Menu
What's new

Internet Speed

Ted Calver

Ted Calver

Moderator
Staff member
Messages
8,494
Location
Yorktown, Virginia
My seven year old Dell Precision Laptop has been chugging along at a just okay 150 mbps internet download speed for about a year, even though we pay for double that speed. Had the cox tech come by last year and he blamed it on the computers age, so I shrugged and said I could live with it. The last several months it really started slowing down--less than 100mbps. I thought something was wrong with our incoming Cox cable lines, so had the tech come to the house again. His equipment measured over 500mbps incoming at the modem/router. My laptop is hard wired because the wifi card stopped functioning, so we thought the cat 6 cable might be bad. Sure enough, when I unplugged the laptop from the long cable (and power supply) and then, running off battery, hooked up to a short cable over at the modem-- the speed test jumped up to over 500mbps. Thinking a bad cable was the problem, the tech left. I put on a brand new cable, plugged in the power supply and then ran speed test again--right back down below 100mbps!

With Google's help I figured out that a computer will throttle back internet speed to compensate for an inadequate/faulty power supply and mine must have been gradually failing. The new power supply arrived today, got plugged in and guess what:
Speed-1.JPG.

Just a thought for anyone facing the same issues.
 
Your "chugging along" would be a nice boost for me. I don't recall offhand what speed we're paying for, but I'm pretty sure it's more than this:

Speed Test.jpg

This just serves as a reminder that I need to contact Xfinity to complain about the ever-growing price they charge me monthly for Internet, TV, and home alarm. :mad:
 
Yikes! Are you hard wired or wifi? Maybe theres a way to boost that. Infinity's local basic performance plan gives you up 100mbps for $29/month. That speed is about what I get on my really, really, really old garage laptop. It's okay for what I need out there. I got used to faster speeds I needed when working from home and now the missus does a lot of streaming. I don't dare slow things down just yet, and the faster speed lets me talk faster.:whistling:
 
Yeah, I'd wonder if you're wired or wireless. Depending on the age of the devices and router, speeds can vary. Even my Mac and Gaming laptop rarely break over 250MBps on our 1GB connection, on the 5 Ghz connection. If you're connecting on a 2.4 Ghz connection, then you're going to max at under 54 Mbps. To get faster on the wired side you'd need a ethernet port of 1 Gbps, but some older hardware only comes with 100 MBps ports.

I also found a long time ago that the router can be the bottle neck too, slow processors in them get overloaded once you get more than a few wifi device connected and streaming.
 
Interesting that I have run what would now be considered low speeds for so long. We run music, multiple TV’s and multiple users without issues.
6F37E70D-321C-42C2-B65B-A31ECCFD06E5.jpeg
The actual throughput required to run these services is pretty low. However, we are not gamers. I also run near zero traffic between local devices.

At work it was a different story since we were doing some serious computing. Even when I brought work home or worked remotely it was strictly control traffic operating remote systems so again, no large bandwidth required;-)
 
Last edited:
Streaming devices can differ, but most will adjust to the pipe size they are given. And will use as much as they are given and adjust for an overloaded pipe.

Example,, In the rv I had the roku choked to a 2 mbps bandwidth. The shows would play without much buffering, but the were really grainy in quality of the picture. I bumped it up to 3 mbps and the picture cleaned up, but we had more buffering. At 5 mbps the quality was the same, but it stopped buffering every so often.
 
Well, I was feeling pretty fortunate till I saw some of the speed you guys are enjoying. I recently dumped my DSL connection that topped out a 7mps down, 1.5 up for a T-Mobile cellular router that bumps that number up 1000% to over 75 MPS down and 5 up.
 
Rennie Heuer said:
Well, I was feeling pretty fortunate till I saw some of the speed you guys are enjoying. I recently dumped my DSL connection that topped out a 7mps down, 1.5 up for a T-Mobile cellular router that bumps that number up 1000% to over 75 MPS down and 5 up.
Click to expand...
I've been paying for a couple of cellular data plans, one for the RV and one for the farm for her grandpa. They are both pay as you go plans, but over the last few months they've bumped the cost from $75 for 25 GB per month up to $75 for 40 GB per month, and most recently to $50 for 100 GB per month. Since there are a lot of folks looking to get StarLink, I think they are trying to compete with it.

Interestingly enough, I talked to several folks using the cellular plans as their main internet, and even though they have the 25 GB (or 40, 100, etc) data caps, the say they go 100 - 200 GB over every month and never get throttled. Most of the contracts read that they "May" throttle you if you're over your limit, but I think if they've got the bandwidth for you to use, they just allow you to use it. It's when their towers are overloaded that they do the throttling.
 
Ted Calver said:
Yikes! Are you hard wired or wifi? Maybe theres a way to boost that. Infinity's local basic performance plan gives you up 100mbps for $29/month. That speed is about what I get on my really, really, really old garage laptop. It's okay for what I need out there. I got used to faster speeds I needed when working from home and now the missus does a lot of streaming. I don't dare slow things down just yet, and the faster speed lets me talk faster.:whistling:
Click to expand...
That was on a 4 year old wireless laptop. Even at those speeds, I typically don't have any problem streaming video. This is pretty much the only device in the house doing any streaming, though.
 
My internet is wireless broadband. I don't have cable anywhere near me and certainly don't want satellite. I average 50 down and around 15-20 up. it does streaming on YouTube and everywhere else just fine. No problems at all. And, it is the fastest wireless speed in this area that I know of. People ask why I don't want satellite and the answer is real simple, yet very important. When the weather gets bad, really bad, no satellite connection. Cloud cover blocks it. Not with wireless broadband. I can tell by live radar coverage on whether a tornado is near and whether I am about to get sucked up or not. :rofl:
 
From these responses there's obviously a big difference in service availability/quality depending on where you live and what you are willing to pay. Rural vs denser population areas and more competition between providers ups the ante. I live on the fringe of what many call a major metropolitan area. They ran FIOS down our street a couple of years ago and a bunch of the COX customers jumped ship. They have been competing aggressively ever since, so when it comes time to renew our contract, that works in our favor. I like to be sure we get what we pay for, so if we pay for COX Gigablast service and only get 100mbps then there's a problem somewhere. If my equipment is so old it won't process the data stream, I sure don't want to pay for the data stream and am gonna save some money on my plan.
 
This is on the slow side of normal for us in the Liquor Shop. Fast is around 200-ish, this is a shared FLETS connection for the whole building.
In my workshop which is NOT a shared FLETS connection, I see +700 in the late evenings.
We do live in downtown Tokyo...
 

Attachments

  • Net Speed.PNG
    Net Speed.PNG
    46.3 KB · Views: 3
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top