Mobile Phone SIM exceeds Mobile Broadband SIM - EIR Network

[Kevin]

Thanks for that. Overnight swap out is the way to go as the speeds go back up then as well. I have ordered another GoMo SIM for now and will see how the swapping out of the SIM cards goes for this, and then possibly order another to get me through a typical month. 3 or 4 should see me out.

Speeds on my end are typically around 15 to 30 mbps during the peak periods, but fantastic for Teams during the day, even when there are 3 of us on a Teams call/meeting at the same time.

[Tom]

I've had a very similar experience. Speeds are excellent throughout the day, in excess of 100mbps at times. Once 8pm comes around though I am lucky to see 4mbps, while upload speeds remain ~25mbps. Tested a Gomo sim in the router which produces far better download results during these times (~30-40mbps). Congestion is the obvious culprit, but I definitely do feel like Eir are purposefully throttling speeds on their broadband sims -- every time the connection is refreshed and something starts to download, without fail, the speeds starts and hangs around 40mbps for a few moments before slowly trickling back down to arround 2-4mbps, which is the same behaviour I used to see when using the Vodafone X plan which has a 10mbps speed cap as they tell you up front. Very annoying as the service has been genuinely very good aside from this.

[boatbuilder]

The same thing happens with gomo but only after you go over the 120gb monthly limit. Momentarily goes to 40mbps, then throttled back to 7mbps.

[boatbuilder]

Now that we've gone back to school (I work in education), our daily usage is lower, so the three Gomo sims are suiting us great.
Gomo's reduced speed after 120gb is often enough for general browsing, so I leave it for a day or two until I need to do a Teams meeting or something before changing the sim over.

[Tom]

Just following up my own post from last week, I've come to notice that it seems the congestion/throttling on this Eir mobile broadband plan is a bit selective. For instance, I download games to the PC from a few different online stores, around peak times on the Steam store I get around 4mbps and running a test on Speedtest.net shows similar results. However downloading from other stores (Epic Game Store, Battle.net, Origin, Uplay etc.) yield vastly better results -- averaging around 70mbps which is in around the same speeds Steam and Speedtest.net get before the 8pm congestion. Youtube also works away at 4K without any issue during these times, while some other less reputable streaming websites stop and start every few seconds at lower qualities.

Any idea why this could be?

[Seán]

Try the following speed test site during peak time to see how it compares with speedtest.net and what it reports for the retransmission:
https://speed.measurementlab.net/#/

   

If it shows a retransmission value above 0 (like the example from my own connection above), the speed difference is likely due to those faster sites using the BBR TCP congestion protocol.  This is what Google uses on its servers, including YouTube.

[Tom]

I've ran that MLab speedtest a few nights now around peak times and can confirm that the retransmission rate is consistently above 0%, I've seen it range anywhere from 2% to 38% which I assume equals a large amount of packet loss. I have found a workaround/fix for the slow downloads from the Steam Store -- changing my download region from Ireland to somewhere else (Paris, Netherlands, New York etc.) consistently boosted speeds from ~3mbps to 50+mbps. I'm not clued in enough to know why exactly this might be, could it be possible they use a different congestion protocol on those other servers?

Trying to work off the same logic do you think it's possible that using a VPN for another country might help to improve my general browsing slowdown during peak times, or would it be a waste?

[Seán]

38% retransmission sure is excessive, which appears like a problem on Eir's network.

You can try the VPN Hide.Me, which is very effective on my end, although we mainly use mainly use it for getting around geographical restrictions, such as US/UK streaming services. They appear to use the BBR TCP congestion protocol, which is immune to significant packet loss. Their 10GB free plan is limited to servers in Netherlands, Germany and USA, but should be plenty to test with. Try running speed tests with these two EU countries at peak time. If there is no improvement, you can try enabling the beta hide.me Bolt, i.e. the top-right test tube icon.

I tried several other VPNs including Private Internet Access, CloudFlare WARP+, Keep Solid and Tunnel Bear, but so far Hide.Me is the only one I tried that makes a substantial difference on my end.

[Tom]

I gave that VPN a try for a couple of nights and it seems to have done the trick! Made download speeds much faster and completely relieved the problem I had with live streams buffering at peak times. Very happy now as it was my one serious complaint with the service. Thanks for the help Sean!

I do wonder if it's an issue nationwide or something to do with the mast I am on, but for anyone else stuck on this Eir plan who might have the same problem of unbearably slow download speeds at peak times a VPN may help the job like it has for me!