mrhuge

Thanks for the reply, CA3LE! I actually live in Seattle, so it's not surprising that my results are better w/Seattle server, but it is surprising (to me anyway) that they're THAT much better. I tried to post a longer description in the General Discussion forum, but it got rejected for having "more images than allowed" and I didn't notice, so now I have to edit it and post again. I'm guessing there's a tighter limit on Newbies in Gen Discussion than this forum, since I got away with 2 .png files here and was only trying to post one there - obviously I haven't read all the rules throughly. Anyway, I'll still post it there unless you tell me to keep the discussion here. The very short version: what I discovered after my first post is that I get wildly different download speeds depending on server location: Seattle: 24Mbps Boston: 4-6Mbls Amsterdam: 1Mbps It surprised me that the range was so extreme, but I'll need to do more research to know whether that's to be expected or the sign of a problem. mrH

I just joined the forum in hopes of getting help with my speed problems (mostly DL speed sucking). I live in Seattle, have Comcast HSI with Blast!, I think I'm supposed to be getting something like 25Mbps/5Mbps. I have a Netgear WNR3500L router and a Motorola Surfboard 5100 cable modem, plus a Vonage VOIP box hanging off the router. There are several Windows machines (one W8, all others W7) connected via ethernet or Wi-Fi, plus one Android box, a Home-Theater receiver and blue-ray player, both connected to a Gigabit switch. When I've been testing speeds I've tried to make sure that nothing much is going on outside of the one PC I'm testing on, but I haven't been religious about it. I was repeatedly getting 20-25Mbps DL on Speedtest.net, but 3-6Mbps on TMN. That seemed fishy... I had various ideas of what to try (resetting the router & modem, connecting my PC directly to the modem, running some tweaks, etc), but I thought I'd run a bunch of tests first to set a baseline and to make sure they were consistent. I decided to try the different servers to see how much difference they would make, not expecting much since my speed was already coming in so slow. This is what I'm getting after a few tries each: (I hope posting this chart works - if not I'll post it some other way) Wed Jan 09 2013 @ 6:28:54 pm SEA 17.8 MB 24.4 Mbps 3.05 MB/s f2hiRZo Wed Jan 09 2013 @ 6:28:11 pm AMS 608 kB 964 Kbps 121 kB/s Tz3D21x Wed Jan 09 2013 @ 6:27:03 pm USA 3.8 MB 4.64 Mbps 580 kB/s Hsqfvnt Wed Jan 09 2013 @ 6:26:06 pm USA 4.6 MB 5.59 Mbps 698 kB/s Juw7oWO Wed Jan 09 2013 @ 6:09:42 pm SEA 16.6 MB 22.66 Mbps 2.83 MB/s ms2Qx8N Wed Jan 09 2013 @ 5:57:59 pm SEA 23.1 MB 23.53 Mbps 2.94 MB/s YeXopnP Wed Jan 09 2013 @ 5:56:38 pm SEA 22.4 MB 24.66 Mbps 3.08 MB/s 7DOHiEZ Wed Jan 09 2013 @ 5:55:58 pm SEA 20.4 MB 23.21 Mbps 2.9 MB/s ypYgjQN Wed Jan 09 2013 @ 5:54:56 pm AMS 1 MB 1.56 Mbps 194 kB/s ar80vg3 Wed Jan 09 2013 @ 5:53:59 pm AMS 640 kB 1.04 Mbps 130 kB/s VwfLThm Wed Jan 09 2013 @ 5:53:24 pm USA 2.7 MB 3.8 Mbps 475 kB/s G69RVPg Wed Jan 09 2013 @ 5:53:04 pm USA 2.7 MB 4.12 Mbps 515 kB/s Jy3BX8V Wed Jan 09 2013 @ 5:40:35 pm USA 4.4 MB 6.17 Mbps 771 kB/s bdDGIYS (I messed up the chart a little - "USA" means either Dallas or Boston I think) The three numbers in each line are the size of the file tested, the DL speed in Mbps and the DL speed in MBps ... So when connecting to the Seattle server I get DL speeds from 22-25Mbps, with Dallas/Boston I get 4-66Mbps, and Amsterdam gives me horrible 1-1.5Mbps speeds. I wouldn't expect to see such a wide range - some discrepancy, sure, but not a 24:1 ratio between Seattle and Amsterdam. This isn't normal is it? Is it indicative of a routing problem? Is there anything I can do about it? Or should I really expect that downloading a big file from Europe will take ~20 times as long as from a server 20 miles away? thanks... mrhuge

Hi - Just signed up for a forum account to help me launch into some speed problems. I started using TMN last month while setting up the network for my father-in-law's vacation villa in St John (idyllic island in the USVI - yes, rough life I lead). I've always used SpeedTest in the past, or the flash test on dslreports, but I've always suspected that they weren't giving me the truth, so I'm happy to find TMN. When I got home from vacation it seemed like my setup was acting badly, and sure enough good old SpeedTest says 25Mbps/4Mbps while TMN reports 6.1M/3.3M, and I'm on Comcast cable that I think is supposed to be something like 25/5, so clearly something's wrong. I'll read the forum posting rules and figure out where to post my details, and search around to see if there's already some wisdom out there for me. happy to be here...