What in god's name is Airtel doing with video streaming?

@mgcarley: I know very little on this topic, but are you really saying that it could be a DNS issue that some video streaming sites are giving me 10-30 KB/s, and some (very very very few) are giving me 500-550 KB/s on a 4 Mbps connection? From my perspective of a lay man it seems either this is a routing issue, or more likely Airtel is doing something to suppress video streaming speeds. (Perhaps it's a combination of both?). Anyhow, I have had this problem while I was using Google's DNS, and subsequent to the Airtel technician changing it to Airtel's DNS there has been no improvement whatsoever.

It's a combination of things, yes, but what I am saying is that the most efficient DNS is *supposed* to be the ISP's DNS, since it will point at the ISP's content cache or mirrors or a directly peered node in the case of a CDN-powered site - but it may also depend on the site concerned: in other words, the DNS server in use does effectively determine the routing (unless the routes are forced by the ISP's gateway routers), and an incorrect config can lead to an inefficient route.

This is not to say that Airtel or any other ISP doesn't shape certain types of traffic - I'm very sure that it does (and it has been proved time and time again). You would be correct in coming to the conclusion that it is a combination of things, but as mentioned, for an Airtel customer, accessing certain sites (such as Youtube or Apple) are most efficient when using Airtel's DNS.

Even then, this is not necessarily a hard and fast rule: BSNL customers using BSNL's DNS can find that the routing is completely screwed and traffic goes all over the show unnecessarily to reach it's destination (no wonder the network is so overloaded).

Even then, this is not necessarily a hard and fast rule: BSNL customers using BSNL's DNS can find that the routing is completely screwed and traffic goes all over the show unnecessarily to reach it's destination (no wonder the network is so overloaded).

But then why does namebench suggest I use bsnl's DNS ?
Shows something like it being 419 times faster than Google DNS

forget the namebench thingy. it just compare the latencies and a couple of other things (can't remember right now). it doesn't see which can actually perform better. the namebench suggests me mtnl dns for my mtnl connection. but there is no way on earth i m going to use it. sometimes websites open , sometimes don't ...all kinds of problems. i simply changed it to 8.8.4.4(google dns). everything works properly after that.

here is to explain it in simple words. what do you think is more reliable? a server in a data center in USA or a box running from your home? your home box would give you excellent pings. but the server in USA would give you higher pings. which is more reliable?

Ah, now I get it. Thanks guys ;-)

Coming back to the topic, I don't think that DNS is at issue here since both Google as well as Airtel DNS give me equally pathetic results when it comes to video streaming. And honestly I can digest perhaps a 20-25% reduction in speeds. But where it should be giving me around 500 KB/s (which admittedly it gives on the rare site or two), the fact that I am getting 10-30 KB/s is extreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeemely pathetic and unacceptable. Unfortunately, Airtel has set up a mega stupid and therefore impenetrable defence shield that they only guarantee internet speeds within India, i.e. with Indian servers and it's extremely hard to argue with lower level engineers etc. on the complete absurdity of that.

But then why does namebench suggest I use bsnl's DNS ?
Shows something like it being 419 times faster than Google DNS

This conclusion is derived from the routing difficulties that BSNL seems to experience in this thread.

forget the namebench thingy. it just compare the latencies and a couple of other things (can't remember right now). it doesn't see which can actually perform better. the namebench suggests me mtnl dns for my mtnl connection. but there is no way on earth i m going to use it. sometimes websites open , sometimes don't ...all kinds of problems. i simply changed it to 8.8.4.4(google dns). everything works properly after that.

That is also a part of it - additionally, Google DNS will most likely route better to Google services. My ISP has it's own DNS servers, but we also have Google DNS and another DNS (I forget the name of it, Ripunjay knows) is being set up - all in the same Data Centre, the only thing is that 2 of the DNS servers are public, 1 is not. The one that is not is for those actually using the ISPs services and allows it's customers to access the caches - the 2 public ones do not allow this, but it does benefit customers on other ISPs by providing them with the alternatives in the case where their own ISP's DNS is not very good.

Additionally, there is the issue of DNS software: many use BIND or something similar, but there is way better software out there - the only thing is that it is quite resource (server) intensive and as such requires some pretty awesome hardware to sit on - we're talking servers with 32-64GB RAM as being minimum spec. But the performance of said software is absolutely and unquestionably awesome and hugely beneficial to an ISP's customers... the problem here is though, how beneficial is it to the ISP? When you're the size of the incumbents here, customer benefits may not be your highest priority - adding to which we have the issue of geographical distribution: one would hope that a DNS server located in Bangalore isn't serving customers in NCR, if you get what I mean, but so far ISPs in India haven't really caught on to multicasting...

----------

Coming back to the topic, I don't think that DNS is at issue here since both Google as well as Airtel DNS give me equally pathetic results when it comes to video streaming. And honestly I can digest perhaps a 20-25% reduction in speeds. But where it should be giving me around 500 KB/s (which admittedly it gives on the rare site or two), the fact that I am getting 10-30 KB/s is extreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeemely pathetic and unacceptable. Unfortunately, Airtel has set up a mega stupid and therefore impenetrable defence shield that they only guarantee internet speeds within India, i.e. with Indian servers and it's extremely hard to argue with lower level engineers etc. on the complete absurdity of that.

It's worse than you think: ISPs in India are only required to guarantee bandwidth within their network.

Though I fully agree about the lower level engineers - over the past couple of weeks I'm getting calls from Vodafone CSRs (and the network team) who have no freaking idea what I'm on about and do not understand my problem with them at the moment at all. Some of you may have seen my frustrations on Twitter.

Back to the speed thing though, it's pretty much set in stone that no ISP is going to help you with International traffic issues, especially for what some might consider to be "illegal" streaming sites.

And it's not just in India, but anywhere in the world. You are on a consumer broadband connection, which is inherently shared between you and x number of users (in Airtel's case, we have the combination of 100+ million customers accessing both voice and data - and while Airtel does own (or part own) many TERAbits of bandwidth as a result of joint ventures in submarine cables, statistics suggest that it is pushing less than 200gbit/s, and it has been this way for quite some time, despite the increase in customers and increase in services such as 3G and upgrades to 4mbit/s over the last 12-24 months.

Are Airtel's International links running at 95% capacity as we might be imagining? As far as they're concerned, probably not. Are they exceeding the TRAI recommendations on contention? According to the figures they publish, not even close. So why so slow?

Bloody good question, IMO. And I wish I knew more about Airtel's internal workings so I could do more than guess or extrapolate based on what information I do know.

But what I do know is this: even their wholesale customers experience a significant bump in response time when routing to certain networks - it was their badly performing links to Vodafone that was the result of my venting towards Vodafone on Twitter lately (not Vodafone's fault, Vodafone is the one that's supposed to be purchasing capacity from Airtel, not the other way around), and it was only because Ripunjay did some BGP wizardry that our links to them are now routed via Tata instead (forced BGP) which has reduced latency by around 70% on that link alone... But even that is just a band-aid on a bigger problem when it comes to Airtel and it's connectivity - it's more or less fixed that particular problem for me and others on my network, but not for anyone on any other ISP.

So the question remains: what the hell is going on? Could one of Airtel's big routers be malfunctioning a little bit and dropping packets causing spikes in latency and slow traffic? Could it's main gateway routers simply be too busy (CPU load too high, needs more routers and/or RAM in the same routers)? Could some of it's links be too oversubscribed for the load that it is trying to bear due to Airtel not doing enough caching or some other inefficiency? Could it simply be a result of traffic shaping that's causing things to just go so badly that everything just falls over and your speeds to certain sites slow to a crawl?

No Airtel CSR is going to know anything about this, of course, and the NOC guys are impossible for most of us mere mortals to get ahold of, and even Ripunjay doesn't like calling them because they can be "difficult" to deal with and take too long to fix problems (which may be why so many ISPs are no longer buying bandwidth from Bharti and instead from elsewhere, mostly Tata).

Now it's at this point that I kind of throw my hands in the air and make the only suggestion that can really make Airtel listen: vote with your wallet. If at all possible, move to another ISP (and tell them why). Doesn't matter who - whoever is available, I guess.

----------

I'm going to throw it out there just as an afterthought, but I wonder if :: Grievance Registration Form :: might be of some use to some of you (select Department of Telecommunications).

Airtel does have sophisticated traffic shaping capabilities. They could easily shape the non popular video streaming sites.Why everyone seems to blame only the DNS and routing?

Airtel does have sophisticated traffic shaping capabilities. They could easily shape the non popular video streaming sites.

Why everyone seems to blame only the DNS and routing?

From what I understand they even shape Youtube, despite having a Youtube content cache in the network.

The reason *I* often think DNS is twofold: often people are using some public DNS, which causes routing to be inefficient, in the cases of some other ISPs, it's simply badly configured and breaks a lot.

As far as routing goes, well... this is only meandering experience, as I alluded to in the previous post. To illustrate the point, if my ISP has upstream from Bharti and upstream from Tata, both of whom peer with Vodafone, if we assume that all else is equal (same laptop, same net connection, same routers from me to the ISP gateway, same DNS, same EVERYTHING except one little entry in the router's BGP table) then why is my latency to Vodafone 70% less simply by traversing Tata rather than Bharti? Shoddy routing? Shoddy routers? Both?

That single action of forcing the route to traverse Tata eliminates my ISP, Vodafone and my connections to the outside world as factors contributing to high latency and/or bad connectivity to certain parts of the Internet and places the blame, rather squarely, on Bharti. Something is wrong with one little thing in Bharti's network, and it's affecting us all, even if we're not (retail) customers.

I've been facing the exact same issues as the op for a while now. Actually I use the same streaming sites as he does. I have, although, noticed that the speeds on those sites tend to improve during the night hours as is the case with torrent downloads so this has definitely got something to do with airtel's traffic shaping efforts during the daytime to save bandwidth.I wonder whether this applies only to people who are/were heavy bandwidth consumers in the past. Maybe Airtel use selective traffic shaping for people who they believe are likely to clog up day time traffic.

I'd like to run some tests on my network - can these streaming sites be used within the browser? I couldn't get either of them to do that - it wanted me to download some software which... I'd rather not do if I can avoid it.

^ No, the vast majority of them don't need any software. In fact if I am not mistaken, those things are actually scams, as they supposed codec / players they make you download are malware. I'll PM you the specific videos I sent to Ryan, and you can check whether you get the same results.

^ No, the vast majority of them don't need any software. In fact if I am not mistaken, those things are actually scams, as they supposed codec / players they make you download are malware. I'll PM you the specific videos I sent to Ryan, and you can check whether you get the same results.

Duly noted.

Having (quickly) checked the videos you sent me now, my conclusion is more or less a problem of bottlenecks, and not necessarily that of Airtel (although they may not be helping).

For me, Filebox seems to be hosted in Russia, and not very well connected - it's primary route to the rest of the world (outside Europe, that is) is through Zurich and even then only 1Gbit/s of it's total capacity (10-20Gbit/s range). Videos were basically unwatchable - the speeds were barely measurable.

Divxden almost couldn't be coming from a worse place as far as the US is concerned: Arizona, and like Filebox, isn't that well connected (seems to be pushing

Vebk, I'm getting the same thing unfortunately. I think mgcarley is right on this one. I'm sure you can watch videos on other sites. I don't want to mention them here for a variety of reasons of course.

it seems to be fine on my connection . i can watch 1080p videos easily on youtube and hd streams of live games too on other web sites .