Slow Vodafone Ireland Home Broadband: Network Tracing

Last week I was contacted by a Vodafone Ireland network engineer to look into the problems I am experiencing.  The most painful of these is the very slow experience I get with websites that have embedded images.  I know the sites and content are fine because I can access them with no problem from other Internet services provider networks, e.g. I have done side-by-side tests on Vodafone Ireland and from our data centre via Terminal Services.

During the call I found some sites and pages experiencing the issue at that time.  I was asked to run trace routes to those sites which I did.  I also installed Microsoft Network Monitor 3.3 and ran a capture of the network traffic while the pages tried to load.  A simple page with small thumbnail images was taking 3-5 minutes to load and many of the images would fail (red X in its place).  I did this with 2 pages on 2 sites.

Those captures went off to Vodafone Ireland.  A couple of days later the engineer informed me:

1. He could see lots of time outs in the HTTP conversation which explains the bad experience I am getting.
2. He couldn’t repeat this experience.

Am I alone in this?  It seems not.  I’m still hearing from people that this is an issue for them.  I’m also getting lots of search hits for “Vodafone Ireland Slow Home Broadband”.

Vodafone Ireland has until this Friday to resolve the issue.  That’s thanks to my case being open with COMREG.  Without a solution, come Monday, I’ll be calling COMREG and following up on that option to have COMREG cleanly cancel my Vodafone Ireland contract and facilitate a transfer to another ISP.