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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.
RTFA and you'll quickly find out.
And nothing of value was lost.
Crickey!
its australia and will probably cost five times what it should really cost anywhere else
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.
Live on a remote island... complain about internet speeds. Sorry Australia, but this goes with the territory.
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!