Last time, the story went like this: Chongxi’s home was mysteriously throttled by China Mobile to 4Mbps upstream. Since Chongxi had indeed been migrating backups from his cloud drive these past few days, he didn’t get suspicious about the huge total upload counter on the router’s WAN port
After talking with the area manager, the broadband technician came to my home for an on-site inspection. When he checked the ONT and the router he went round and round and found nothing: no NAS, no set-top box, nothing but the single cable connecting the ONT and the router. The technician scratched his head for ages, unable to figure out why the broadband had been blocked
Then the technician asked to go into the ONT’s admin panel to look at the topology. As soon as he saw that the ONT was in bridge mode with the router doing the dial-up, he reported the situation to the area manager, who was absolutely furious, saying this was a violation of the rules
Since the technician’s China Mobile app kept failing to bind to the ONT (well, of course — I’d deleted the remote control), the area manager told him to swap in a new one, the PT927G we talked about last time. After re-binding it he took a few photos, then there was still the signed letter of guarantee, and that was that
Then came the part where it took me only three minutes to successfully get the new ONT’s superadmin password, and I switched the router dial-up back (see the previous post). Then I refreshed the data and, good lord, it had only just been connected and the WAN port had already pushed 10.6GiB of upload while download was only 8.8GiB. That definitely wasn’t right, so I hurriedly installed a bandwidth monitoring package to see which device was up to no good. The truth came out at once: the monitor had only been installed for a minute or two and upload had already run 234MiB, several times the download. It was coming from the old folks’ phones at home. I could guess with my eyes closed that some streaming platform was behind it — my NAT1 is great for hole punching, isn’t it? One look at the UPnP list and there’s a 168h terms-of-service clause. No wonder my broadband got blocked: these platforms secretly use people as PCDNs. They’re worse than some PCDN providers — at least those pay you a little. These guys not only suck your blood, they get your broadband blocked. Absolutely disgusting
In a fit of anger I just installed qosmate, throttled upstream to 500KB/s, and turned off UPnP while I was at it. These vampire vendors really are disgusting
