kenwood850

Thanks to all that responded, Mudmanc4 and TriRan for their insightful advice on how to deal with tech. support, RTB for the answer to the 90% question and of course CA3LE for not only his comments but for running this site. I have always been aware of the fact that Ethernet had overhead but I would have expected that most of the flash speed tests sites, at least those run by ISPs, would have counted that overhead in their total speed value since it is to their advantage to show the highest speed possible. Also RTB’s comments suggesting that value was 10% seemed a little high so I did some more poking around and found out that ADSL breaks down an Ethernet packet into cells 53 bytes long and that adds even more overhead for a total of over 16%. I was not aware of that so I learned something new. I guess since I really do not know what the speed figure really represents, I will accept within 10% being a satisfactory reading. As for the location of the ISP’s speed test site, I live in the northern New England and the first two hops are local within 30 miles but then it is a direct link (at least no hops shown) to a site in TN. That is very unusual as even traffic within my state has many more hops and all of the traffic goes south to NYC before it is routed back north – or anywhere else for that matter. I also know were TriRan is coming from as I have talked to tech. support perhaps 6 times under 4 tickets and have had techs at my home twice and they have found nothing wrong (there generally isn’t even a problem during the workday) with my configuration. I have also had to wipe all my NAT values, hookup direct instead of to my LAN, and use their modem instead of my more capable modem on multiple occasions with the same results I find with my own configuration. I understand their reasoning but although it has not been the 100 times RTB has seen, it sure does get old to spend an hour each time covering old ground. I have one more question. Is anyone aware of how to automate retrieval of test speed readings from an Ookola flash speed test site? I know you can automate tests with testmy.net but I would really like to do it with my ISP’s test site. I am familiar with bash scripting so ideally it would be something that would run from a Linux (Slackware) command line that I could call using crond. On the other hand something that worked with Windows would also be acceptable. Beggars cannot be choosers. Thanks again for all your comments.

Up until recently I never bothered to check my Internet speed on my ADSL connection but over the past couple of months I noticed that at certain times (early evening mostly) my connection to the Internet seemed sluggish. I will not bore you with all the details but one evening when it was particularly sluggish I checked the speed with a well known test site and found my speed was only about 15% of what it should be. Since then I have been working with the ISP to resolve this but in the process I found testmy.net and now have two questions. 1. Even during the best of times when everything seems fine I only receive about 90% of the speed I am paying for even when using the ISP’s flash speed test site. When I mention that speed value to tech support the say this is a normal and acceptable condition. Is no more than 90% of the rated speed all you should really expect? 2. When I do a speed test using the ISP’s flash speed test site and it reports 90% of the my connection speed, I often find that if I immediately do a speed test with testmy.net it reports a speed considerably less. I have read the sticky postings and some of the other postings on this subject and understand why this is the case and how the testmy.net results are more real world and meaningful, but how do you convince your ISP of that? All the low speed readings in the world from a dozen different external speed test sites that show a problem will not make your case if the ISP only wants to judge your connection speed based on their internal flash speed test site that shows everything is 90% of fine. Has anyone had any success in convincing them otherwise and if so, how did you do it?