow they are calling me back so they can get openreach to run diagnostics, im going to ask if they can specifically run diagnostics along the route to cloudflares london server. also rerunning the test it looks like i was lucky first time round, now its refusing to even run most of the tests

[Spikefire]

further proof this is specific to full fibre, this is the same test ran off of my mobile hotspot i got for purchasing smart wifi:

[Rayman_]

Any updates to this matter? Another case here of perfectly fine speeds when connected via a VPN or any site that doesn't use Cloudfare... but when 80% of sites use cloudfare I can barely do anything at all. I work from home and this is limiting my ability to get my work done and I'm losing patience and running out of ideas. This is clearly a major issue between a node or some other technical specification between cloudfare and ee. This needs to be sorted ASAP. I have no clue as to what I can do.

[connorg123131]

I've got a bit of an update on this issue as I've spoken with someone who was a lot more technical and understanding from the EE team in the executive complaints department.

They called me on the phone and noted that they had read through this very thread with the information provided and have been trying to take a look into the problem while also taking more information from myself about where the issue lies. They believe it is IP address related and I am inclined to agree as the only time I've had this issue was on a specific range of IP addresses.

But basically it boiled down to I need to be allocated an IP (by turning my router off and on until it forces a new one within a different range...)  that works and then send them that so they can use it as some sort of cross-reference to see where the problem in the network lies. I gave them my IP addresses that didn't work, but unforatnetly they had no way to check, and neither did I, what my old IP address was when it did work the other week.

I would suggest anyone trying to get this issue looked at to please get in touch with this part of EE, let them know the thread and provide them with as much information as you can, especially if you get an IP address where the issue is not present because that is what they are currently waiting for from me in order to take this further. Please contact them here: https://ee.co.uk/contact-ee/complaint/form

[Akiyama8641]

Funnily enough, we've also thought it may be tied to IP range, and have already attempted to debug this, so we may already have several affected ranges:

• 2.31.0.0/14 [2.31.26.0/24] (going by the images above)
• 2.30.0.0/14 (my current range)
• 2.26.0.0/14
• 2.24.0.0/14
• 95.145.0.0/14

It is reassuring to know they are at least aware that there's a problem, too.