TPF v/s Airtel - Long term review and comparison (Pick your poison)

[_rajat]

@Lolita_Magnum I tried to change the MTU size to 1480 and 1460 from 1492. Didn't help at all.
Yes TPF uses PPPoE as well and the IPv4 address is under CGNAT. Tried disabling IPv6 but no luck. I have tried all workarounds but nothing helped so just stopped recharging altogether.
I dropped a very detailed email to their customer care with all the screenshots and proofs but didn't receive any relevant response other than standard "browsing issue" ticket being raised. I did try to fight with their NOC team but it was not worth the effort as they asked for a lot of data and logs which was too difficult for me to provide. At the end up I gave up and decided to settle with Airtel.

 

[Lolita_Magnum]

This is definitely the fault of Tata & not yours.
What I meant was TCP control does not know what the MTU of the interface is. This means that by default, it assumes an MTU of 1500 and does an MSS of 1460. (You can take a look with a simple packet capture.) The packets will go through, but they will be heavily fragmented.
Adding to the issue is if Tata (since they have CGN) is not reassembling the packet adequately, you'd be bound to have "browsing issues" or slowness, which is what one usually sees.
If you have a specialized router (or VyOS, Mikrotik, etc.), you can clamp MSS to 1450 for better performance.

 

[jehunix]

agreed. mss clamping is a client-side workaround...

and if tata's cgnat is dropping or mishandling fragmented packets upstream, no amount of mtu/mss tuning on the customer end will fully fix it.

 

[_rajat]

I am honestly baffled. How can a bigshot ISP like Tata get away with such problems? Don't they do some kind of internal testing before? ISPs these days just want to milk customers in the name of OTT bundle and other crap. Even local ISPs have these kind of basics sorted out.

Something to note: This "slow browsing"/"not loading at all" thing happens randomly, sometimes on google, Apple store, gmail and AWS S3 storage gets throttled heavily. As soon as I connect to a VPN, problem goes away.
OTT apps like Netflix works flawlessly on TPF, I am assuming that since most of the content on netflix is sitting on CDN so there is no issue.

I broke my head a lot digging this. Thanks @Lolita_Magnum for the insights.

 

[jehunix]

@_rajat OTT bundling gotta be worst thing happened to ISP market tbvh! Nobody is concerned about "core things" and providing good internet service anymore but milking people with expensive bundled plans and shoving as much as OTT down throat of customers....

TPF is notorious for the same. If I want their 500Mbps/1Gbps plan I gotta take their shitty 30+ OTT bundle by default - there's no option to opt out or choose just plan with internet...

 

[Sushubh]

because of this i hope excitel keeps the option to renew your existing plan because all their current plans appear to be ott bundles.

 

[jehunix]

i'm glad that you broadband doesn't pull this ott bundling nonsense. 3 months of 500 mbps for rs. 3186 (tpf is rs. 9558 btw ) is honestly one of the cleanest, no-bs plans i've seen. only 15 days in so gotta see how it performs long term, but so far zero complaints. no downtime, good ping, solid routing. exactly what an isp should be and nothing more.

 

[theOne235]

TPF Kolkata, how is the routing?
@jehunix @_rajat
Ignore the first 2 hops, I intentionally did a double nat setup.

Tracing route to 202.94.70.1 over a maximum of 30 hops

1 1 ms <1 ms 1 ms 192.168.2.1
2 2 ms 1 ms 1 ms 192.168.1.254
3 2 ms 3 ms 3 ms 100.112.0.1
4 * * 41 ms 172.27.4.246
5 60 ms 36 ms 42 ms dsl-ncr-static-073.81.16.125.airtelbroadband.in [125.16.81.73]
6 85 ms 85 ms 82 ms 116.119.42.61
7 84 ms 83 ms 85 ms 203.117.32-209.unknown.starhub.net.sg [203.117.32.209]
8 96 ms 92 ms 119 ms 203.118.7.74
9 89 ms 87 ms 86 ms 202.94.70.1

Trace complete.



Tracing route to 217.38.149.236 over a maximum of 30 hops

1 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms 192.168.2.1
2 2 ms 1 ms 1 ms 192.168.1.254
3 4 ms 2 ms 3 ms 100.112.0.1
4 37 ms 38 ms 41 ms 172.27.4.242
5 41 ms 57 ms 40 ms dsl-ncr-static-073.81.16.125.airtelbroadband.in [125.16.81.73]
6 137 ms 134 ms 134 ms 116.119.33.226
7 149 ms 152 ms 152 ms ixp2.de-fra.eu.ignite.net [80.81.193.84]
8 153 ms 150 ms 150 ms t2c3-et-9-0-5-0.de-fra.gia.bt.net [166.49.164.122]
9 158 ms 158 ms 157 ms t2c3-et-8-0-5.uk-lon1.gia.bt.net [166.49.195.192]
10 154 ms 155 ms 155 ms 166-49-214-195.gia.bt.net [166.49.214.195]
11 156 ms 155 ms 155 ms core1-hu0-7-0-1.guildford.ukcore.bt.net [62.172.103.146]
12 161 ms 163 ms 161 ms 62.172.102.83
13 166 ms 167 ms 168 ms ftip004512660.acc3.mr.21cn-ipp.bt.net [109.159.234.155]
14 167 ms * 164 ms 217.38.149.236

Trace complete.

 

[jehunix]

@theOne235 its good only!! do you feel throttling, heavy dpi or general browsing slowness though?

 

[theOne235]

@jehunix
So, no throttling as such. But yes, recently I started playing through Xbox Cloud gaming. I didn't investigate which server was it connecting but on the overlay I saw the ping going around 48-55 ms. I don't know if this is ideal or not, but it has caused a slight input lag. I talked to the LCO and he said that this was the expected ping for india servers in west or south!

Also recently, TPF did an infra upgrade (as they pre-notify in whatsapp). Post that, they added a strict-cap to the download speed!
Now multi-connection speeds during download which used to exceed the plan limit, is not happening now !
IDM/FDM are of no use now.