Xfinity ISP: Ordered "Unlimited Data" plan and within 2 hours, VPN speed was 1/2 and p2p speed was 1/10th or lower.

[Qen'Liar: Daemon Veritatis 0]

Hello, community!

I have upgraded some of my PC equipment and found some more data-hoarding sources on the web, so when I talked to Xfinity customer service for an unrelated issue, I asked about their unlimited data and they gave I the relatively cheap price and the reassurance that my bandwidth would never be reduced no matter the data I used.

Within two hours of the over-the-phone purchase, my VPN traffic, both through my router's OpenVPN functions, and the Eddie app, was at about one half or lower of my pre-'unlimited data' speed. Worse, my p2p traffic was then maxing out at about 1/10th of my pre-'unlimited data' speeds. This cannot be a coincidence, and considering the horrible reputation of Xfinity now and in the past, it is clearly completely intentional.

One interesting tidbit is that while using additional security / encrypted connections over the VPN, my p2p traffic will be consistently at about 75% of my pre-'unlimited data' speed and then sometime overnight, I discovered when I woke up, my p2p speed was reduced and was currently maxing out at about 12% of my pre-'unlimited data' speed. Rebooting my router itself seemed to fix this problem - for about 18 more hours. However, I do not suspect my router to be the problem because it had no problems with this at all before my tumultuous decision to pay more $$ for the 'unlimited data' plan.

I talked with a customer service person a few days ago and despite the obvious censoring of my traffic, he replied that Comcast/Xfinity has never done that, and then he gave I a 5 minute spiel about how he has a family of five and has never gone over the non-unlimited data cap, and asked I what I could be doing to use that much bandwidth. I insisted on talking to a more technical person, and said the most he could do is connect I with a supervisor. So I said that was acceptable for now, and I waited un hold for about 15 minutes while the phone was on speaker. They hung up on I, and I had the call being recorded, so make of that what you will. I personally hate lying and corruption enormously.

Reasons I have to be certain that Xfinity is hacking my connection:

• They have in the past used man-in-the-middle attacks openly, and I have received them before. This manifest itself obviously as a popup in your browser, no matter what page you are using or what you are signed in to, to warn you of your data usage and to recommend you lower it.
• My Xfinity modem is enormous, at least 4 times the size of my Grandmother's Xfinity modem, and her speed is 4 times higher than mine.
• My modem, after getting connected to the WWW, simply WILL NOT PROVIDE INTERNET to new LAN connected devices (such as my laptop) after the cord has been removed from my router and plugged directly into the laptop. It needs to be restarted and then it will reconfigure itself for the devices that are meant to receive clean WWW connections from it.
• The modem, after being unplugged, sometimes takes 15 minutes to reconnect to the WWW, whether it is on my router or on my laptop.
• In order to diagnose the problem, I did many steps using several computers, operating systems, VPN on and off, etc. I also reconfigured the VPN on my router to use an encrypted connection on a higher port, and while this did result in a worse ping and lower overall bandwidth, my p2p traffic was much, much higher: almost at the full speed of the VPN which itself was almost at the advertised speed of my internet plan.
• While troubleshooting, I used CyberGhostVPN, and they have an option called 'WireGuard', and this seemed to entirely fix my speed and latency problems! If new types of encryption stop the lower speeds and worse ping, then Comcast/Xfinity is literally deep-packet-inspecting my connection and torturing/defrauding my packets to sabotage my p2p and VPN usage.

While troubleshooting this problem additionally, I have tried using AirVPN suite, but the instructions given by the post on this website, and also on github, are not enough for I to understand how to enable and configure my bluetit "AirVPN suite," and when attempting to open the bluetit.rc file, I opened it with root in gedit and nano, and both showed I an empty file. I believe that WireGuard technology may be enough to allow the full usage of my connection, but does AirVPN support it at all?

Unfortunately, I am in the middle of transitioning from FreshTomato router firmware to OpenWRT. The OpenWRT is installed, but the documentation on it does not match with what I am seeing in my webUI or even logged in via SSH. I have not yet gotten to the part of OpenVPN, and I won't be able to test that until I have some free time and ask the right questions in their IRC channel. I have been diagnosing the problem the past few days just with the Eddie client.

Thanks for reading! I would really appreciate any assistance, especially if you have details on what Xfinity does, or known workarounds. Since I have gotten so disgusted by being lied to, I installed an app on my SmartPhone to record all phone calls, and I have the 2nd Xfinity call (tech support) recorded, but not the 1st Xfinity call (sales pitch). I have a cousin who literally works for Comcast/Xfinity (although not the residential internet division) and she had I run an app called PingPlotter, which many, many times showed red, disconnected and unconnectable pings on many popular website, including the AirVPN website and even the ACLU website. I am so angry about this that I have considered elevating this beyond Comcast, but what can I do against one of the largest lobbyers in the USA? 

Attached: The first image "XfinitySlowDOWN..." is rather optimistic, and it has gotten progressively slower since then. The second image "XfinityBlocksVPN..." shows how WireGuard works really well, but I have not achieved any speeds like that since then using Eddie, and I ran out of my trial for CyberGhostVPN with Wireguard.

~Debsin

[gmini 0]

@Debsin  Dude I have been experiencing a similar throttling to you from Comcast for the longest time. Constantly throttling my P2P on VPN connections. 

Have you figured anything out by now?

[Qen'Liar: Daemon Veritatis 0]

@gmini I have made several changes which have made my p2p traffic almost maximum.

1. I am connecting to AirVPN through UDP p41185 IP-1, although p2018 may work, too. I had read on these forums that these were the best for Xfinity internet.
2. I converted my torrent PC from Win10 to an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution called Pop!_OS. I had read that Win10 was now specifically limiting torrent traffic and this could not be easily disabled.
3. I changed my qBittorrent settings to ONLY 'TCP' (not uTP or 'uTP and TCP') which dramatically increased my torrent speeds. I read about this on the qBittorrent subreddit
4. I limited my torrent traffic in qBittorrent settings to about 80% of my maximum internet speed, which keeps it at a consistently high speed. 

I hope that helps. 

[gmini 0]

@Debsin Thanks very much for the reply, friend. And thanks for the suggestions.

I guess the type of throttling I'm experiencing is a tad bit different than yours (just made a post about it as well a few days ago if you wanna look). The problem seems to come from constant, hundreds of bad packet ID AEAD Decrypt errors in OpenVPN, which is most likely Comcast applying some serious throttling when they detect I use a VPN with torrents. Although torrenting without the VPN seems to be much less throttled or maybe even none at all.

I do get maximum traffic speeds-- the problem here is that it lasts for like a few days, then after that I get a few days or even week of full-on throttling being capped at 1MiB/s and slowing down my entire connection (specifically when I turn on qBittorrent). And this pattern repeats itself week after week. Direct downloads seem to be unaffected.

Changing to 'TCP only' indeed increased my maximum speed but unfortunately did not solve the throttling itself. Same goes for trying all kinds of different settings in qBittorrent and protocols in AirVPN. Just tried the ones you suggested. Nothing I've tried so far beats this throttling and I've tried a lot. Unless it's something different than throttling which I doubt. Still didn't try changing to Ubuntu (it's foreign to me).

One thing I thought of is maybe I have old equipment from Comcast that needs replacing. I have their standard xFi Wireless Gateway model Arris TG1682G from years ago. It used to have a problem with constant disconnections but weirdly not anymore. I know they have some newer models-- think it might help? Do you have their equipment or your own?

 

[Qen'Liar: Daemon Veritatis 0]

@gmini I currently have the Gateway 3 model modem/router from Comcast/Xfinity in Gateway mode. I connect it directly to my fancy new router, the Turris Omnia 2020 and from there to my several PCs. The cool thing about this router is that it is from Europe and they have to-the-minute auto-updating Firewall features. The bad thing is that it is $330 !!
I keep my Gateway 3 in modem mode only, and have it wrapped up in a Faraday bag so little or no wireless signals can get out of it. I'm sure that won't stop them as Comcast is one evil ****** corporation! (My asterisks)
If you do get a router to try with this problem, I highly recommend you get one that is OpenWRT compatible, and this will allow you to run AirVPN (through OpenVPN) always-on and from your router. Just make sure to add firewall entries or the OpenWRT equivalent so that you have a 'network-lock' feature!

I am familiar with the problem you have described in this post, and I don't recall having a problem with it for a while. Unfortunately, I am in-between PCs on my torrenting, and will be for a couple more weeks at least. I tried to set up an Odroid-HC4 for torrenting only but am having a very annoying and tedious job converting my finely categorized torrent collection to Linux-qBittorrent. I may even use the HC4 for a Chia-crypto machine and just use my Pop!_OS laptop for torrenting still.
The forum settings will not allow I to view your profile/previous posts, but I will continue to monitor this thread and do not mind helping out!
 

Edited ... by Debsin

[gmini 0]

@Debsin Hey, thanks for the reply! (wasn't aware of the visitors block on my profile btw, unblocked it now)

Well, maybe I'll try changing out my equipment and see if it does anything... if it does-- i'll report back. If it doesn't.... 😃 🔫

But really, what in my opinion should happen (the real proper solution) in order to put an end to these issues many customers are dealing with, is AirVPN needs to find some better ways to deal with evil throttling ISPs like Concast. Meaning, better hide/encrypt client's traffic and especially torrent traffic (which seems to be the biggest issue) from ISPs. For example as you mentioned in your post, and many others I've seen discussing on the web, this new "WireGuard" technology seems to solve throttling from ISPs for many people. Among those many mentioned Concast.

Maybe, hopefully(!), AirVPN can implement this technology or something similar in the very very near future?

Cheers

[arteryshelby 25]

You could try tls-crypt on tcp port 443, this masks vpn traffic as normal tls traffic is therefore is hard to intercept.

 

[gmini 0]

On 4/25/2021 at 10:37 AM, arteryshelby said:

You could try tls-crypt on tcp port 443, this masks vpn traffic as normal tls traffic is therefore is hard to intercept.

 

Thanks for the suggestion. How do I turn on tls-crypt?