Is there some sort of a national slow Internet thing going on?

I'm getting very sporadic weird connectivity. Some websites are fine, others are not. Cannot connect to Steam. Anybody else noticing this?

And Merry Christmas.

I haven't noticed anything. Maybe it's a local issue for you?

I couldn't get onto Netflix last night. Otherwise it's been fine.

Thin_J wrote:

I couldn't get onto Netflix last night. Otherwise it's been fine.

That was an AWS issue.

Steam's been having some issues today, apparently, although I haven't seen any here.

If it's kind of everywhere, it's probably a problem in your ISP or whoever they're directly connected to. That specific symptom sounds most like a major trunk outage, which can make parts of the Internet sort of disappear for you. This can be particularly nasty if the route is 'flapping', going up and down.... this plays hell on routing algorithms, giving spotty, highly frustrating Internet. It works, and stops working, and then works, and then stops, and then works... gets real old.

Or, your ISP may simply be oversubscribed, not able to provide enough bandwidth for everyone. Internet traffic is probably unusually high on Christmas.

I'd been noticing more than the usual China flakiness in connecting to the Western Internet. Trouble connecting to Origin to download BF3 premium, erratic VPN connection, and unusual slowness accessing some websites.

I was just reading that China is detecting more forms of encrypted connection through the Great Firewall, and is now shutting those connections down, so you may need to find new VPN tech.

Steam sale is clogging the tubes.

Malor wrote:

I was just reading that China is detecting more forms of encrypted connection through the Great Firewall, and is now shutting those connections down, so you may need to find new VPN tech.

Yeah we've been hearing that, and China has also officially announced that it is illegal for Internet companies to do business in China without a Chinese business license. It's not clear what "doing business in China" actually means though, but the pay-for VPN providers are seeing greater difficulty in providing services here. Mine is a personal one set up on my brother's DD-WRT router, so I don't think it has or will draw much attention--recent troubles have been across the board to international sites, so it's not VPN specific for now.

Yeah, that's not likely to be a problem, they just don't want you to know about a bunch of stuff that, basically, makes them look like authoritarian assholes.... so they double down on asshole authoritarianism.

I doubt internal VPNs would ever be noticed, because presumably it doesn't cross the Firewall.

Malor wrote:

Yeah, that's not likely to be a problem, they just don't want you to know about a bunch of stuff that, basically, makes them look like authoritarian assholes.... so they double down on asshole authoritarianism.

I doubt internal VPNs would ever be noticed, because presumably it doesn't cross the Firewall.

I mean my brother is in the US, so it's crossing the Firewall. Occasionally I have trouble connecting to it, but usually only when there are general problems accessing US sites. Give me Facebook or give me death, I always say.

This got me thinking about a bit unrelated question for all you technically-minded gentlemen: is there a good source (infographics, visualizations and such) for volume of data transfer over the Internet broken down both by location (which parts of the world have biggest share of the transfer) and type of media (what clogs the connections)? I occasionally see some numbers, but they aren't very enlightening.