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Showing content with the highest reputation on 05/14/2015 in Posts

  1. I am somewhat educated about computers, however netwoks both ineterst and confuse me. I have cableone as ISP and am paying a bit extra for speeds "up to" 60 Mbps. I have NEVER had a test come back daster than 28 Mbps and typically see results between 18 and 22, My position with Cableone is that this is unacceptable whilst they repeatedly use the phrase "up to." I realize that expecting results of @ 60 Mbps is not realistice, but think my results are bs. I just purchased my own Motorola SB 6141 and have a Belkin F5D 8235-4 which to my chagrin is a N standard but not dual channel. I have an X box one, and 360 hooke to a wired connection as well as an old XP desktop. Wireless is a Toshibe Win 8.1 laptop, an old RCA N standard streaming box to tv, and couple of android telephones. I am trying to educate myself as to these issues prior to any further arguments with Cableone as aithout further knowledge I am at huge disadvantage lol. I purchased the cable modem to save $$ but as important to me is speeding up and making system as effeicient as possible Is the 18 - 22 test reults okay, or is that slow ? Any basic tips as to setup of equipment for me ?. Does the speed of my router effect the speed tests, i.e. if i upgraded to a dueal channel N, or better yet an AC router, would my numbers go up. I am interested in upgrading router. Thanks for any help or feed back. I have looked ALL over the internet and this is by far the best site AND testing I have found by FAR. BELOW IS MOST RECENT AND TYPICAL SPEED TEST: Download :: 26.9 Mbps 3.4 MB/s
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  2. I would add a few points to this case which has mostly been explained by other members already. The peak throughput of a router is definitely finite and quite small relative to a desktop computer. It is a separate from the throughput and power of the wireless radio interface. I was able to find that this router has a 384 MHz CPU in the latest documented revision, and has been tested to deliver 60-80 Mbit over wireless. Wired performance, surprisingly, wasn't tested, but is at least 130 Mbit. Many people nowadays consider router to be synonymous to an access point, which is not at all the case. I think the most bandwidth hungry devices should always be connected by a cable if at all possible. Several wired devices connected to a network switch can all transmit and receive at the same time. Only one device can transmit over wifi at any given time, similarly to how it was with Ethernet hubs, which are now obsolete. The "extension channel" allows the radio to use more bandwidth with stations (laptops, computers) that support the mode. A regular channel is 20 MHz wide, and supports at most 55-60 Mbit of throughput under "N". With a chanel extended to 40 MHz, a throughput of about 110-120 Mbit can be reached. (gross air rate 300 Mbps what is getting quoted on packaging to make the device sound more impressive). The entire spectrum allocated to wifi is 80 MHz wide, and can fit 3-4 access points with 20 MHz channels with minimal interference between them, but only 2 using extension channels. I always use manual channel selection. Most consumer routers do not allow full control over the channel in the 5 GHz band due to legally required "radar detect" function. They may hop to a different channel automatically. Professional devices do not have that restiction, but user is required to enable "radar detect" by law. There are certain applications that allow to scan the wifi spectrum and create a graph of other signals and interference. They're built into good routers, from Ubiquiti/UBNT and Mikrotik. In the 2.4 GHz there aren't that many channel choices. Staying on channels 1 or 11 is usually the smartest option to avoid users of chanel 6 and microwave ovens. Channel 13 could be a good choice if all your computer support it. Since that channel is not allowed in the U.S., some wifi radios have it disabled. In order to enable it on my Atheros card, I had to download the driver that comes with CommView for WiFi and change the country code on the card. My first attempt locked up the system... For bandwith testing purposes I like to use the free FileZilla FTP Server. I have installed it on all my Windows computers to do file transfers, which also conveniently allows me to perform speed tests between any pair of computers. I can choose to send 1 file or do a few simultaneous file transfers. Paired with FileZilla (client) the program can saturate any connection. Other clients may have lower performance, and Windows SMB/Network Neighborhood is usually slower and more difficult to troubleshoot and tweak. (You can't swap out to a different version of SMB client/server without reinstalling Windows.) I found this good article explaining wi-fi settings like channels and transmit power. They are not specific to DD-WRT. http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Atheros/ath_wireless_settings About spectrum outside the unlicensed band and wifi devices that support using it: http://www.qsl.net/kb9mwr/projects/wireless/modify.html
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  3. That sure is a bummer, as their CDN performed very well. The only other CDN I've had experienced with is CloudFlare, which the website Myce used about two years ago. However, its performance was awful at the time. Even when I tested its free service on my blog, not only did my pages take longer to load, I received notices from Google that my pages taking excessive time to load! Myce is using PageSpeed since, so that's going to be a pain looking for a good alternative. Based on my testing so far with TestMy, I'm fairly sure my ISP does not have great peering. I visited a friend yesterday who has Sky broadband with FTTC (VDSL based), so took the opportunity to run a few speed tests. It achieved roughly 70Mbps down whether I chose the linear UK or multithreaded and 18Mbps up. On my home ISP, I typically get 2 to 3 times quicker results down with the multithreaded Google CDN test than the UK servers. The following are in the order of UK linear, UK multithreaded and Google CDN: For comparison, the following are the UK multithreaded (left) and UK linear (right) tests I ran on my friend's connection yesterday:
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  4. Hi ohbothersaidpooh, sorry you're having problems. Whether in disappointment, "Oh bother." or in anger, "Oh bother!" it was truly Pooh's way of politely saying "Damn it". Eeyore was always my favorite. Watching and reading it with my daughter now and he still cracks me up. You're making me blush. Do you have wifi and a smart phone or tablet? Any other device really... laptop, other computer. Get connected to the same network and test. If you're able to test (which I bet you will be) then we've established Are you running through a VPN? These can cause issues. TMN is capable of testing VPNs but I've seen odd behavior with certain types. Especially web based anonymizers. That's actually the only time on a healthy connection I've seen things like you're describing. When those are disabled things instantly return to normal. Whatever is causing it... it's a clue to an issue that is most likely affecting your speed in some way. Sometimes when I test a device I don't even need to see the result. I can feel by how the test loads if the device is running great. The progress bar itself loads in different ways depending on how the data is flowing and how the device is processing. This was not intentionally programmed to do this... it just does it. If you use TMN enough you'll have a feeling for what it means when that bar reacts differently. It's very hard to explain but I'm sure others experience can back me up. Just seeing the progress bar (not even having to know how much data is being transferred) you can see fluctuations, jumpiness in the updating... in the linear download test this directly correlates with the data being loaded. You want to see a nice smooth transition across the entire progress. Software and hardware issues can cause the progress to jump. Multithread's progress is always jumpy, because multiple elements can finish simultaneously. Speaking of multithread. Try a multithread speed test. It may run when the linear test won't. Let me know. And let us know if you figure out what's holding you up. It may be causing unexpected behavior on other sites and you may not even realize it yet.
    1 point
  5. There are utilities, such as iperf, that you can use to check the network performance between two computers. You could use that to diagnose your WLAN speed from your laptop to your other machine. This would remove the unknown and unpredictable variations in your WAN connection speed. I use iperf extensively, but there are plenty of others available in Windows land.
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  6. Personally... I always manually select. ...always have fast speed with tons of interference from other devices and networks near by. All are taken in my office 75 ft from router. Wired Cat-5e Wireless 802.11 AC (channel 160) (lol, exactly the same) Wireless 802.11 N (channel 9) This isn't always typical. Sometimes AC performs better, other times to get the best performance I find myself manually selecting the 2.4GHz (b/g/n) band instead of 5 GHz (a/ac/n). So AC isn't always best. The 5 GHz band seems to be more finicky. Right now though, in this test across my house through distance and walls... it's on par with Cat5e. Repeat with the office door closed, which has windows on it. ..... 802.11 N 802.11 AC Some windows (especially double pane and solar insulated) will destroy wifi. Not much of a difference in this case. The results are predictably repeatable. Meaning you can retest immediately and predict a speed within 5%+- of the previous... AC performs nearly 30% faster every time in this scenario. You need to make sure that your connection isn't fluctuating itself before you try to tune your wifi. If the connection itself is unstable it will be impossible to know when the wifi is slow or the connection itself is slow. Test directly to the computer, wired, without the router if possible and make sure that you have predictable results first. Then you can reach for those baselines in your wifi tuning. If I had a slower connection, it too would perform better... and I would expect about the same percentage increase. ... and now }}CLICK{{ back to Cat5e. Always wire it if you can.
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