djpenn3

CenturyLink fiber. Trial offer ended, so I'm at $160/month.
 

CenturyLink fiber. Trial offer ended, so I'm at $160/month.
 

CenturyLink fiber. Trial offer ended, so I'm at $160/month.
 

Running pfsense on an HP box with 4-GB nics split by a cisco 2924-xl for local KVM acess ect, a DGS-1224G GB switch, one card to a wtr54g with ddwrt, a wap11 which acts as a repeater.
 
I pulled cat6 through this old plastered house and dropped GB nics in all the machines. The wireless is controlled through 'captive portal' ( which plays hell on the kids 3dsx hahah ) on the pfsense appliance for external access. All hardware devices are on seperate subnets from any servers and or wireless networks. Using turnkey PDC to keep things in order.

This is awesome!!!! time to go upgrade my two routers!. I currently have two set up in hyper-v VM's with one of them configured as a backup. Looking foward to playing around with the new GUI!

I've got boxes running several places, a few in production and quite a few in residential applications. Rarely, as in hardly ever any more does one of them complain. The more you do with them they more you'll want to do.
One of them had an uptime of around 10 months until recently when I ran the 2.3 RC version on it. The local box is still running the nightly, I should get that up to date.

I never claimed BSD was Linux - only that I used the Linux router. Totally separate project that pre-dated m0n0wall and pfSense, and is now defunct.
m0n0wall was started by the same people as pfSense, yes, and it's now officially closed. Chris Buechler is the main guy at pfSense, and a couple of other folks help with answering questions on the forum and writing and updating documentation. It was begun in order to provide a platform that was more feature-rich and would scale to server-class hardware.
 
I used, and still use, ssh for console access whenever possible. Telnet's not at all secure, and ssh has way more features. My office has a static IP, and I created rules in pfSense to let traffic through from that IP on ports 22 and 443...and others, if some special need warranted. I very seldom had anything come up that I couldn't manage through the pfSense web UI.

pfSense is to the point of replacing Cisco equipment in rather large production sites. As you should well know.
 
Before I started with it, I relied on whatever tomato or DD-wrt had going for it, not downplaying them, just required a bit more.
 
Now I use it in three production environments myself, I'm a bit concerned though to be honest, it does it's job so well, I've come to rely on it. Top notch stuff!
 
Been running the nightly since 2.3 was at night lol

I used the Linux router, way back in '99 or so. Compiled onto a floppy and booted from that in read-only mode. It was a bit fussy about NICs and had no admin UI, but it worked. m0n0wall was good, but pfSense is truly gold-standard open source software, right up there with the best Linux distros, MySQL, the various Apache server products. I used to have a side business setting up and administering firewalls, routers, IPSec VPNs, captive portals, etc. for small businesses. Needless to say, pfSense was my go-to platform for most of that. I re-branded the web UI with my own logo and colors, so clients thought I was a real wizard.

Been running pfSense since 1.something; ran m0n0wall before that. Just upgraded from (I think) 2.2.6. So far, so good. Web GUI is vastly improved, and scales well to my phone. Very nice work by Chris Buechler and crew. I encourage folks to try pfSense. It's a real-deal firewall/router that does everything you'll likely need it to do and a whole lot more. Excellent community support.

You should always purchase your own modem.  Don't buy it from your provider either, don't even let them give you one.  Always do your research on the modem, even if you're not going to use it's full capability... in the future you may.
 
Motorola owns.  If you get the best model (usually for around $100) and pair it with a great N-600+ or AC router (Netgear owns here IMO) you can't go wrong.
 
So side from saving money why should you always purchase your own?  Especially with Comcast...
 
Because Comcast USES their customers who have leased modems.  If you have one of Comcast's modem/router combos you're not only broadcasting your own private wifi but also Comcast's public wifi network.  People can hop on your modem and draw your bandwidth.  They don't access the Internet from your IP but they do draw bandwidth from your modem.   You can now call 1-800-XFINITY or visit http://customer.comcast.com/ to disable this "feature".  But in my experience, even without that... their modems suck.  They're huge and you don't want to combine your router and modem.  I change my routers out more often than my modem needs to be changed...
More info > Comcast sued by customers for turning routers into public hotspots You can get much better supported routers in the open market that will give you a much richer feature set and technologies behind them.  IMHO it's always a dumb move to get modems and routers from your provider.  ESPECIALLY if they're a combined unit. YUCK!  No thanks.  If they gave one to me... I wouldn't even sell it or give it away... I'd disassemble it for fun, see if any parts could be salvaged.  Get that public wifi out of people's houses!  It's a disgrace and they should be ashamed for doing it without really telling people.  Hey Comcast, install that crap out in your pedestals at the street and pay for your own electricity!

Hello back at you!
 
Yes, we live on the Olympic Peninsula, and the landscape and the quick access to it is amazing.  It's just frustrating living so close to Microsoft and Amazon, to name a couple, yet have access to the internet far below many 3rd world communities.

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.

Damn, that sucks.

Post up a pic of your bill where it says the date.

I know it's lame but just pay the bill. They have the best Internet in your area, right? If you want to escalate the issue you may be able to get a credit for the inconvenience. But be nice... if you're not getting what you think you're due ask to talk to a manager. Still getting nowhere, send an email http://frontier.com/helpCenter/contact-us. If they are fair I'm sure they'll make it right, they shouldn't disconnect you 2 days early. That's BS.

http://TestMy.net Version 14
Validation:: https://testmy.net/db/ReW1swYU
TiP Measurement Summary:: Min 197.12 Mbps | Middle Avg 722.07 Mbps | Max 774.33 Mbps | 33% Variance
TiP Data Points:: 197.12 Mbps, 441.51 Mbps, 557.18 Mbps, 656.5 Mbps, 758.77 Mbps, 758.77 Mbps, 754.97 Mbps, 754.97 Mbps, 758.77 Mbps, 758.77 Mbps, 754.97 Mbps, 758.77 Mbps, 762.6 Mbps, 762.6 Mbps, 751.22 Mbps, 740.17 Mbps, 774.33 Mbps, 770.38 Mbps, 356.12 Mbps
Client Stats:: https://testmy.net/quickstats/djpenn3 https://testmy.net/compID/19822805007
Test Time:: 2015-05-12 21:08:55 Local Time
Client Location:: Maple Grove, MN US https://testmy.net/city/maple_grove_mn
Target:: Dallas, TX US http://dallas.testmy.net
Client Host:: CenturyLink https://testmy.net/hoststats/centurylink
Compare:: Comparable to client avg, 2432% faster than host avg, 209% faster than city avg, 2328% faster than country avg, 3605% faster than world index
1MB Download in 0.01 Seconds - 1GB Download in ~10 Seconds - 10487X faster than 56K
This test of exactly 204800 kB took 2.858 seconds to complete
User Agent:: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:37.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/37.0 [!]

So, my Mom's a Teacher and they got a new school, and New Internet.
 
It's like the FASTEST internet I've seen In person. (It's fast because only a couple of techers are on the Internet since the school year hasn't started yet)
 
Do you have faster ones? Post them, i'm interested to see!
 
   Christian || http://Doolgo.com

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.

I might have already replied to this topic a while ago, so if I did, forgive me...I just didn't check whether I had or not.
 
I'd just like to give a quick summary of my view of TMN vs.  "the others." I am a networking guy by profession as well as by degree and certifications, so it is natural for me to be the "curious cat" about everything networking and to try to "fool the system" (e.g. find bugs that cause erroneous results) as well as attempt to prove or disprove the validity of someone's claim (in this case, the accuracy of TMN).
 
Many (probably most) people do not realize that there have been TCP (and other transports) benchmarking for just about as long as the transport itself has been around.  Some of the most powerful are command line tools found (typically) in Linux systems that offer extreme flexibility in testing (e.g. packet sizes, compression algorithms, hardware offload for things like checksums and VLAN or QOS tagging, certain kernel path bypass mechanisms, window scaling heuristics, and literally dozens of other adjustable parameters to test the maximum Tx/Rx speed between two or more computers).  That said, I've used pretty much all of them at one point or another and have done very meticulous comparisons to the results on TMN.  The margin of error is astonishingly low (generally less than 5%).  Compared to Ookla's Flash based test, this is a factor of 10 difference in accuracy because the average from that site that I have found is around 50% (with a huge standard deviation).  One day, I will perform the tests again and post the results in a forum here..I didn't save everything last time and want to make my post "legitimate" by including all methods and screenshots utilized.  I'll try to get around to it sometime soon.
 
That was the first thing to get out of the way.  Secondly, as explained in other posts, Flash is a VERY expensive technology (expensive meaning processor and memory intensive) and adds quite a bit of latency as well due to the complex paths the data flow must go through.  Is it appealing to the eye?  Absolutely.  Would I choose the most graphically appealing test if my goal is to get the most accurate results?  Absolutely not.  See paragraph above...command line is about as ugly as you can get - but also as accurate as you can get (using the correct tools).
 
I'll preface point three by saying that I don't know enough about the internals of either TMN or Ookla to make a totally accurate claim about their inner workings but I may through my obversations, I can assure you that Ookla has major problems with regard to the results.  One of the best ways to test this on your own is to use a program called Wireshark and start a capture of your network packets (make sure to choose the correct network card!!) during a TMN test and an Ookla test.  The first thing to notice is the amount of data that is transferred during a test.  I cannot figure out, for the life of me, the algorithm with which Ookla determines how much actual data to transfer.  By "data," I mean, for example, how many megabytes are transferred to your box during the test.  Second thing I noticed was a lot of "noise" in the packets that seemed to be upstream communication to the Ookla host server from my computer during a download test (NOT ACKS, so please don't call me out saying it was ACKS).  There is some type of communication to the server going on - which OBVIOUSLY interferes with an accurate download score if a Download test is also simultaneously transmitting information other than standard TCP Acknowledgments, replies, etc.  That doesn't occur on TMN.  There is simply an ACK and SYN as expected during a raw transfer.  The TMN server determines whether or not more data is needed to determine an ACCURATE result based on how quickly you down- or uploaded the information (7 seconds down and 5 seconds up for a specific amount of data transfer).  Assuming a download, at first you will receive the smallest continuous piece of data and if it took less than 7 seconds to transfer, TMN will push the next size to you.  This process repeats until:
 
 
The seven seconds expire and you have not received the entire download chunk - or - You reach the maximum size (200MB) and complete the download in less than seven seconds.
This way, during the download, the only cost incurred on your PC is that of the Operating System's networking routines and the CPU usage for offloaded tasks (for instance, checksum offload).  BTW, this occurs during ANY network communication and there is no way around it.
 
Another thing to consider if you are receiving results that are inconsistent amongst testing sites is the location of the hosting server.  If you go to speedtest and live in Atlanta, Speedtest will choose the location closest to you with the least latency (and, in this case, would be in Atlanta).  The further a byte has to travel, the more latency introduced and (generally) more hops must be taken to reach the destination.  All of which introduces decreases in speed with increase in hops and latency.  So, if you're testing on Speedtest in Atlanta on an Atlanta based server and then hop over to TMN and use a Dallas server, it is only natural to expect that the transfer speed will (again, typically) be slower and vice-versa.  So, a more accurate way to compare the sites would be to choose a Dallas location on speedtest, take the test and then test via Dallas on TMN.  Or, you can just trust me..TMN is better
 
The last point I'll make in this post is that with TMN, the data transfer occurs via standard HTTP, which is how the vast majority of your real world downloads and browsing occurs.  One exception is on a secure site that uses SSL and is preceded with "https://" - that normally occurs on port 443 instead of 80 as in HTTP and incurs a heavy performance penalty for the encryption and decryption of the data after is is received.  There are tons of other protocols such as FTP, SCP, SSH, CIFS, SMB, NFS, etc. but, like I said, 99% of the typical user's internet browsing occurs on HTTP.  I don't know exactly how the data is transmitted and received on Ookla based sites but I do not believe it is HTTP - I think it is an embedded part of the Flash wrapper.
 
So, to close this post that I meant to be short and to the point and went way overboard, my opinion and experience is that the most accurate measurement of your bandwidth is going to be found on TMN. 
 
I apologize for the rambling.  I hope at least someone finds this helpful!  Take Care....more to come (in the future, sometime!)
 
--SIETEC--
 

I'd also be thrilled to have something like an iperf server that us geeks could access. I would think doing a bi-directional iperf test would be just about as accurate as one could get - takes browser performance out of the picture. Thanks for looking into this, CA3LE.

there are many factors that could be causing this it may not be hardware related, first things first make sure the drivers software isn't manually set to half duplex mode or 10Mbps which can be found in your network adapter settings its under control panel > network and sharing center > change adapter settings
 
 

 
 

 
 

 
 
if that is already set to auto or 100Mbps then you should be fine next step would be to download TCP Optimizer and make sure the MTU is set for 1500 aswell as the connection set for the correct amount of download speed your expecting to get
 
if none of that works then you may be looking at either a issue with the ethernet cable or the router or maybe just that one router port