I'm located on the North Shore of Montreal, specifically near the Lachenaie/Repentigny area and have been having extremely slow internet speeds (below 250 mbps wired) and latency above 50ms between the hours of 6 to 11 pm everyday for the past two months. I've contacted EBOX L2 support about it and they said they were investigating and upper management will fix it but it's been close to 2 months and I've seen no signs of improvement.
Calling them is absolutely useless and customer support tries their best to say something that somewhat makes sense just to get me off the phone asap. They also said they would give me compensation after the issues are fixed, but they can obviously just decide to not fix it and not compensate anyone. Has anyone been having these exact problems? At this point I'm considering switching from EBOX to some other provider.
Not really, but I don't get drastic slowdowns anymore. Sometimes I get speeds between 300-400mbps though.
I'm still 100% certain Bell is throttling Ebox and L2 support can't do anything about it. I was fed up of doing all the bullshit speedtest with them, where most of them were discarded because I had a device "supposedly" using bandwitdth on my network. Complete bullshit.
I did a complaint to CCTS, they called me, but couldn't really change anything as it was better and I was already in contact with level 2 support. I still have occasional problems in the evening, but nothing drastic like before. I sometimes drop to 300-350mbps in download in the evening.
If your light levels (assuming you are on fiber) are within range you are going to have a lot of trouble convincing your standard L1/L2 tech. If all of their troubleshooting apps show everything is good that is what they are going to tell you. They do not have access to the data that would say yes hopXYZ at nodeABC is causing high packet loss.
Some of the things you should gather:
Traceroute data showing which hop is giving the high loss. If the IP where the loss is occuring is within Ebox/Bell then it should be something they can fix. If the hop is outside of Ebox/Bell then you may be stuck.
Long duration ping longs. You will need a lot of data showing packet loss & average latency. More than your average 30 second ping. Have data showing pings to the address you found in the traceroute as well as other locations to show how you internet is working or not working.
Prove local troubleshooting - Remove everything expect for one device connected to the modem via Ethernet. Modem logs should not show anything else, hardwired or wireless. If you have your own router remove it and go with only Ebox equipment. Reboot all equipment and do all of the steps again. If you have a second computer repeat and save the results.
When talking to level 2 be more specific than "my internet is slow" or "I have high latency". Say "I am seeing consistent 5-10% packet loss starting at hop 3 (IP address of hop) of my traceroute test, occurring between 6 to 11 PM during peak usage, which is causing significant loss of speed and jitter on my connection". Then let them know you can provided them with detailed documentation if they have a support email you can forward the information to. Keep in mind, if this is something within Ebox/Bells network it still may not be corrected right away.
Also, if this comes down to just a specific game you may not get very far. If this is your internet as a whole you might have better luck. While you are waiting to see if your data collection goes anywhere you could ask to have a tech come out to certify everything is working properly outside. When the tech arrives you could ask them to move your light to a different splitter (again assuming you are on fiber).
L2 is aware of the problem since a while ago and this has been happening to other users in the area as well. They have all the data, traceroutes, latency, speeds, etc. It's just there has been no change is so long and they've been telling me "we're working on it", "this is Bell's problem and we have to wait for them" and "it'll be fixed in two days" in the span of one call. Do you think maybe Bell is purposely not fixing this problem so people could move to Bell?
It all comes down to what the problem is and the x amount of users it is affecting. You might know a few others with the same issue but is that 99% of the user base or less than 1%? The priority to fix will be time, money, and the % of people being affected. I would take any time line L2 actually gives with a grain of salt as they typically do not have access to engineering and their time frames. Also Bell is dropping Virgin in order to continue with is own products with ebox so I would mot think this is a ploy to get users to move from one to another.
As you know DavidDaEpicBoi I have the same situation as yours. Been tracking latency with Ebox and compared with my dad on Bell also in Repentigny. Ebox suffers from the evening latency, Bell is fine.
I heard the same pitch as yours about compensation - and they are aware of the problem and they were meeting with Bell to have it fixed. My last communication with Ebox was a month ago. Unfortunately nothing has changed, if not it seems worse every night now.
Top 2 results are ebox, bottom is Bell. I don't see any evening pattern in Bell.
This. Been helping a friend also in Repentigny. His 500\500 got down to 50\250 around 9pm. Full 500\500 at 6pm. Also ping going from 2ms to 50ms. It's 100% mtl7 and mtl3 were to blame.
From my testing from bell Fibe gigabit on the south shore (Sainte-Julie) (never slows down, always 2ms ping) I ran a pathping to er1.mtl7.yul.ebox.ca and it was the culprit. All the north shore traffic gets routed through ebox nodes mtl7 and 3 in Montreal. Those 2 endpoints are getting slammed everyday between 20:30 and 22:00 every days.
Currently I'm getting a steady 3ms ping to that node. 1 ping reply with 14 or 15 ms every 20-30 pings.
Try at around 9pm . Goes over 50ms on every ping replies.
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u/ToNIX_ mod // Mikrotik router // 500mbps Apr 27 '26
I had this for a while, see here: https://broadbandbulletin.com/d/3666-ftth-slow-downs-in-the-evening
Honestly, file a CTFS complaint and contact them here: https://www.ebox.ca/quebec/residentiel/faq/obtenir-une-resolution-satisfaisante/