Networks Cable internet slower than DSL?

I just got Cable internet, and it appears each time I unplug the modem it takes quite a few hours for it to re-sync.

Now that it has, the internet isn't horribly slow, but slow enough for me to run a speed test. When I did, it said my connection was 1/10th the average speed!

I'm not sure about speedguide.net, but either it has slow servers, or my cable company will be putting in overtime getting my internet up properly. (0.1Kb/sec is rediculous for downloads!)

Well, I just started downloading something from download.com and it started out at 280 KB/sec and is now holding fairly steady at 50 KB/sec... oh, just went down to 40....

This is pretty annoying considering cable is supposed to be so much faster than DSL... Maybe the Shared pipe is shared a bit more than I thought it was?

Any tips?

 

That is shocking. What service are you on? i.e. 512kbps, 1 meg etc.

 

Well, I guess my ISP was just messing up, because when I just went to dslreports.com/stest/ I averaged 330kbps down/353kbps up.

But that's still just what, 40KB/s?!?

Could this have to do with being on a wireless connection with WEP enabled? Does WEP encryption/shared keys slow down the internet that much?

I still may call them to figure out what's going on.... bandwidthplace.com has me at "Not Bad" downloading at about 80KB/s...

Arg this is annoying. If I don't see better results, I'm switching back to DSL.

The company just advertises it as "High Speed Cable Internet, up to 3 times faster than DSL!". I'll have to do a little research to see what else I can find.

 

Unlike DSL you dont have a direct line to the "backbone" *for lack of a better word*. Cable has nodes and each node shares an alotment of bandwidth,always reminded me of a spider web with the isp in the middle and each corner a node, every person on that node shares that bandwidth. So of course the more people on = less speed to go around...So in a nut shell cable *can* be faster than DSL depending on the network status...I belive cable makes out at about 10meg..

Or there could be issues in your cable lines...your modem shouldnt take nearly that long to resync...

Or it could be the wireless but Ive never seen WEP *worthless imo* slow the connection down. Only way to rule it out is to try it without it. I would try a direct link to the modem, no wirless, no router, just cat5 straight to the modem...

Im curious who your provider is?

 

My provider is Comcast, and now that I'm at work, I've noticed there was "scheduled" network maintenance in my area, and it should now be done.

It would have been nice to hear this from the tech support line instead of online, since it is a little hard to read web outages on the web! But life goes on. Besides, now I'm using work's bandwidth to download what I wanted!

Heheh, check out this l337 download rate (pardon the pun!):

 

Well, the technician came, and saw my modem stats (-25 dB Downstream Power!) and realized it was going through way too many splitters.

He re-routed it at the box, but unfortunately did not have enough filters to put on the line, so we are stuck with 4 times the number of channels!

This is pretty cool.
Oh, and my average download speed: 480KB/s! (4Mbps)

I hate to have to do this, but WOOT!

Even if they cut the cable back, I still went from -25 dB to 7 dB, taking me from about 40KB/s to 480KB/s!

 

I had a problem like yours up here in Santa Fe when I first got my Comcast HSI. My cable was being split through 3 or 4 lines going nowhere. The connection was always decent, but I would lose sync all the time, which ended up with nearly 10 modem reboots daily. Eventually some one who knew wtf he was doing gave me the line directly from the box and split the other TV's off a seperate line and everything has been excellent since then. The only problem is that he left all the wires above the ground and Comcast insists they're buried, when they're not

 

Same thing happened to me with Mediacom (division of Comcast yo).

I was getting horrible download speeds and the cable connection kept resetting. Was both the fact that it was going through too many splitters, and the line in the ground had frozen coming into the house (**** you Minnesota!)

 

I got curious... So I went to Braodband Reports... I ended up with this:

2005-02-23 20:39:52 EST: 3943 / 342
Your download speed : 4038526 bps, or 3943 kbps.
A 492.9 KB/sec transfer rate.
Your upload speed : 350684 bps, or 342 kbps.

Holy sweet mother!!! I know there was a reason I was hitting 500 KBps on the Fileplanet DL'r thing, but I didn't know there was an upgrade. I sure hope it lasts and isn't a fluke (please don't be a fluke!!!!!)

 

Now I'm getting 2.9Mbps, but it's about 9:45, which I'm assuming is more of a peak time than 5:00, when everyone is getting off work and getting stuck in traffic.

Now if only I could get Fedora Core 3 to recognize my wireless g card so I could use this nice connection in an OS other than windows!

 

I don't have a peak time, I'm in the middle of nowhere,

 

thats some nice speeds going on there, just a shame that it took comcast that long to send an engineer out that knew what they where doing.

it sounds a bit like a few of the situations ive had with NTL over here.

 

Keep in mind I got the service last Saturday, and I called them Sunday afternoon. So since the time I called, it took 3 days, which isn't too bad. (Although it sucks that they didn't check this type of stuff out during the install.)

But while we are on the topic of band width, here on small node off of the Internet 2 I get:

:::.. Download Stats ..:::
Connection is:: 9808 Kbps about 9.8 Mbps (tested with 12160 KB)
Download Speed is:: 1197 KB/s
Tested From:: http://www.testmy.net/
Test Time:: Thu Feb 24 2005 07:39:50 GMT-0700 (Mountain Standard Time)
Bottom Line:: 175X faster than 56K 1MB download in 0.86 sec
Diagnosis: Awesome! 20% + : 32.42 % faster than the average for host (unm.edu)
Validation Link:: http://testmy.net/id-1KPGSQZHO

I get the same download speeds to other universities across the country as I do from one PC to another (via FTP anyway... ) Now if comcast could do that I'd be impressed!

 

are you running fedora on a 32bit machine, if so you could try using a windows driver with NDIS wrappers. just a thought.

 

not to be stupid, and after i looked around a bit, whats the difference between bits and bytes. if i had a 56k connection, how many kilobytes per second is that? currently i have a 3 megabit connection, which performs about 3.7 megabits/s. How fast is that in actual megabytes?

 

3.7mbps is about 0.4 mega bytes per second
Usually you can divide your kilobits per second (kbps) by 8 to get your kilobytes per second (kBps)
ie 1mbit internet is usually 1024kbps
therefore your download speeds would be around 128kBps - or 0.1MBPS

Hope this helps

 

8 bits = 1 byte
my 3Mbit = 375KB/s
and Gigabit lan is 125MB/sec max under ideal conditions
56k = 7KB/s
etc

 

Hey, I hope I'm not hijacking this thread, but I have a similar problem. My d/l speeds are uber-slow (but Steam updating's okay...that's weird) and I'm on a 802.11b wireless network. I get about 30 KB/sec when I download anything from Firefox (tried IE, no better). It usually starts out about 1300KB/sec or something like that and drops and keeps dropping. However, when I use my dad's laptop w/ its b connection too, it gets at LEAST 150KB/sec. I've tried reinstalling my Linksys drivers, but it doesn't help at all.