Eircom Newsgroup speed throttling

[Sean]

I recently subscribed to the newsgroup service Giganews and mainly use the service at home where I have IOL's 2Mb package. However, for curiosity, I decided to try it at work to see how well it runs over Eircom’s broadband service (Business Plus 4Mb package), especially with how long it takes to download headers for some large newsgroups. To my surprise, I found that it often takes much longer to download headers with Eircom despite double the ISP connection speed, so I decided to carry out some speed testing.

To start with, I ran the IrishISPTest speedtest from my work PC and home PC (using remote desktop & closing it the moment I started each test) and got the following results:

Eircom Business broadband plus connection:
Downstream : 3.49 Mbps
Upstream : 304kbps
Quality of Service : 99%
Round Trip : 54ms
Max Pause : 84ms

IOL BT Broadband 2Mb connection:
Downstream : 1.66 Mbps down
Upstream : 174kbps up
Quality of Service : 79%
Round Trip : 31ms
Max Pause : 69ms

These tests were carried out at about 2:20pm, 12th July 2006

At a first glance, the Eircom connection clearly takes the lead, however when I go on to Giganews' website to run its own speed test, I get a totally different story:

Eircom Business Broadband Plus connection:
news.giganews.com - 452kbps
news-europe.giganews.com - 320kbps

IOL BT Broadband 2Mb connection:
news.giganews.com - 1689kbps
news-europe.giganews.com - 1734kbps

I have run the Giganews performance test several times at the time of the above test and got pretty much the same results (I was the only one online at work at the time). I also tried it several times during the day such as in the morning, lunch time and evening time and the throughput seems to be quickest before 10:30am with the transfer often exceeding 3300kbps. The connection is slowest usually after 11am with its speedtests often showing as slow as 130kbps and seldom exceeding 1000kbps. The speedtests for both news servers are generally quite similar (within 100 to 200kbps of each other). On the other hand, I generally always get over 3Mbps down and 300kbps up with the IrishISPTest and very seldom get anything lower than 1000kbps on either Giganews server test at home, so I can easily rule out contention on the ISP and Giganews. I can also confirm that there is no traffic shaping carried out on the router that would cause this issue.

Has anyone else experienced similar issues with using newsgroups (particularly Giganews) using Eircom as their ISP? Otherwise it looks like Eircom would be one to stay away from for those interested in using Newsgroup services, at least for the larger newsgroups.

I would apprecicate if others using Newsgroups using Eircom as their ISP could post their experience here, just in case this may be a speed restriction on just their business packages.