Vodafone Traffic Throtling/Managment

I came across an interesting problem with my home broadband provided by Vodafone UK the other day. I was using rclone (an excellent piece of software btw) to sync some data to my google drive. Whilst doing this my server monitor, Zabbix, started alarming that my external servers were no longer up. Assuming my broadband connection had gone down I fired up my browser and pointed it to google which responded instantly. I then fired up a shell and tried to ssh to my servers – no joy just a time out. My next thought was that my server hosting company was down, and sure enough I could not ping my servers. However neither could I ping google but I could browse to my web servers.

By this point, I was pretty confused. HTTP/S traffic was fine but everything else was dead. A long call to Vodafone broadband ensued. The help desk was pretty clueless, to be honest. They did the usual thing of getting me to reboot my computer and router without resolving the problem.

So here is the behaviour. If you saturate your network link with HTTP/S traffic then any other kind of traffic is limited. Further HTTP or HTTPS traffic will be OK but any other network traffic will be limited or blocked. Vodafone denied point blank that this is what is happening and their marketing denies it. I assume they think they can get away with it by saying that HTTP/S traffic is not throttled which is true but their traffic is throttled.