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Reports: Telstra Customers Suffering Crippling Speeds To Any Apple Service
An anonymous reader writes: It appears a large number of customers of Telstra (one of Australia's largest telcos) have been suffering crippling speeds while attempting to connect to any Apple Service for the better part of four days. Reports indicate this is affecting Apple Music, Apple App Stores (on both iOS and OSX) and are stopping many Telstra customers from getting access to app updates and the much anticipated El Capitan release of OS X. Mobile phone customers as well as home broadband customers seem to be affected at this stage with a large number of posts both on Twitter and the Whirlpool Broadband Forum. It appears one Twitter user has also fully summarised all the issues in a single post including many of the Twitter posts as well.
Pardon my ignorance, but does anyone know whether this is unintentional or not? I don't know of anyway this could be an unintentional action by the telco, but I've been wrong before; if anyone knows, please enlighten me!
They happen.
And nothing of value was lost.
Speed so fast it leaves you cripple... isn't that the dream? :)
Apple is running their own CDN now and have been turning up peering connections like crazy in the US. The new IOS release most likely produced more traffic than expected and saturated some peering links.
Question: Why wouldn't Apple have local cached servers in place? That seems redundantly silly for having an entire nation pull effectively the same content over trans transoceanic cables.
Life is not for the lazy.
Crickey!
We know Ausies don't like poofters
Sayin.
Telstra, the commercialized continuation of the old australian telecommunications government department (which used to be called Telecom), is well and truly the biggest operator in Australia - not one of. Australia's original copper telecommunications network was built when Telstra was still part of the government, and as such was entirely taxpayer funded.
This meant that, when the telecommunications industry was deregulated in the late 90s, Telstra was the default choice. Even today, many ADSL ISPs are only able to offer their products to customers who lease a landline from Telstra due to the control Telstra retains over the copper network (although some ISPs have installed hardware in the telephone exchanges in some areas that allow for provision of ADSL to customers without the leasing of a line through Telstra - these services provided on a copper line that does not have a telephone service installed on it are referred to as 'Naked ADSL').
Optus, Telstra's largest rival, has 1/4 the revenue and 1/6 the profit (they aren't as good as gouging their customers - but then few companies are).
So yeah, it's pretty safe to drop the 'one of' bit.
Live on a remote island... complain about internet speeds. Sorry Australia, but this goes with the territory.
Couldn't it be that the lines are saturated because everyone is trying to get the new MacOS update at the same time?
I used to work for Blizzard Europe customer support, occasionally during my time there Virgin customers in the UK would complain of terrible latency and each time it was a result of some traffic shaping appliance that Virgin was using, which was incorrectly categorizing WoW traffic as being peer-to-peer. This was over 3 years ago, but happened at least 3 times during my time there.
However, as Apple traffic is likely over HTTP(S), it seems less likely to be mistaken as "questionably illegal traffic" and is probably more likely a peering issue of sorts. Perhaps the CDN servers that Apple uses are at a different ISP and there is a routing / peering issue making it all route internationally instead.
I think this is what happened. Early yesterday MST I installed El Capitan, a 6.08G download, onto my two machines without problems. Late last night I tried updating my mother's system (same town, somewhat slower broadband), but by then the servers had bogged down to a crawl and it was impossible to complete the download.
Why would anybody want to connect to an Apple service to begin with?
I thought Apple went through great lengths to tout how they boosted server capacity and yet we still have problems?? I mean come on, if Microsoft can push out Windows 10 to people why can't Apple handle its users? Not everyone is upgrading at the same time, but I guess you also have yet another fix update for IOS 9 so there is that also going on. I know a lot of Mac owners have absolutely no patience for getting a precious update but seriously wait a few days and things go so much faster and smoother. I see the forums filled with fan boy whiners who wait hours on end for the upgrade to download. I'm like get a life people Yosemite is just as good and without all the early bugs. Of course you will get people who whine about waiting then they finally get it installed and whine because it breaks shit. Do you like disappointment or what?
Plus if anyone's read any review about iOS 9 and OS X El Captain, they're well aware that these OSes offer no new features and are basically wastes of time to download. It's like the new iPhone - there's nothing new or interesting about it, either. So who cares that people are having issues downloading things that have nothing new or interesting in them? It'd be like complaining that Windows 7 can't download Windows 10 - you should be counting your blessings instead.
What are crippling speeds? Do Apple services run so fast that users can't manage and Australian Telcos cannot cope?
The most dangerous drug
Because Australians are sexy, while Canadians and Poles are not. Ever watch Crocodile Dundee? Ok now how about.... erm.... (can't think of one single famous Canadian or Polish movie)
It's pretty telling that should a Telstra user (who's experiencing slow performance) activate a VPN, suddenly they have no issues whatsoever downloading from the various Apple services. The only way this could be the case is if Telstra is intentionally throttling (by way of some QoS method) traffic destined for Apple's address ranges. Their claims of a cable cut are bald-faced lies, nothing more. That they've "fixed" it shows the degree to which they've been caught, and relented their behavior. While the motives for this remain to a certain degree unclear, it' appears to be yet another case of a big, unregulated "communications" company (I place quotes due to the obvious nature of their desire to bleed their customers for all they're worth) pushing around their users as though they were a commodity to be monetized. Hey Apple, you want to not look bad? Pay up or else!
<FreeFrag> The most secure computer in the world is one not connected to the internet.
<FreeFrag> Thats why I recommend Telstra ADSL.
Source: http://www.bash.org/?168859
I'm having the same, downloading apps, iOS and books is slow via comcast internet or over the at&t wireless network.
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
It's an interesting technical problem, with a crowdsourced investigation - definitely Slashdot material.
It occurred in a modern, scientifically literate, high income, and technically advanced part of the world. Not in Texas.
How do you say "Jade Helm" in Australian?
Like anyone with half a brain would even want Windows 10.
I realize this must seem horrible if you are Texan. The rest of us are just waiting on a new set of Articles of Secession from ya'll. Just get on with it.
Come play Moral Decay!
Plus if anyone's read any review about iOS 9 and OS X El Captain, they're well aware that these OSes offer no new features and are basically wastes of time to download.
Not entirely true. iOS9 introduced some new and interesting bugs in existing APIs, like a big memory leak in SKAction.playSoundFileNamed, that are causing various games and apps to crash. e.g.: Supercell's Hay Day is taking a huge hit of complaints from people who upgraded to iOS9 yet, mysteriously, Supercell's Clash of Clans seems unaffected.
So, from the point of view that iOS9 has effectively stopped my kids from playing Hay Day all the time, it's been well worth it! :P
Gawd, you probably think Fosters is good beer too.
I am on Optus not Telstra and have the same issue. It is site specific not provider specific.