My ISP has installed a fibre based dedicated internet connection at the place where I work. In the beginning the connection terminated at one of the ISP's core routers. It resulted in a strange issue. Eventhough the assigned speed was 5mbps, when tests were done by downloading large files over http and ftp from multiple locations, the speed never went above 2mbps. But bittorrent downloads reached 5mbps. Even file download from the ISP servers were fine. So, at the ISP our link was attached directly to their edge router. After this file downloads from high bandwidth servers, like Google and MS, reached the 5 mbps limit. Sometimes the speed would fall down below 2 mbps and suddenly it will go up to the 5 mbps limit ( it keeps on happening during any single file download). But other downloads like ubuntu apt repositories still struggle to go above 2 mbps. The engineers at the ISP have not been able to sort out the issue.
After they moved us to their edge router instead of giving us 8 public ip's, they just gave 4 ip's. When we enquired about it, they told us that giving more ip's would result in arp overload at their edge router. But somehow I was able to convince them to give us the 8 ip's which we wanted. But the file download issue has remained. What might be the reason for files from different location getting downloaded with different speeds, that too with heavy fluctuation in speeds? I have downloaded files from same url's from a connection belonging to another smaller ISP, and the speeds were fine and reached full 5 mbps limit.
