Less speed than I am paying for?

I'm paying for 6Mb/s down and .75Mb/s up and am getting




Any one have ideas?


Also, i will be calling ATT tomorrow (other reasons that have nothing to do with this), but still, im curious what you all have to say


EDIT: and the reason i am confused is because at my dad's house 6 blocks away he is getting better than he is paying for (3mbps paying, gets like 3.1mbps ect)

 

Those are excellent speeds! Internet speeds will depend on a host of factors, and what you are getting appears to be very normal. There is a baseline performance for AT&T Internet connections, and it is set at around 50% of the advertised speed. What you are getting is absolutely normal and better than mine.

 

You are paying for "up to" 6Mb/s, and "up to" .75Mbps down. You're actually getting great speeds. Don't forget that the carriers measure total speed, including control packets and all, and speedtest.net and other tests like that don't include that in your total bandwidth. Read this bit about TCP/IP overhead for some more info. They claim 20% off for overhead, and 6Mbps - (6Mbps*0.2) = 4.8Mbps, so you're doing quite well all things considered.

Calling AT&T will only result in aggravation for them, and nothing different for you. Think of it like your 500GB drive actually showing up as 460GB or so once it's formatted and the size is calculated in base2 instead of base10... it's just the way things are.

 

Well, it depends. What is the rated speed for your Internet Plan?
If its lower, than, no, your not getting the speed your paying for.

Your DL Speed is very good. Upload seems a bit low compared to DL. Its always lower, but that is a larger gap than usual.

 

You have to realize you pay for a maximum speed. Your terms and conditions cover the fact that you will not always get this speed. This applies for every service provider

If you connect to a server that can not upload at your download speed, your obviously never going to get your maximum download speed with that download. You also have to account for all the other people putting a load on that server at any given time, or putting load on one of the nodes your connecting through to get to that server.

Also remember that multiple connections, say doing two downloads from two different servers is more likely to reach your maximum total connection speed as your dividing your throughput in half between the downloads and assuming they both can manage to bottleneck at your speed limit and AT&T

Also note that having to go through multiple nodes and networks on the way to the speed test server can slow down the connection, this is how networks work lol.

 

@Pita I have to call them any way because of about a million problems from the last few days, but ok


and to add this into the loop, at my dad's house 6 blocks away with 3Mbps service, the speedtest actually excels the speed i am paying for by like .2mbps or so... hence my confusion

 

I think your internet speed is normal and does not warrant asking AT&T since they probably won't do anything if your performance is above baseline (~50% of advertised speeds).

 

Does he have AT&T? Comcast is actually uncapped for the first 10MB which usually makes this speed test looke 2 or 3 times faster than the actual rated cap your paying for.

Keep calling them I wonder if theyll make like sprint and cancel a million customers based on them calling customer service too much lol.

 

They may have things misconfigured for him, and not for you. That is a problem you DON'T want to tell them about... hehe. It's more common than you'd think... I've seen billing data for telecoms companies in the course of my work. It's dark, scary, and you may be eaten by a grue. Things get lost quite easily, configurations changed randomly, and they really only know when someone complains or a tech checks it.

 

nah, ATT as well

haha, i guess so!


But yea, i was hoping to get uverse (cheaper and faster) but not available in my area (but it is 7 blocks north) (kinda OT)


But yea, i guess this thread is kinda concluded.

Pita, you may close if you so choose

 

6mbps is the maximum speed possible. Theres lots of other factors that might limit the maximum speed. As mentioned, proximity to local exchange, overhead and also contention ratio.

Dont bother wasting your time calling them, its normal. Try doing a speedtest when its not busy.

 

The speed that you are paying for is the local loop/last mile from your house to the first junction or cable building. After that you and your provider are at the mercy of the internet.

 

Those are, generally speaking, very good speeds, considering that what's advertised is the theoretical maximum speed, and not the actual, in-practice throughput speed. You also have to take into account the fact that the advertised speeds don't take into account the "cost" of the network overhead you have to put up with in practice.

For example, I pay for 20Mbps down and 5Mbps up, and this is what I typically get from Speedtest.net (two runs):



As you can see, there are overhead "costs" that typically shave about 0.25Mbps off my download speed and about 0.5Mbps off my upload speed (sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less).

The other thing to keep in mind is that TCP/IP transmission "tunes" itself - basically, a network node (client or server) is throttled in terms of the rate at which it can introduce traffic to the network; from what I recall reading, the standard throttle is that a node can transmit 2 packets for every 1 that it's received (with, obviously, a minimum of 1 packet) on any particular established TCP/IP connection (i.e., one on which the three-way handshake is completed and which hasn't been closed), so that a client that receives a lot fewer packets than the typical client will be restricted in the rate at which it can send packets out, relative to the typical client.

That being said, sometimes it is possible to get speeds greater than those advertised for the plan you purchased. That usually only happens if (a) you happen to get lucky and are the only one on the shared link between you, your neighbors, and the ISP's servers, or (b) you've had your service for a while now, and the ISP has since upgraded its hardware and software so that it can now provide better speeds than it originally could, and isn't doing anything to throttle older customers who originally signed up for slower service.

 

I love the fact that I'm I'm part of group B people.

I'm paying for 7.5Mbps down and 0.5Mbps up.
I'm getting 20Mbps+up on Wifi around 30Mbps Down and 0.5Mbps Up.

Yay... I guess they forgot to cap my bandwidth or they offer uncapped service for old internet subscribers.

 

Sounds good; just don't look that gift horse in the mouth too closely, or it might bite!

 

I pay for 8 down and 5 up

 

Dear Guest:

Thank you for informing us of the errors in your account service. We will be reconnecting you to your slower service by the end of business today. Furthermore, because you've been receiving more than you are entitled to, we will be further reducing your available download/upload bandwidths to the following speeds: 0.5Mbits/sec download and 0.05Mbits/sec upload.

Thank you for your cooperation, and have a nice day,

Technical Division,
Mediacom Communication

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(jk ).

 

It's just you. I have the same 7.5Mbps plan as you and I've been a subscriber since 1999.

I'm not even getting a quarter of the advertised speed:

 

Have you had your cable connections (or phone lines if DSL) checked recently? Do you have a cable modem or a dsl modem?

 

Not since like 2006, and that was for cable TV.

Cable modem. Shaw is a cable provider.

 

If it's been a while since the coax for the cable/broadband feed was set up, it's quite possible that you're getting significant signal degradation from connections that have come loose, become corroded, or what have you. The first thing I would do is check all of the connections from the feed in off the street through to the endpoint at your cable modem. Undo each connection, check it for corrosion, dirt, bent/missing wire, missing shielding, and whatnot. Repair any connections you find that need it (for example, I once had a coax fitting that wasn't crimped properly, and when the coax shifted against it, it would cause havoc in the internet signal, even though the television signal didn't show any noise or disruption. Then, put each connection back together tightly and see if that doesn't help with your signal at all.

Also, if you open a browser and type 192.168.100.1, you may be able to get into the web-based management page for the cable modem, which will allow you to see what the power levels and the signal-to-noise ratios are for your up and down connections. If you can get to that info, that should tell you whether there's excess noise or interference in the connection between the cable modem and the ISP's gateway on the other end.

You could also run a traceroute out to a well-known server (such as google or Microsoft) and then check to see if any of the legs that cover your ISP's own equipment are showing a really high response time - that would be an indication that the trouble lies either at that piece of equipment, or from noise/interference being generated between your end and the piece of equipment in question.

To run a basic traceroute, go Start->Run...->enter "cmd" in the box that opens up (without quote marks) and hit enter. That will bring up a black commandline console window. At the prompt in that window, type (without the quote marks) "tracert www.google.com"

You should get a result that looks something like this:

Code:

C:\Users\[REDACTED]>tracert www.google.com

Tracing route to www.l.google.com [64.233.169.147]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1     1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  192.168.1.1
  2    28 ms    28 ms    29 ms  [REDACTED]
  3    26 ms    28 ms    27 ms  dstswr1-vlan2.rh.hntnny.cv.net [167.206.34.161]
  4     *        *        *     Request timed out.
  5    25 ms    24 ms    24 ms  rtr4-tg10-2.wan.hcvlny.cv.net [64.15.4.29]
  6     *        *        *     Request timed out.
  7    36 ms   102 ms    35 ms  74.125.48.13
  8    82 ms    31 ms    30 ms  72.14.238.232
  9    44 ms    37 ms    38 ms  209.85.248.216
 10    42 ms    37 ms    45 ms  64.233.175.219
 11    43 ms    43 ms    56 ms  216.239.49.149
 12    34 ms    35 ms    40 ms  yo-in-f147.google.com [64.233.169.147]

Trace complete.

C:\Users\[REDACTED]>

If you want, run a tracert and then post it up if any of the numbers in the list look very high.

 

I think my net was supposed to be 3mbs, but Speed test usually gives me like 2.12
But when I really DL i get like 200-300kbs...is this normal?

 

Your line speed is in Mb = Megabits

Not MB = Megabytes (notice the upper and lowercase B)

8 bits = 1 byte

So 2 megabits or 2000kilobits / 8 = 250 kilobytes which is your download speed.

 

Never really knew that, thanks