US network congestion woes plague iiNet

"Customers will experience slow speeds to some international sites," states an advisory issued by the telco on April 10 and updated yesterday evening. Customers Australia-wide are affected, iiNet claims.

One Sydney-based customer said he had been experiencing the problem since late March. "The speeds are slower than dial-up," he said via e-mail. "The problem is with many users connecting to servers in the US and parts of Asia with very slow speeds."

iiNet's chief technology officer Greg Bader admitted the problem was somewhat out of his hands.

"Unfortunately we don't have full control over it. We've seen where the problem is, and unfortunately we cannot control the timing on it," he said in a phone interview with ZDNet Australia yesterday afternoon.

"The issue is with the peering link in the US," he continued. "We've got about a gig of traffic running through this link in the US and it's just congesting. We're pushing them to upgrade it to a five gig link, and they're working on it."

Bader said iiNet didn't have a direct relationship with the supplier causing the problem and consequently was working through another carrier to get the issue resolved. "I'm sure you can appreciate how frustrating it is being one step removed," he said.

iiNet's upstream provider has given the telco an estimated resolution date of 21 April for the problem.

Bader declined to reveal which carriers were involved and noted it was possible other Internet service providers could be affected.

However the news may not all be bad for iiNet customers.

"We generally don't try and run our network like that, so we are working on it," said Bader yesterday. "We are putting in place some other measures to try and get around it. Some stuff we're doing tonight will hopefully ease people's pain a little."

"We're beefing up our capacity on other suppliers and whatnot."