[ale] Diagnostic help needed

[Ron Frazier]

40 Mbps is pretty wild.  You can bet you won't see continuous speeds 
much above what you're paying for.  I've noticed that I have to reboot 
my routers periodically to keep them from getting sluggish.  I now 
include that in my Monday maintenance rituals along with system patches, 
etc.  Comcast does have some sort of turbo boost technology that's 
supposed to work for a short period of time whether you're on a speed 
test or not.  That can skew the results on a short term speed test.  For 
an indication of a more prolonged download test, try downloading a 
Ubuntu ISO or similar from a fast mirror.  I've clocked these: 
http://www.gtlib.gatech.edu/pub/ubuntu-releases/ and 
http://mirrors.cs.wmich.edu/ubuntu-releases/ at sustained speeds of 15 - 
16 Mbps when they're working.  (As a side note, don't let the Ubuntu 
site pick your mirror for you, or you may be waiting hours downloading 
at .5 Mbps from Europe.)  Once you get above about 25 Mbps, cheap 
wireless routers, switches, and slow internet servers can easily be your 
bottleneck.  I had an old Belkin wireless router that refused to go 
above 10 Mbps.  It worked fine, but it just couldn't handle any more 
packets than that.  Also, note that the max signaling rate for Wireless 
G signals is 56 Mbps, I think.  The maximum data throughput will be 
somewhat less.

Sincerely,

Ron

On 1/14/2012 8:48 PM, Jim Kinney wrote:
>
> All ISPs know the speedtest sites. Comcast is known to privide 
> priority routing.
>
> On Jan 14, 2012 7:53 PM, "Drifter" <drifter at oppositelock.org 
> <mailto:drifter at oppositelock.org>> wrote:
>
>     On Saturday, January 14, 2012 05:36:53 pm Kirsa wrote:
>     > I would not be surprised if you experienced a similar speed
>     issue next
>     > Friday though... On almost any residential cable node Friday
>     5-12pm is
>     > peak time and has the most utilization of the entire week. So
>     that you
>     > were down to 4mbit/s on Friday evening and 2mbit/s by Friday night
>     > sounds suspiciously like congestion to me, despite the faulty
>     > equipment.
>     [Rest trimmed for brevity.]
>
>     I had the same speed issues at 9 am Saturday morning. Snail-slow
>     download
>     speeds continued all day Saturday until I replaced the defective hub.
>     Then: BINGO! full speed returned.  In fact, a speed about 19:45
>     Saturday
>     (Speakeasy's test) returned the rather unbelievable download speed of
>     40.59 mbs! The upload speed was only 4.16. Obviously some sort of
>     burst
>     speed. Does Comcast have some way to know when I access a speed
>     test site
>     and goose the speed for a few seconds?
>
>     Sean
>

-- 

(PS - If you email me and don't get a quick response, you might want to
call on the phone.  I get about 300 emails per day from alternate energy
mailing lists and such.  I don't always see new messages very quickly.)

Ron Frazier

770-205-9422 (O)   Leave a message.
linuxdude AT c3energy.com

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