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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.
Seriously, anyone that relies on Apple services to function deserves to wade through imolasses.
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.
Apple is for sheeps.Sheeps say Mehhhhhhhhhh!MehhhhhhhHH!Mehhhhhhhh says the sheeps.You apple's cock sucking sheeps.
Live on a remote island... complain about internet speeds. Sorry Australia, but this goes with the territory.
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.
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?
I realize Australia is a country and Texas is only part of a country, but there are 27 million people in Texas vs 23 million is Australia. Australian tech news gets reported on all the time, why? Its insignificant. I see on ZDNet for example that the government of New South Wales (population 7.5 million) is buying new software to track welfare payments. Would that be reported if it were happening in North Carolina (population 9.5 million).
Australia is a nice place with great folks, but I hear way to much about them in tech news. Heck they are smaller than Canada or Poland and I rarely hear Canadian or Polish tech news.
If you would not post an article about Texas, Canada or Poland, don't post the same article about Australia. Its just clutter.
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!
I, for one, would love to read more tech news from Canada and Poland. Perspective is good. Also Polish women can be quite decent looking.
As for the topic, coulndn't it simply be that all the traffic from Apple was fucking up the intertubes to Down under, and that they simply decided to give that traffic a lower priority. In most cases I'd dissaprove, but when it's Apple services that get hit I'll make an exception and point and laugh at the Apple users.
<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?
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!
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.