Ask HN: why is the Internet experiencing high packet-loss?
internettrafficreport.com
UPDATE: from the looks of it this appears like a measurement error on a single website.
internettrafficreport.com
The way that particular website works is people submit routers to be pinged, they ping them every 5 minutes, and graph the results. That's it.
It's not in any way an accurate view of the Internet's performance as a whole.
http://www.internettrafficreport.com/europe.htm http://www.internettrafficreport.com/asia.htm http://www.internettrafficreport.com/namerica.htm
To see an outdated list of mail servers and routers.
For example, in Europe core1-gig2-0.bletchley.ukcore.bt.net is down. Sounds pretty "core routing" doesn't it? Shame that the DNS name doesn't resolve, so lets mark it as 100% packet loss shall we?
Hmm, maybe it's not packet loss at all...
The Asia link is reporting 2 routers in Iran down, and a name server down in India for an ISP which has 5 other name servers (which are not monitored by ITR), which are all up. Perhaps Iranian internet traffic is being filtered? I know there are a number of blockades around Iran at the moment.
Basically the source list is very poor and outdated, and the site itself should not be trusted.
http://ipnetwork.bgtmo.ip.att.net/pws/current_network_perfor...
No other data confirms this supposed packet loss, and this clearly looks like an incorrect measurement.
False alarm.
Clicking through their site it is obvious that the 20% 'global packet loss' number is almost wholly created by the large number of sites they are 'testing' that are down and showing 100% packet loss. Of the sites that arent showing 100% loss, most of them are on 0% loss - nothing close to an average of 20%.
The posted source seems to be of no value.
http://internethealthreport.net/ shows that everythings fine according to their data.
Was this a planned outage? Perhaps some hardware being decommissioned, and BGP routes not being updated? Surely there is a better answer then, "LOL, Chicago O'Hare got snowed in."
Regardless of any of that, I'm pretty sure some heads are going to roll. I mean, who runs a router THAT important, and can have a 3 day blackout without anyone noticing?
Or the problem could be local to North America only.
Maybe I am a little bit paranoid but I have a weird idea at least for Asia. Most of the countries in Asia is blocking VoIP traffic.
I am working on a VoIP tunneling software (http://www.mizu-voip.com/Products/VoIPTunnel.aspx) used by many telecom companies in Asia.
In the last 3 years we have continuously evolved the built-in encryption algorithms but it was always cracked by the local authorities (yes, they are employing high qualified personnel for this). Last summer we decided to integrate much stronger encryption (at the cost of lower server performance) and since then the protocol was not cracked anymore.
I think that since they cannot easily crack new VoIP encryption anymore, they have decided to lower the quality for all links to keep the VoIP quality low so people have to use their national telecom service at high cost.
What do you think?