Great site, and looking for feedback on my results

[petertirrell]

First, thanks for this site!  I came across it while investigating what appears to be occasional slowness on my internet.  Speedtest.net run from my phone repeatedly reports less than 1MB down but I'm not aware of other devices seeing such bad speeds.  Netflix and other streaming services are run all the time and work great, except occasionally will hang and rebuffer for a few minutes...usually after a little while these go away.  I was looking for a way to run some sort of connection test over time and came across this site. 

 

What I'm wondering is after running an automated test over a couple of days, it appears (at least from running it from a chromebook) that I'm generally getting the advertised speed from my ISP, and it averages out pretty well.  But there are occasional dips.  I'm not seeing a pattern in those dips either.  Here is my log from here:

 

https://testmy.net/stats/?&t=u&l=100&q=petertirrell

 

Is this somewhat normal for a cable modem connection?  My ISP is WOW (Wide Open West), but I didn't see a dedicated forum for that on these boards.  Without running another extended test over a set of days or maybe a couple weeks it's hard to say whether this is the general pattern or not but I'd be curious to know what a normal baseline might be.

 

Thanks again,

[CA3LE]

Hi petertirrell, please excuse my slow response.  Been building, I read your message right when it came it, then read it again and that made me feel like I had responded.  Just remembered that I hadn't yet, sorry.

 

I don't see a pattern yet either.  If you test more a pattern may emerge.  I'm happy to help look closely at it again when you have more data.

 

It isn't normal for a connection to fluctuate heavily like that.  But maybe you have normal activity during those periods... it would have to be something taking up nearly all of your bandwidth during those periods.  

 

Tell us more about your home network.  Is it possible that you have activity during those periods that would explain the drops?  Can you isolate your network to a single test machine for 24 hours?  That test would tell you a lot.  If you still see a regular drop then you know it's more likely either an issue on that client or an issue with your host.  If you test other clients and they behave the same... even more likely it's your host.  It could be an intermittent equipment issue too.

 

This may sound crazy but it might even be other electronics near your router.  Something that turns on and off on a regular basis, especially if it has a motor in it.  Are you testing wifi or wired?  The area around your router should be free of other electronics.  Put a 5ft imaginary bubble around it.  Your cable modem is fine by the way... many electronics are.  But there's definite wifi feng shui.  -- if you're testing with wifi, switch to wired if you can to eliminate that variable.  Also if your modem and router are separate it's a god idea to try directly connected to the modem.  Which eliminates the router as a variable.  If you have improved results, then you have a much better idea where the issue is.

 

 

 

 

[petertirrell]

Thanks for the reply!  I'm continuing on in my investigation....My network looks like this:

 

ISP is connected to my own cable modem, which is connected to a Netgear R6400 wifi router.  That in turn is connected to a powerline adapter (some Linksys model), which pairs with the other powerline adapter upstairs.  That adapter is plugged into an 8-port TP-Link switch, to which my streaming devices are plugged into.  Generally everything has been good, other than the occasional freeze in Netflix or Amazon which led me down this journey in the first place!

 

Wifi seems to be alright, although I'm thinking something may be up with my phone on that front - a download test from my phone will show drastically slower results than multiple other devices on wifi, so that may be something else or related or something...I haven't had time to dig into that further. 

 

Anyway, since my last post I've run a couple of other tests.  First, I hooked a dedicated laptop up to the upstairs switch (that was going through the powerline adapters) and it looked like the image below.  I ran 500 up and down tests, every 15 minutes:

 

<a href="https://testmy.net/stats/?t=u&l=1000&z=7&q=petertirrell">?t=u&l=1000&z=7&q=petertirrell's Speed Test Results</a><iframe src="https://testmy.net/stats/?t=u&l=1000&z=7&q=petertirrell&f=1" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" height="380" width="100%"></iframe>

 

Since then, I moved the laptop down to hook directly into the router, and am running the same test:

 

<a href="https://testmy.net/stats/?t=u&l=1000&z=6&q=petertirrell">?t=u&l=1000&z=6&q=petertirrell's Speed Test Results</a><iframe src="https://testmy.net/stats/?t=u&l=1000&z=6&q=petertirrell&f=1" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" height="380" width="100%"></iframe>

 

Interestingly, I see what I assume is the powerline link causing the average to be about 10Mbps less than when hooked right to the router.  I do still see a lot of intermittent dropoffs, although I'm not sure if there are fewer or not.  Once it's complete I want to compare the two and see if at least the direct router connection is more "stable" or has fewer drops.  But it doe still seem to be very spiky.

 

Beyond that what I'd like to do is run a similar test directly hooked up to the modem - that's a little more tricky since I can't kill our internet for a week like these were running.  I'm going to try and run it overnight or see if there's a period we'll be gone for a while.  I'd also like to run a shorter test, but maybe every 5 minutes.  If I'm seeing so many intermittent drops in speed when testing at 15 minute intervals it makes me wonder what it looks like more granular or how long those periods are actually lasting.