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).

[Spikefire]

I have been rolling through IPs on my network for the last hour, here is my list of tested IP address (note; none of the EE IP addresses reported positive results on cloudflares speed tester)

ipaddresses

bad
2.31.26.50 bad results
2.31.26.53 bad results
2.31.26.54 2 good results followed by bad results
2.31.26.55 failed to load test
2.31.26.56 bad results
2.31.26.57 bad results
2.31.26.58 bad results
2.31.26.59 bad results
2.31.26.60 bad results
2.31.26.61 bad results
2.31.26.62 bad results

good
5.254.112.118 Good (VPN) - UK london
138.199.31.202 Good (VPN) - UK manchester

i did more vpn tests i didnt log and by far and away got the best results from japan.

[connorg123131]

Thank you! I've rolled through a few myself but I've needed to use my internet so not been able to do it a lot, and they were all bad when they started with 2.31.X.X. I'll pass this information on to them as when my connection was working normally it definitely started with a three digit number I believe.

[Spikefire]

if you can, ask them if there is a way to jump to a completely different IP, as my understanding is there isnt on the customer side, but if they could change it for us we could test a much larger effective range of IP addresses and get more data for them. as it stands every time i reconnect its only incrementing the last number by 1 keeping me in the same relative range of IP addresses, which doesnt seem too useful.

[connorg123131]

Yeah, one of the first things I asked when they brought it up on the phone was can they just allocate a new IP address but unfortunatley I was told they don't have that ability, so yeah until then we have to test it like this...

[Spikefire]

well, i guess ill report back in 256 network swaps and see if anything different happens, or ill update tomorow if the call back from EE results in any new and interesting test being done that pinpoints the issue

[reefy]

Also getting this issue with certain websites.
Chrome just constantly spins trying to load pages
All devices. Has been fine for the past 12 months but only started last week.

[Heaving0551]

I don't think its IP specific, i've had the issue on completely different subnets ranging from 109.180, 2.31, 2.26, i've gone through a few different IP's this evening also and they all have the same MTR

Does anyone know if this a valid reason to exit contract early without charge? Trying to checkout dependencies from NPM, Discord and various other websites not functioning properly is becoming unbearable. I'm at the point where enough is enough will just go back to using BT directly.

[Spikefire]

not sure what if anything has changed but the issue appears to have magically disappeared for me, can anyone else please confirm if you are still getting timeouts, preferably using https://speed.cloudflare.com to pull stats?

edit: included screenshots of tests, have ran 5 similar tests to this within the last hour.
edit 2: never mind, its back to being inconsistent, sometimes getting stuck midway through a test and dropping packets galore. had hope for a second there 😛

[XRaySpeX]

It probably doesn't depend on individual IPs or even on subnets, but EE's allocated IP pools, such as:

• Orange WBC Broadband: 2.28.0.0 - 2.31.255.255
• UK-TM-20060808: 91.110.0.0 - 91.111.255.255 (I'm on that)
• OUK Broadband IP Stream : 95.144.0.0 - 95.147.255.255
• Orange GPRS Service: 109.180.0.0 - 109.180.127.255

[Akiyama8641]

Yeah, the behaviour you mentioned in your edits is a pretty typical observation of this issue. Several tests in a row can come back "clean", but then it will pop up again some arbitrary amount of time later.