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I am using a broadband internet connection from an ISP named Reliance in India. I wanted share you with a weird behavior of my internet connection.

I have a 2Mbps connection and I get around same bandwidth anywhere inside India, checked with multiple locations and major cities its all the same. I use speed testing website services as well as try some sample downloads. But when I access anything outside my country no matter the nearest or the farthest one, I get 512Kbps. It can maximum vary by +/- 100Kbps. The speed will never go above ~650Kbps.

I did one more testing, connected to my office via VPN, also did ssh tunneling (SOCKS Proxy) to office and tested the behavior. But it is exactly the same! I know the internet connection at my office is above 20Mbps and never had any such issues mentioned above. When I tunneled the traffic, I got around 1.5Mbps within the country and less than 512Kbps anywhere outside. But this is absolutely not the case if I access anything directly from my office, I have no issues downloading/streaming any data because they are premium services for business.

But why it is dropping to 512Kbps or less only if the connection is originated from my ISP? Is there a way an ISP can restrict/control this? I don't think so my ISP can see the actual destination when I tunnel the traffic. I recently upgraded my bandwidth from 1Mbps to 2Mbps because I was not able to stream videos because of this issue. But I still get the bandwidth same for accessing anything outside my country. Strange:(

mmn357157
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In all likelihood your provider has some sort of traffic shaping in place on their upstream international link so that traffic to any one user coming in over an international link is throttled to 512k.

Your description of your tunneling test was unclear. Were you tunneling into another location in the same country or another? Are you sure you were really moving traffic over the tunnel? Was your whole network system including DNS lookups being done over the tunnel or just browser traffic?

EEAA
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Caleb
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  • Yes my office is in same place where I am staying, but may be they use a different internet provider. – mmn357157 Apr 11 '11 at 19:25
  • +1. every cheap route in use by professionals can do traffis shaping in degrees you can not even imagine ;) – TomTom Apr 11 '11 at 19:27
  • I really didn't check the DNS used, but now I changed it to google dns(8.8.8.8) and results look same. Also when I connect to office using Cisco VPN client, I guess end-to-end communication is encrypted and tunneled. – mmn357157 Apr 11 '11 at 19:28