Re: [tlug] Tokyo ISP Throttling? Why does my internet speed increase so much by setting up a proxy?

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

>>>>> Raymond Wan writes:
 > Jawaad writes:

 > > However, today I setup a Squid3 proxy server on a cloud server I
 > > own.  When I connected to that (and connected my wife), all of a
 > > sudden all sorts of slow / dropped connection problems went away.

My guess is that the cloud server has high bandwidth connections with
several backbone providers including Flets (search the TLUG archives
for Charles's posts about the DDoS attack on Linode for more
information on cloud topology, especially a link to the Linode blog),
and demands quality service from them.  On the other hand, from NTT's
point of view, any traffic that traverses another provider's network
above a certain level is high-cost, so they're not eager to pay for
it, and the result is that anybody who doesn't have a QoS guarantee
(and that will include all home users) gets poor service to certain
parts of the Internet.

You can switch providers and you'll probably get better service for a
while, but it seems likely that NTT will build or buy capacity and the
situation could easily reverse within a few months.

As for investigating things for yourself, traceroute and tcptraceroute
are your friends.  (I don't know if there's any advantage to using
traceroute over tcptraceroute unless you really need IP-level
information vs. TCP streams.  The advantage to tcptraceroute is that
many firewalls these days block the echo protocol at the IP level,
why, I don't know.  Yes, ping-o'-death, but that should be fixed in
all relevant stacks by now, and firewalls should be able to filter on
packet size.[1])  What you're looking for is gateways that drop lots
of packets.

 > This is unrelated to anything I can control (since it's at work), but
 > I was connecting to this USA site from work this week at 200 kb/s.  I
 > can get 10 MB/s from home to the same USA site.  So I download the
 > file and then I can send the file from home to work at 10 MB/s.

Trans-Pacific bandwidth is expensive.  Here is one amusing link:
http://www.cablemap.info/, and here's the one I was looking for:
http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2014/10/internet-transatlantic-data-flows-meltzer/internet-transatlantic-data-flows-version-2.pdf
(see map on about p. 6).  Despite population and GDP and exploding
Internet usage, Asia connections to the U.S. still are only about 2/3
of the Europe bandwidth.  (AFAIK Asia-Europe traffic still mostly goes
via the U.S., too.)


Footnotes: 
[1]  If you're in a high-security environment, then ICMP echo can be
used to map your network at the IP level (eg, counting hosts), and you
might care.  Why home providers and universities do it, I don't know.