This was in the Vancouver Sun.. but it could be related.
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Viruses Blamed for High-Speed Net Slowdown
Peter Wilson
Vancouver Sun
Wednesday, September 17, 2003
If you think your Telus ADSL high-speed Internet service isn't what it
once was, you're right.
Blame it on the many viruses are floating around the Net, and yourself
for not properly dealing with them, says Telus.
If you believe it's taking far too much time to get hold of a living,
breathing person to handle your problems with ADSL, again you're right.
Telus high-speed support is swamped.
Over the past few weeks, said James Goliath, Telus vice-president for
multimedia, a number of events have combined to cause problems with
ADSL -- especially during periods of high use, like evenings.
The biggest problem, Goliath said, is that a many ADSL user's computers
are infected with viruses, as a result of recent viruses targeting
vulnerabilities in Microsoft software. And every time these computers
are turned on they start "pinging" the Net.
"It's what is commonly referred to as 'ping' traffic," said Goliath in
an interview Tuesday. "Your computer is sending out ping messages every
millisecond, literally, and it's just flooding the network with useless
traffic."
Telus vice-president of national network assurance Linda Armstrong said
that the impact on the network load from each individual infected
computer is about 9,000 simultaneous connections coming from a single
line.
At the beginning of the spread of the virus infection the effect was to
put the load on the Telus network to 10 times normal.
Currently, the network gets so busy managing the blast of extra traffic
that it prevents users from enjoying the full high-speed offered by
ADSL to its 470,000 subscribers, said Goliath.
The problem continues because users have neither been protecting
themselves with the free anti-virus software offered by Telus to its
ADSL subscribers, nor have they been downloading the security patches
from Microsoft that would prevent them from getting the viruses in the
first place.
Goliath says the issue of the extra e-mail or spam generated by the
viruses from infected computers is a relatively minor issue when
compared to the pinging.
"If we could get any message out to our customers it would be to
download those patches and to please use the anti-virus software we've
included as part of our base service, so that it cleans up our
computer. This will help them out and help the entire network out."
He added that if users have their own virus software they should make
sure it is up to date.
Shaw Cablesystems president Peter Bissonnette said his company's
high-speed Internet service, with more than 850,000 subscribers, hasn't
seen any slowdown as a result of viruses or the pinging problem.
"Everybody is experiencing viruses, and to the extent that we can
protect our customers from them, we are," said Bissonnette. "But we've
not been impacted like Telus has. We're not experiencing any slowdown."
He said Shaw has largely shut off the virus that is causing the pinging
problem.
Armstrong of Telus says that since the initial virus invasion what
Telus has done is block individual subscribers that are infected and
then helping them clean up their computers.
"We are isolating the impact only to the infected customers. We believe
that's the better model," she said. "We believe that model is better
for the future because there are more viruses coming."
Goliath said that Telus, despite the fact that it had added "between
300 to 400" people to its customer-care and technical-help sectors
beginning in early July, was still falling short of giving users the
technical help that the company would like.
Last year, Telus cut back its workforce by some 6,600 people, and there
had been fears that this might lead to a lowering of customer service.
"We react as fast as we can to improve the service, its just that we're
kind of caught up in this sort of 'perfect storm' of a few things
happening at the wrong time," said Goliath.
"From the beginning of August to the early fall is ADSL's busiest
period of the year," he said.
"You get people moving around a lot, you get students going back to
school and people moving before school starts. You compound that with a
few unpredictable or unfortunate things and it just loads our customer
service and help desks."
As for criticisms that Telus ADSL has had more than its share of
complete outages, Goliath said this is simply not true.
"The reliability has increased over the past six months in fact, quite
dramatically," he said. "It's at, frankly, its highest levels."
Goliath said that, at the most, a few hundred to a few thousand
subscribers were affected with complete outages at any given time.
"Sure, a section of the network or a central office or a particular ATM
box or a particular router will go down and it affects customers that
are on that, but it doesn't affect everyone on the entire network," he
said. "It's an unfortunate incident for those customers that are
affected, but the number at that point is in the thousands or hundreds
and not in the hundreds of thousands.
"When that happens we find it and fix it as fast as possible."
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� Copyright 2003 Vancouver Sun
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