Internet Speeds

[markb5900]

My cable company is pretty much worthless with my high speed.
But for MY curiosity when I run a speed test, I will be getting 1/2 to 1 meg down but ALWAYS get 1/4 meg up. Just wondered why the up stays so consistent and the down is all over the place.

Thanks

Mark B

 

[mikea]

My cable company is pretty much worthless with my high speed.
But for MY curiosity when I run a speed test, I will be getting 1/2 to 1 meg down but ALWAYS get 1/4 meg up. Just wondered why the up stays so consistent and the down is all over the place.

Thanks

Mark B

Your download on cable is shared with all of your neighbors. What you see depends on how much they're using.

You should know that most major ISPs have bought traffic shaping hardware. They know when you're doing a speed test so they give you the whole pipe so you get impressive results. When you do normal stuff they throttle you. Nice, huh?

If you saw how many customers are on equipment that gets fed with one link....There are 480 customers on the switch who are each paying for 6mbps when the switch has ONE 100mbps ethernet port going to it, and THAT goes to a single 45mps T3.

 

[markb5900]

Your download on cabel is shared with all of your neighbors. What you see depnds on how mucch they're using.

You should know that most major ISPs have bought traffic shaping hardware. They know when you're doing a speed test so they give you the whole pipe so you get impressive results. When you do normal stuff they throttle you. Nice, huh?

If you saw how many customers are on equipment that gets fed with one link....There are 480 customers on the switch who are each paying for 6mbps when the switch has ONE 100mbps ethernet port going to it, and THAT goes to a single 45mps T3.

Thanks Mike

Mine isn't that bright to actual shape it.
I am sure my file reads like a WHAT A JERK! LOL
Anytime I am not getting the 1 meg I am paying for they get a phone call, tech support says there is a problem on the line and billing gives me a credit.
I tell them every time, just give me what I am paying for and you won't hear from me. LOL

 

[RJM62]

To piggyback, if I may...

Cable is a shared system. The reason the up is more consistent than the down is just because more people are downloading than uploading at any given moment in time.

I basically hate cable companies, but one of them -- RCN -- actually delivered what they promised. I was paying for 3 MB/sec and actually got it, and sometimes more.

When I moved a while ago, I couldn't get RCN at my new location; so I went with Time-Warner cable. What a horrible service that turned out to be. I was paying them for 6 MB/sec, but was lucky if I could top 300K except maybe at 4:00 a.m. And that's assuming the service was working at all. It frequently went down for hours or days on end.

So I switched to a cheap DSL account with a 30-day trial. On DSL, paying for 768K (the best I can get given my distance from the DSLAM) I get 650K - 750K on average -- better than Time-Warner, and at one-third the price. But it does get unstable during thunderstorms, which I can live with because I have EVDO as a backup.

Speaking of which -- the best speed I get is on EVDO. My Rev-A Verizon EVDO seems to be getting faster, with speeds regularly in excess of 1 MB/sec the past few weeks, and uploads in the 500 - 600 neighborhood. The only problem is the 5 GB/month cap. They do cut me some slack because I'm an affiliate, but I don't want to abuse that.

Recently, though, I was talking to a Sprint rep, and she told me that Sprint has no cap and couldn't care less what I do with an EVDO account. According to her, I can even legally run VOIP over EVDO if I want to using Sprint's service. (I've done it over Verizon's service just to see if it worked, which it does; but to actually use it would violate Verizon's TOS.)

In any case, the speed your paying the cable company for should be viewed as a maximum speed, because that's what it is. It's the speed your modem caps out at. Actually getting those speeds on a shared system is pretty much a fantasy.

-Rich

 

[jesse]

Keep in mind, due to the nature of the internet, most bandwidth is shared and oversold. There seems to be this misconception that DSL is the solution to this. It's not--it's still shared--just at a different level.

Everyone wants to profit and everyone has a budget. As a result networks are engineered based on expected load. Sometimes the unexpected happens. This can occur at levels that your ISP simply cannot control.

 

[markb5900]

I do agree with Jesse and Rj and know it is shared.
BUT their "tos" for lack of a better term promises a certain speed for a certain fee each month.
On the times I do decide to check the speed and "catch" them not giving what is paid for, I have NO PROBLEM with telling them that I deserve a credit to my account since I am not getting what I am paying for.
If they want to eliminate this type of problem, then it needs to be "sold" differently, with what as RJ said, you will get a "maximum" of XXX and a minimum of XXX, but until they do that????

Mark B

 

[RJM62]

Mark, somewhere in the fine print, they do say that. At least every TOS I ever read did.

And Jesse is right: DSL bottles down, too. It just bottles down further up the line, and (in my experience) bottles down less, probably because it's less popular than cable and there tend to be fewer users on the system.

It just seems to me that cable companies tend to be the worst offenders in terms of the speeds they deliver versus the speeds they advertise. Maybe that's just a reality of the area I work in, where clients with cable probably outnumber those with DSL by a factor of 10:1. Mores users sharing a finite resource means less resource per user, no matter how you slice it.

It's also true that my DSL customers get the very best premises wiring possible. I install a DSL/POTS splitter immediately downstream of the NIB (as in inches from the NIB ), then run the DSL signal over the shortest possible length of Cat-5 to the DSL modem, and run Ethernet from there to the router. So the total length from the NIB to the modem is only a few feet in most cases, with the rest going over TCP/IP; and there are no filters anywhere in the equation. That's keeps capacitance and line drop on the premises end to a minimum, resulting in better overall DSL performance.

It'll be interesting to see how FIOS performs once there are enough users on it to make a fair comparison. The few clients I have on it now get scary-fast speeds, but it's a brand-new service with relatively few users sharing a huge fiber-optic pipe, so the comparison is unfair.

Still, my hunch is that with Verizon's survival as a landline telecom provider riding on this very expensive project, they're going to try to keep people happy. Cell phones and VOIP over cable will continue to undermine their core business if they don't.

-Rich

 

[markb5900]

If it does say that then they are FOOLS for giving me credit, which they do every time I call and I CAN'T find it in any paperwork they have ever sent me.

Mark B

 

[RJM62]

Well, then maybe yours doesn't. I haven't read all of them, after all. But the ones I have read say that speeds aren't guaranteed.

I'm glad they give you the credit, though. Keep them on their toes!

-Rich

 

[SkyHog]

If you're using MediaCom, its written here:

With download speeds* of up to 8 Mbps and upload speeds of up to 512K Mediacom Online’s residential service gives you more power to surf sites faster, play online games better, download video, music and more. There’s no interruption when using the phone, watching TV and surfing the Internet at the same time.

The asterisk is never defined, however, but the key words are "up to." They are issuing "courtesy credits," also knows as "make my job easy credits."

Jesse has nailed the truth, btw, the truth that many people refuse to acknowledge, and that is that all companies share bandwidth unless you're getting a dedicated line. DSL is just as bad as Cable, except they start at a slower speed to begin with.

Getting 500kbit is crappy, Mark, that's way too slow, even using the "up to" wording they're using. I'd be ****ed too if I were you.

As to your original question, I would guess that the upload speed is consistent because there is much more downloading going on than uploading, so sharing the pipe is easier (that's just an educated guess though).

 

[Greebo]

When you pay for Xmbs connection, you get Xmbs connection.

To their hardware.

What their hardware gets from other hardware (theirs or otherwise), is a different story.

Nice, ain't it?

 

[wsuffa]

When you pay for Xmbs connection, you get Xmbs connection.

To their hardware.

What their hardware gets from other hardware (theirs or otherwise), is a different story.

Nice, ain't it?

And I remember the days where MAE-East and MAE-West were the real bottlenecks.

 

[mantakos]

For a cable modem, the bandwidth that your connection is rated for is like a "party line" (if you're old enough to know what that means), that's a big chunk of bandwidth that's shared by a bunch of neighboring customers. In effect, the speed of your connection to your cable company depends on how many of your neighbors they have sharing that same chunk of bandwidth, and how busy they are. So at "peak times", your neighbors are all surfing the internet, and the share of that link that you can get for yourself is going to be the lowest, and highly variable. If you're sitting at your computer at 3am, you probably have it nearly to yourself, and it will be close to the rated bandwidth, and fairly constant.

The reason you're seeing variation for "download" and fairly constant speeds for "upload", is because traffic and congestion in the network isn't necessarily symmetrical, most traffic for consumer end users is "download", and in your network, the congestion is apparently more prevalent in this direction.

For DSL, the bandwidth that your connection is rated for is dedicated to you personally, it's more like how a modem used to work.

Now, once you get "upstream" of your connection, you're in the access network and backbone of your and other internet service providers. These networks are inherently "shared", just because you have a connection to the network at X Mbps, doesn't mean that you're guaranteed X Mbps to any point elsewhere in the world.

Your connection to your service provider is like your driveway. A cable modem is like having a bunch of houses share a big driveway, if everybody leaves for work at the same time, you might get delayed behind them. A DSL modem is like having your own driveway. But whatever your driveway looks like, you'll eventually end up on the same roads and highways, and there can always be traffic jams out there. When you're downloading something from a web site out there, you can be crossing the networks of multiple service providers, so congestion might not even have anything to do with your cable company.

Ultimately, your cable company either provides you with "good enough" service or they don't. The rated speed of your cable modem will always be an "as high as X mbps", and can never be guaranteed. The rated speed of your DSL link can only be guaranteed for that first hop to your DSL provider, and after that all bets are off.
-harry

 

[markb5900]

Well, I have enough credits for two months now and they STILL won't come out and fix the problem.
What am I missing again?
I understand what everyone has said and appreciate your responses.
But after calling EVERY 3 days now for 3 weeks I would think EVENTUALLY even the cable companies would get the ideal to come out and find the noise on the line and fix it.
Just had a "supervisor" tell me that the local "tech" had canceled every work order because there was an outage.
What does it to take to WAKE SOMEONE UP?
Ok, rant off!
I just want my "high speed' internet to work "HIGH SPEED". LOL

Mark B

 

[RJM62]

Well, from the troubleshooting perspective, you can ask around your neighborhood and see what kinds of speeds people are getting. It could just be typical overselling.

You can check all the splitters in the coax run to make sure they're tight, dry, and that any unused outputs have terminating resistors. Also make sure that the exterior splitters are grounded to shunt the static that builds up in the lines from the wind.

Not that these things will help you get a response, but they're easy to do and might just identify the problem.

I don't know about where you live, but in NYC there is a "Mayor's Office for Telecommunications" or something like that. If a resident calls them with a cable complaint, the complainant become an instant VIP and get bumped to the top of the repair list. They even call back a few times to make sure the resident is satisfied.

So I'd call whatever government entity grants the cable franchise in your area and find out how to complain. Raise a bit of a stink and see if it does any good. Can't hurt.

Rich

 

[wsuffa]

Not that Verizon is any better. They've been hauled on the carpet in Maryland for consistently missing repair deadlines on individual service, and they've asked Virginia to loosen the regulatory standards because they're missing them there, too.

 

[inav8r]

Nobody seemed to mention dslreports.com. It's a great resource to see how you compare.

 

[flyingcheesehead]

I don't know about where you live, but in NYC there is a "Mayor's Office for Telecommunications" or something like that. If a resident calls them with a cable complaint, the complainant become an instant VIP and get bumped to the top of the repair list. They even call back a few times to make sure the resident is satisfied.

So I'd call whatever government entity grants the cable franchise in your area and find out how to complain. Raise a bit of a stink and see if it does any good. Can't hurt.

Amen to that. I had an issue with the phone company that they refused to resolve (they disconnected 2 phone lines based on verbal instruction from someone who didn't live at the house and obviously had no authority to instruct such, and they wanted $100/line to reconnect them), so I called up the Public Service Commission for the state of Wisconsin.

Our apology letter was hand-signed, hand-delivered, and the last line said "As a token of our appreciation... blah blah blah... your next three months of service will be free." Then, the PSC guy called back and asked if they resolved the issue to my satisfaction. Yup. Thank you very much.

Sometimes ya grab the bull by the horns, sometimes ya just gotta go straight for the balls.

 

[mikea]

If we haven't mentioned it before, Comcast sucks:

Comcast has warned broadband Internet customers across the country to curb their downloading or wind up on the curb.

The company has a bandwidth limitation that, if broken, can result in a 12-month suspension of service. The problem, according to customer complaints, is that the telecom giant refuses to reveal how much downloading is too much.

The company, which a few years ago advertised the service as “unlimited” has an “acceptable use policy” which enforces the invisible download limit.

...

Michael, of Speedway, Ind., uses Comcast Internet to transfer large work files while his son uses it for school research. In 2004 he received letters threatening to disconnect his Internet if he doesn't restrict his bandwidth.

...


Carriero received a phone call from Comcast in December 2006 warning him that if he didn't cut back on his usage, they were going to cut his service. When he contacted customer service to see what he could do, they had no idea what he was talking about and even suggested it was a prank call.

One month later, he woke up to no Internet. When he called Comcast, they informed him he would be without service for 12 months.

...
Carreiro said he has spoken to hundreds of people in 15 states in the past five months who have had their Internet privileges revoked by Comcast.

http://consumeraffairs.com/news04/2007/08/comcast_ban.html?imw=Y

Now that it's looking like Comcast+CableCARD+TiVo is my only viable TV solution, I may just pass on pay TV all together and just go with over-the-air and watch less. &*(! 'em all, especially the greedy MPAA who keeps making the options suck.