Some things are very slow on Spectra

I have a 1Gbps plan in Gurgaon. Performance is mostly good on Spectra, except for some cases

1. A Speedtest with an Indian server results >900mbps up and down, but a Speedtest with any server outside India goes down to 70/80mbps. Is such a vast difference normal?
2. Twitter is very slow. Scrolling leads to posts continuously stuck on loading. Switching to Mobile data or even switching on VPN improves performance drastically
3. Netflix 4K performance varies wildly. In some cases I am able to stream just fine. In other cases, streaming is horrible. In such cases, a Speed test on fast.com shows 30/40mbps, Speedtest.net still shows >900mbps. Prime, Hotstar, Apple TV all work fine
4. I have tried Spectra’s DNS as well as Cloudfare and google DNS with similar results

Looks like spectra is either throttling some traffic, or there are serious routing optimisation issues causing poor performance for some websites.
I have seen the sane issue with other Spectra connections at my neighbours. Airtel works fine, but I don’t want to switch to Airtel at this stage as I don’t want technicians entering my home.
Do others also face similar issues with spectra? Any tips on how to solve this?

right. this is the problem with high speed plans in a market like india where most of the accessed content is either faraway or is routed poorly. peered services would show proper speeds. other networks are going to depend upon the route taken by your isp. excitel does a bit better in this area by having peering with most of the popular services including netflix so we get proper speeds on the most accessed services from google, Apple, microsoft, netflix, Amazon and hostar.

the one option is to create your own alternative route by using a VPN. but that option is not suitable in your case because of your gigabit connection and of course services like netflix would basically hide most content on vpn.

Thanks, using up the entire 1Gbps is not important to me (this is the only plan they have for my apartments) so I do use VPN on many occasions to get around poor performance of some websites, however, I watch Netflix on my Apple TV so no option to use VPN there except implementing VPN on my router which I don’t want to do.
There are also many other oddities. Eg streaming BBC radio (any channel) doesn’t work at all on Spectra. I have to use LTE to start the stream, then I can switch back to WiFi and it continues.
I would prefer 300mbps of Internet which works well, rather than 1Gbps of Internet which doesn’t.

yup. a friend of mine who lives in the my locality moved to spectra from excitel expecting 1gbps everywhere. he is now planning to move back to excitel. 100mbps plan is good enough for most homes. and when fiber comes, 300mbps would become available. i have considered spectra in the past but they seem to be too restrictive. blocking p2p sites, throttling torrents and so on. 1gbps sounds great in theory but in reality, it is only going to look good on a very limited services along with speed tests.

Yeah, I wasn't expecting 1Gbps everywhere, but this sub-optimal routing is not acceptable. Back to Airtel, then.

Were you having these issues pre-lockdown? If not, its probably just the lockdown effect almost all ISP's are facing. Increased latency and decreased speeds are a trend right now.

Frankly speaking, the Netflix issues weren't there pre-lockdown, but the situation is not likely to improve anytime soon (People would prefer to stay at home regardless of the lockdown), so need a permanent solution.

Twitter slowness is not acceptable even during lockdown, the bandwidth used to load a feed is minimal. In twitter's case, it is more about latency I think.

Strangely enough, game downloads on Xbox do max out the full 1Gbps (128MBps), so looks they have some peering arrangement with Microsoft, or Microsoft's CDN works better with Spectra.

I think MS uses Akamai CDN and yeah smaller ISPs like spectra, excitel etc rely on peering a lot since they can't afford raw international bandwidth.

I switched to Airtel 300mbps today. All the issues mentioned here have been solved. Speedtest.net and fast.com now show the same throughout

tinoryls said:

Strangely enough, game downloads on Xbox do max out the full 1Gbps (128MBps), so looks they have some peering arrangement with Microsoft, or Microsoft's CDN works better with Spectra.

Click to expand...

I saw a youtube video of 1gbps download speed on xbox one. The game was downloaded at 250-260mbps speed max.