I am an established iiNet customer. I have been with iiNet for almost 15 years. The service has been almost uninterrupted and I have never really had issues with connections or speeds, the added bonus of Xbox downloads being a part of iiNets Freezone has also been advantageous to me.
In the last week of May, I began to experience some issues with downloading Xbox Live content, it almost seemed to me that the Xbox Live downloads were being throttled, my Xbox diagnostics was saying that it could communicate at speeds of 70mbs download, meanwhile, my downloads were not happening or, if they were, they were they were downloading at speeds of 1-6kbs.
My initial consultation with Xbox support indicated it to be a preview program issue, but given I had removed my console from the preview program I should not have been affected. I downloaded the updates from another console and had temporarily resolved the problem.
The next issue that presented was games would no longer launch whenever I was online, this limited me to games that were on disk or were saved to the console as home games. Again, consulting Xbox support resulted in a full reset of the console, testing and wiping of USB HDDs and a number of other ‘trial and error’ activities to try and resolve the issues.
It was at this point I began to see information surfacing about iiNet and their changes to their services and that a DNS change would resolve the issues with Xbox live. I reached out to iiNet of a couple of occasions, but the determining comment from iiNet was that they did not specifically support Xbox hardware, and that my internet was working and so there was no issue as far as they were concerned.
Luckily for me, the person I spoke to on the phone at iiNet was not content with that response either. They offered a few suggestions but unfortunately none of those panned out.
After further trials and tests, I was able to confirm that the problem was indeed specifically related to iiNet networks. I tested my Xbox on alternate networks (Telstra ADSL, Telstra NBN, Optusnet ADSL, & Amcom fibre) with no failures on any of those networks.
The first part of the working solution was to switch my DNS. I used Google’s DNS of 8.8.8.8 & 8.8.4.4, but you can also use OpenDNS as an alternative. The second part was to ensure that there were no downloads running on the Xbox. I had to either complete them or delete them (I opted to download them all). The downside to iiNet users using these DNS servers is the lack of Freezone, but given that my data allowance is unlimited, I do not have that issue.
I can confirm, I have had no further issues with Xbox or Microsoft services since Tuesday evening, 27th June, which is quite a while considering I first noticed the issues on May 30th.
I celebrated with a couple of nights of Rainbow Six Siege.
Farreg 