File downloads are truncated on Three Broadband

[electricworry]

I'm looking for some verification about whether the issue I have is isolated to me, my area, or if it's a general Three-wide problem as I think it is.

I use Three 5G broadband and I'm about 50 metres away from the gNodeB so I've got excellent uninterrupted signal. It's not a Layer 1 problem I'm facing. The problem I have is that TCP connections are terminated prematurely (i.e. a RST packet is sent) before all data is received. Here's a simple test to verify if you have the problem or not.
The following command will attempt to download an 8MiB file (all NULs) from a website in AWS. It should work the same on Linux, MacOS, and modern Windows computers just the same. For me, I get the error "curl: (18) transfer closed with XXXXXX bytes remaining to read", which is the problem.

curl -H "Connection: close" https://electricworry.net/test-8 -o test-curl

If you're not comfortable connecting to my server, the following third-party download test should produce the same result (it does for me!):

curl -H "Connection: close" https://files.testfile.org/ZIPC/15MB-Corrupt-Testfile.Org.zip -o test-curl

When I tested, I collected a packet capture at both sides and I can see that my server sends the whole 8MiB file in the TLS session and then terminates the connection with a RST packet at the end (which it does because we sent a "Connection: close" header). However on my client side, only half of the file comes through before the session is impolitely terminated.

Would people on Three 5G broadband mind testing please to help confirm/deny whether this is a general problem or an individual one?

I've done a lot of testing over the past month and I've got a hypothesis.

• Comparing the server and client packet captures, the packets do not match up; the sequence and ack numbers - though they start the same - end up being very different. It appears that something in the middle is buffering the stream and ACKing the packets on my behalf.
• The problem only happens when I'm on my Three 5G Broadband service. If I take my laptop into work, the problem is gone. The problem doesn't occur when I use my Giffgaff mobile as a hotspot either.
• The problem exists on all websites (I suffer *a lot* from Ubuntu APT packages being half-downloaded and rejected on my workstation).
• Since the times on my server and client are synchronised as good as possible with NTP I can compare progress of the stream at both sides. When my server has finished transmitting (and received the final ACK) it correctly sends a RST packet according to the standard. However, at that same time on the client all of the stream has not been received (we're about half-way) and I certainly haven't sent an ACK for it. then a RST comes in tearing down the session before it's finished and truncating the download.
• The problem only happens if "Connection: close" header is used. If "Connection: keep-alive" is used, then it's the responsibility of the client to terminate the connection once it's done. In this case, no problem! However, a lot of things don't use that. A web browser generally uses keep-alive for efficiency - hence 99% of users won't encounter or know about the problem - but a lot of systems (e.g. APT, Ansible) will use "close", which is why it's such a problem for me in my work.
• Changing APN and PDP type in the router has zero impact; it doesn't matter whether I'm using IPv4, IPv6, IPv4v6, APN "3internet", "3secure", or "three.co.uk". The problem for me is general.

Ultimately, my hypothesis is that Three have some sort of connection buffering to optimise the user experience or maybe to prevent wasted re-transmissions, but there's a glaring bug in it whereby it resets the connection and discards the buffer it holds for the session once the server has closed the connection. This would make sense for an ISP based solely on a Radio Area Network because if clients exist in grey spots where the connection can go down momentarily much of the time it is helpful to buffer the lost packets for the clients rather than have the server spamming their link with retries of the unACKd packets (and further polluting the radio waves). So I think Three ACKing the packets on my behalf is by design. Only the implementation is bad and it mistakenly assumes it can throw away the buffer when the server terminates the connection.

Any help/testing/solidarity would be much appreciated because Three technical support have been zero help since I raised it with them over a month ago. I sent over detailed evidence, but all they can muster is a call occasionally to incorrectly restate the problem and ask if I'm still having it. Really awful experience; I've never seen a team so completely unable to escalate to responsible people who might actually be able to help eventually.

[electricworry]

It is not what @Gardinerr suggests. To prove it's not some Apache vs Nginx difference, I went ahead and switched my webserver (which is only up for testing anyway) from Nginx to Apache.

If you visit https://electricworry.net/ you'll clearly see it's an Apache installation. The only thing I've done to it is add an SSL certificate so that it's representative of the problem.

$ curl -H "Connection: keep-alive" https://electricworry.net/test-8 -o test-curl
% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current
Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed
100 8192k 100 8192k 0 0 2705k 0 0:00:03 0:00:03 --:--:-- 2706k

$ curl -H "Connection: close" https://electricworry.net/test-8 -o test-curl
% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current
Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed
51 8192k 51 4195k 0 0 2205k 0 0:00:03 0:00:01 0:00:02 2204k
curl: (18) transfer closed with 4092646 bytes remaining to read

@Gardinerr, want to try it too?

[Gardinerr]

I tried both commands but they failed (after about a minute) with a SSL connect error:

LibreSSL SSL_connect: SSL_ERROR_SYSCALL in connection to electricworry.net:443 

 I thought this might be something to do with the way the Mac resolves hostnames under IPV6. Consequently, I switched to an IPV4-only connection but got the same error.

[electricworry]

Sorry, definitely not a problem at your end. The server fell over (which is what always happens when I run Apache on low RAM server, due to massive probing from botnets).

It's running again. You've got from now until next time it falls over (could be hours or days); after that I'm switching back to Nginx.

[jr0]

Over broadband

Over Three mobile phone hotspot

[electricworry]

It's really interesting that the problem doesn't appear with mobile phone hotspot but does with the ZTE and (if Gardinerr is right) the Zyxel routers. I've still not tried putting the SIM card in my mobile phone but I might get a chance over the weekend.

[PeteG]

If you get a chance, please report your findings for me, it's all information I can add to the report. 

Thanks.
Pete. 

[electricworry]

Ok, I put the 3 SIM into my mobile phone and I connected my computer to the phone's hotspot. I also ensured that my phone's WiFi (client) was turned off so that there's no doubt my phone is routing via the mobile data and not some other access point.

The test produced the same results:

electricworry@BOB1:~/projects/download-test$ curl -H "Connection: close" https://electricworry.net/test-8 -o test-curl
% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current
Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed
50 8192k 50 4140k 0 0 1991k 0 0:00:04 0:00:02 0:00:02 1991k
curl: (18) transfer closed with 4148646 bytes remaining to read

electricworry@BOB1:~/projects/download-test$ curl -H "Connection: keep-alive" https://electricworry.net/test-8 -o test-curl
% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current
Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed
100 8192k 100 8192k 0 0 3402k 0 0:00:02 0:00:02 --:--:-- 3403k

So that rules out the device as the cause. There has to be some kind of connection optimisation system on the network with an implementation flaw. That or I'm being monitored by the authorities and there's a bug in their platform. 😁

[PeteG]

Thanks for doing that. 

Pete.

[PeteG]

Hello. 

Waw, that's really interesting. Your testing should be useful. I don't know the answer and don't have a way of finding out directly, I'll need to speak to another team internally to find out more. Hopefully I can find some useful into to come back to you with. 

Pete.

[TheEnglishman]

When I called the support people they went through some tests and said there wasn’t a problem

can you at least acknowledge there is an issue and you’re investigating?  It’s not hard to test and confirm/deny. 

thanks