Expected speed?

[UncleBob]

Hi all,

Just took delivery of my new FTTC connection on Friday.  Very pleased with the speed increase over my previous ADSL connection (supposedly a 2MB connection but frequently in the 1.0 to 1.5 range).

What sort of speeds should I expect from my new connection?

* As I understand it the theoretical maximums at present are 40MB download and 10MB upload.
* After the Openreach engineer had fitted the new faceplate and modem his test equipment indicated 38.1MB download and the full 10MB upload.
* My own connections have varied between 16.6MB and 27.98MB download and a fairly constant 8MB upload.

Now, I have to admit that this is on a wireless connection and is in our upstairs study (faceplate/modem/router are in the living room downstairs).  Could this be the cause of the drop-off or does the speed vary a lot throughout the day and throughout the week?  I'll try to pinch the wife's laptop later and try a speed test on a connection with a short ethernet cable wired straight into the router. (I realise that wired is always going to be quicker).

[Rik]

FTTC seems to be more variable, according to demand, than ADSL. Is your wireless N or G? You're right, though, cable is going to give you better results. Run a BT speedtest and see what you get from that, it should give you a good idea of your baseline.

[Polchraine]

Upstream - 8Mbps seems to be about the maximum most users see on a 10Mbps connection.   For 2Mbps it is around 1.6 Mbps.

Downstream - you have probably already identified the issue - wireless.    If the Tech suggested you were syncing at 40M then you will get a 38717 profile and speeds of around 37000 to 38000.   Test it with a wired connection.

[Lance]

Your router could also be affecting the speed if it's not up to the job. What have you got?

[UncleBob]

Hi all,

The wireless router is the one recommended by Idnet - a Netgear WNR1000v3 (purchased from and pre-configured by Idnet).  Firmware updated.  I'm using Wireless N.

I've just completed a test, using the BT test rather than my usual Speedtest.net, using a wired connection from my wife's laptop.  The 'best effort' test indicated a Max Achievable Speed of 36920 Kbps (with, in BT's opinion, an 'acceptable range' of 12000-36920) and an actual download speed of 23877 Kbps.  The 'upstream test' indicated a Max Achievable Speed of 10000 Kbps and an actual upload speed of 8181 Kbps.

I understand that as a very rough rule of thumb we should be happy to get anything of around 80% or higher (http://wiki.ookla.com/improve_your_internet_speeds).  On that basis, 80% figures for download/upload are 29536/8000 Kbps (this seems to stack up with Idnets indicated download speed of 30MB before I place the order).  

My upload speeds have been pretty consistent at or around the 8000 Kbps figure.  However, my download speeds seem to fluctuate within quite a wide band - I've done 2 tests an hour apart this morning (back on the wireless connection upstairs), the first was 28.13 Mb (a new high score   ) and the second was 17.80 Mb  . (Even the wired connection, as indicated above, was 'only' 23.8 MB).  Don't get me wrong, I'm very impressed with the speed increase over the old ADSL connection.  I'm just mightily confused at the speed variation and inability to get anywhere near the max achieveable speed.

EDIT : I'm no techie but this all seems to suggest to me that the service coming in to the house is fine but it is somehow going astray thereafter.

[Rik]

My own view is that BT have not updated the network infrastructure fast enough to cope with the extra bandwidth used by fibre connections. We saw the same thing when ADSL2 was introduced, and went through a period when BT seemed to be 'robbing Peter to pay Paul' by moving the available bandwidth to the latest hotspot. It may not have actually been like that, but it's what it felt like. From bitter experience, we do know that BT don't put in capacity to meet future demand, only to catch up with current demand, so there have always been these good and bad spells. Fibre just seems to amplify the differences.

[jm_paulin]

Using speedtest in the morning, I typically get:
- 37 Mbps from a Hard Wired PC
- 22 Mbps from a Wireless Laptop (WiFi N)
- 18 Mbps from a Phone (WiFi N)
- Upload is pretty much always 8Mbps everywhere....

So I'd reckon you are good.

I also found that:
- Speedtest.net is by far the more consistent
- Morning is always better than afternoon or evening
- And also that speed was all over the place for the first 10 days. It gets better after...

Overall, the speed is dancing a lot more than when I was on ADSL. You can take a test, get 15Mbps, and if you retest 2 min later, is read 38Mbps....

Go figure....

JM

[Bill]

Using speedtest in the morning, I typically get:
- 37 Mbps from a Hard Wired PC
- 22 Mbps from a Wireless Laptop (WiFi N)
- 18 Mbps from a Phone (WiFi N)
- Upload is pretty much always 8Mbps everywhere....

Something not right there... I get full speed (~33Mbps on my profile) from a laptop with wireless "n".

[.Griff.]

He probably just needs to try a different wifi channel.

[Bill]

Could be, took me a while to find the best router settings. which turned out to be Channel 4 and 20/40MHz channel width.

[UncleBob]

Thanks for the further feedback. 

He probably just needs to try a different wifi channel.

My router settings currently have the wifi channel as 'Auto'.  Would it be preferable to pick one manually?

Network Stumbler shows :
Channel 1 : 2 users (including mine)
Channel 5 : 1 user
Channel 6 : 2 users
Channel 11 : 2 users

I understand that there is a certain amount of overlap between channels.  Would it be better to pick a channel like 3, 9, or 13?

[Bill]

If I set my router to "Auto" it would usually pick channel 1, and it was terrible... as often as not I couldn't maintain a connection for more than a few minutes.

Some possibly useful info here about channel spacing etc:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11#Channels_and_international_compatibility

[UncleBob]

Thanks for that, Bill.

I've set the channel to 13 for now and will see how things go.  I've just done another speedtest and its the best yet (on the wireless connection upstairs too) :



If it stays anywhere near that I'll be happy 

[Rik]

I should think so too - it's only 11 times faster than my line.

[jm_paulin]

Something not right there... I get full speed (~33Mbps on my profile) from a laptop with wireless "n".

yeah, I know. I live in a terraced house, and can see about 15 networks from here, I did push to channel 13 (not even sure it is legal in the UK) but I still get interference.

[Bill]

Afaik all 13 channels are legal, but 1, 6 and 11 are "recommended" cos they don't overlap. They're just unusable if everybody sticks to the recommendations

I can see around a dozen networks here at night (more if I move upstairs), about a third are strong enough to be a potential nuisance... Depending whether you've got any spare money it would be worth considering a dual-band router. If I use my Airport Extreme I have the 5GHz band all to myself.

[Steve]

The other solution is illegal unless your convinced you live in Japan.

[Bill]

I would never have thought of that...

[jm_paulin]

The other solution is illegal unless your convinced you live in Japan.

Will I move to SuShiLand? probably not!
Will I feed SteveJobs that little bit more? Probably not either...
Am I really bothered? Definitely not, but I am curious...

So 20 or 40 Mhz for channel width? or could it just be the AP is on a bit of 100Mb lan before it gets to the router?

[Bill]

Will I feed SteveJobs that little bit more? Probably not either...

Apple aren't the only ones who make dual-band routers- I only mentioned the AEX cos it's the one I've got (Relegated to "spare router" status as it won't handle native IPv6)

Am I really bothered? Definitely not, but I am curious...

So 20 or 40 Mhz for channel width?

Whichever works best...

or could it just be the AP is on a bit of 100Mb lan before it gets to the router?

Not sure what you mean by that, but the OR modem only has a 10/100 Ethernet port.

[UncleBob]

Ok, who would like to explain this one to me? 

[.Griff.]

Ok, who would like to explain this one to me? 

What AV are you using?

This typically happens if something is installed on your computer which is intercepting traffic between your web browser and the server. Examples of this would be security software from ZoneAlarm, McAfee or Symantec. Try momentarily disabling the software to see if it is the source of the problem. Make sure you don't leave it disabled. Any software firewall should work with Speedtest.net if configured properly.

[zappaDPJ]

Around a week ago my daughter started complaining about the speed of our Internet. She uses a laptop connected by WiFi. Being lazy I checked our connection from my hard wired PC, got 32.5 Mb/s and delivered a short lecture on why the servers she was connecting with were overloaded. Her persistent moaning lead me to eventually check out her PC for viruses and in doing so I found she was right. She was downloading at under 1 Mb/s with massive amounts of latency (up to 1000ms) and packet loss.

After spending the best part of a day updating drivers, checking settings, restoring the laptop to a previous restore point, switching off every electrical device in the property all to no avail, I gave up. Today she started moaning about her iPhone having the same problem on WiFi so I suspected a faulty router and left it at that. By chance I read Bill's post further up the thread.

If I set my router to "Auto" it would usually pick channel 1, and it was terrible... as often as not I couldn't maintain a connection for more than a few minutes.

Some possibly useful info here about channel spacing etc:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11#Channels_and_international_compatibility

I changed the setting from 'auto' to '1'. Job done. So thanks Bill and

[Bill]

Glad it helped someone

Funny thing is, I've been having a not dissimilar problem over the last few days- iTunes (and the Airport utility) took ages or couldn't find the Airport Express, and when it did it would frequently drop out for a few seconds. Irritating when you're listening to music

As I'm using a new router with beta firmware I've been resetting/playing with everything wireless in sight... then tonight I tried using the laptop to play the music shared from the library on the iMac, as if it were the AEX- no problem.

So in my case it looks like a hardware problem- my Airport Express is turning its toes up

[UncleBob]

What AV are you using?

Hi,

I'm running Avira AV and using ZoneAlarm as my software firewall.  Can these programs be configured to support speedtests or must they be disabled for each test?