Jazztel ADSL, does it "discriminate" traffic according to the modem you connect with?

[Angra Mainyu]

I have observed a "curious" phenomenon with Jazztel's ADSL. I don't know if it's a one-off thing that only happens to me or if others have noticed it too, so I'll describe it. It's a bit long but I'm curious to know if anyone has experienced something similar.

About a year ago, more or less, my Jazztel modem-router that I had been using (a Comtrend CT-5611, which had been working "normally" until then) "died". I asked Jazztel to send me another one and while waiting for it to arrive, I put a borrowed one (a Linksys, I don't remember the model) and configured it to use with Jazztel (password, etc.).

Now here's the curious part: for most of the day things worked fine, with no difference to how I had been doing it with the Jazztel router (the Comtrend), but from 7-8 pm until 12-1 am, browsing became almost impossible. It's not that the connection was cut off (it wasn't), but that pages took ages to load, if they even loaded. And this happened during the two-three days it took for the replacement modem from Jazztel to arrive. When it arrived (another Comtrend identical to the one I had before), I installed it, removed the Linksys and everything went back to working "normally" no matter the time of day or night, so I thought it might be something about the Linksys, that it wasn't quite right or maybe it was missing some configuration and I forgot about it.

But two weeks ago, the Jazztel modem-router "died" again (it seems that Comtrends don't last more than a couple of years and then expire"), and while waiting for a replacement, I installed another modem "not from Jazztel" to keep going: this time a D-Link DSL-320T. And my surprise is that the behavior is the same as before: browsing is fine all day but from 7-8 pm until 12-1 am there's no way for pages to load. And it was enough to get the Jazztel modem-router (a Huawei HG532c), put it in, and everything works well again at any time.

It's known that operators usually "tweak" the firmware of "their" modems (many times to cap them or anything else that only manages to annoy the customer, but anyway…) and I was wondering if they might do something more: discriminate traffic (or the priority in responding to DNS, for example) depending on whether the modem you connect with is "one of theirs" or not.

So, during hours of little traffic, some Jazztel customer (but who doesn't connect using the Jazztel modem, as happened to me in the cases I described) might not notice anything strange since, although "discriminating" their connection, being the traffic light at those hours, they probably wouldn't notice anything. But on the other hand, during hours of saturation (late afternoons-nights, when people return home and connect torrents), the browsing of the "discriminated" modem would get much worse.

It seems to me quite complicated, but another explanation comes to mind. Or that, or there is some parameter configured in the Jazztel modems that makes them less "sensitive" to network saturation at certain hours. If it had only happened with a "non-Jazztel" modem-router I would think it was a matter of bad modem configuration or some other problem, but I have already observed it with two different modems and from different brands (the Linksys and the D-Link), and it's enough to put the modem-router that Jazztel sends and the "problem" disappears.

In summary: with several "own" modems from different brands browsing becomes very slow in the afternoons-nights, but with the "corporate" modems from Jazztel everything goes normal at all hours.

Has anyone experienced something similar?

[Bm4n]

I don't know, but I think the configuration of a router is not limited to the password, there are other parameters that could be the issue. It doesn't make much sense to me that they discriminate against certain routers.