AARoads Forum

This should be a good place to bitch about your ISP.

I have Astound (formerly Wave) and routinely get over 250 Mbps DL/20 UL over Wi-Fi to local servers on various speed testing websites. I'm paying for 300 Mbps service, though it was only recently that I replaced my modem and router to get higher speeds.

We have gigabit Internet from Comcast, and even with a modem that actually supports those speeds and a mesh wifi network, I don't think we get more than ~750 mbps.  Which is still way more than we need.

I hate Comcast for reasons too numerous to mention, but they're a billion times more reliable than our only other option, RCN.

100/100 with Verizon Fios. Could pay for more but I'm fine with what I have.

Comcast. It's fine.

Google says I get 173 down and 5.22 up. I could get a nicer plan from Cox, but I don't have the money. However, my computer is decrepit enough I imagine any latency issues I have are probably more likely to be caused by the browser renderer than anything else.

I'm paying for 200/200 but a speed test I just did is more like 301/313.  This is fairly normal.  Verizon FiOS is awesome.

I use Charter Spectrum, which advertises the service as 300 Mbps.  When I plug the computer directly to the modem, it comes in at around 315.  My router is not high-end, because I don't need it to be, and the wired ports are limited to 100, so the normal speed at the computer is about 95.  For the computer and one TV, both of which are wired, and also another TV and mobile devices that are wireless, it's more than fast enough.

I have CenturyLink internet with 80 Mb down and 10 Mb up.  For $55 a month, it works well enough for us, even when streaming video on 3 TVs.  My only alternatives are Cox and T-Mobile (my cellphone provider).  Neither is acceptable as an ISP.

Quote from: KeithE4Phx on January 09, 2023, 10:43:43 PM
I have CenturyLink internet with 80 Mb down and 10 Mb up.  For $55 a month, it works well enough for us, even when streaming video on 3 TVs.  My only alternatives are Cox and T-Mobile (my cellphone provider).  Neither is acceptable as an ISP.

Starting this past November, CenturyLink has dumped our service to a new provider Brightspeed that is based out of Charlotte.  There's been a little bit of decline in Internet speed, but a significant improvement in service (both customer service and response).  But you'all are making me jealous.  Right now, I got 6.3 Mb down and 0.69 Mb up.  That's down from a recent peak of about 7.5 Mb down* and 0.85 Mb up*.  But we live way out in the boonies (although it is starting to grow up around us really fast).  I was the first out here to get DSL service, and the original DSL was much almost twice as fast as this version.  It was still active when our original DSL modem died after some 12 years of service, but nobody had anything compatible with the old DSL frequencies.  It appears that the bandwidth on the newer frequencies are shared with too many other customers out here.

*corrected the ups and downs  :crazy:

When Spectrum upgraded me from 30-10 to 100-10 I didn't realize that until a few months later. When they went up another notch, I didn't realize that until I upgraded my router.
300-10 right now, and if anything I would like to see that "10" upgraded. Limitations of DOCSIS and aging infrastructure though.
Fiber is finally getting built in the area, but I have a gut feeling it will be "oh so close, but..." situation.

We just updated our equipment from Xfinity, the old modem used to average 100-175 mbps but couldn't handle what we were rated (300-500 mbps).

Now the new modem along with a free boost in speed and we're getting 250-400 mdps, but are rated for up to 700 mdps

Mine works just fine for streaming and Teams meetings and such. Just ran a speed test. Xfinity.

183.16 down, 5.55 up.

No idea. Don't care. It's fast enough for everything I need. It beats the crap out of having a 2400 baud dialup modem like I had in the late 80's.

I recently got T-Mobile Home Internet for on-the-road use (you need service at your house to be eligible), and I pay $50/month for unlimited data. The downside of the giant hotspot is that Home Internet customers are the lowest priority for service, so if there is congestion, you are de-prioritized. It's great for my nomadic lifestyle - I plug the modem/router into my power box, and it sips just 6 watts/hour. Speeds vary, but in much of West Virginia, where there is service, I can get 50-100 Mbps/25 Mbps. I can pull 300 Mbps throughout Ohio and in many places in Kentucky, and was getting close to 500 Mbps in upstate New York when I got on a 5G UC connection. Another downside is that the router is not that configurable, and people have found workarounds for using VPNs and for specific configurations they need. I wish T-Mobile would allow for more customization in the service.

We decided to dump Spectrum at the house for another Home Internet modem/router, going from $79/month to $50/month. At first, speeds were great and I could get 150 Mbps/20 Mbps on average but they have been overselling service on the towers. It's been close to 5-10 Mbps in the evenings for a few weeks.

A few months ago, Windstream Kinect strung fiber on our road, so we decided to give them a try. $50/month and the install was easy. Our first run was today and I am averaging 800 Mbps/850 Mbps. It's convinced us to dump Home Internet for the house - keeping the other for on-the-road use. It's going to make a night-and-day difference in my work and I'll now no longer have to hack around to get my services to work.

Quote from: skluth on January 10, 2023, 12:19:51 PM
No idea. Don't care. It's fast enough for everything I need. It beats the crap out of having a 2400 baud dialup modem like I had in the late 80's.

It's a good idea to know, just in case you may be overpaying for what you have.

Quote from: Scott5114 on January 10, 2023, 06:15:43 PM

Quote from: skluth on January 10, 2023, 12:19:51 PM
No idea. Don't care. It's fast enough for everything I need. It beats the crap out of having a 2400 baud dialup modem like I had in the late 80's.

It's a good idea to know, just in case you may be overpaying for what you have.

assuming you have competition worth mentioning. Local provider has lower pricing in competitive areas and is tight on discounts when they know options are limited to either them or nothing.

I pay for 400 Mbs up/down from Verizon FiOS.  They report I'm getting 726 down/428 up.

I get 160 Mbps download/210 upload according to the online speed test.

It's really awful where my parents are in Utah. For some reason, their neighborhood still has never gotten cable, much less fiber, so a DSL connection through CenturyLink has pretty much been their only option. They pay extra to get the fastest speed CenturyLink will offer them, which is supposedly 40 Mbps download. It's actually more like 2. I was there for Christmas and was horrified at how bad their wifi was. Couldn't watch 10 seconds of a YouTube video without it buffering and it would take 30 seconds to just load a simple web page. They're certainly not Elon Musk fans, but they're getting close to jumping on the Starlink satellite internet train because the CenturyLink monopoly is so bad.

It's not like they live out in the sticks, either. They live in a suburb 20 minutes from downtown SLC.

Download:  26 Mbps.  Upload:  6 Mbps.

This is what passes for "gigabit" in Centurylinkland.
Also they say you can get a fixed IP address, but the web page that lets you sign up for it is mysteriously broken.

^ CenturyLink also has some of the worst customer service I've ever heard of. My mother tried to call them about one of those tall greenish-gray phone boxes being knocked down in their neighborhood and she spent something like 4 hours navigating through the phone tree or sitting on hold, all for the guy who finally picked up to tell her he had no idea what she was talking about and hang up.

My parents did manage to get a fixed IP with them years back, but that could have been long enough ago it was with Qwest. Clearly CenturyLink is now too big to provide its customers with good internet or customer service.

I get 940M down and 125 M up. How's that for Clink (erm darkspeed)

The up speed isn't their fault. I have a limited speed router that has firmware the manufacturer doesn't care to fix.

Looking at modem status page may be entertaining if you use cable DOCSIS. http://192.168.100.1 (http://192.168.100.1) pretty often.
If you have too noisy line or not enough power, it will be right there.

Quote from: US 89 on January 11, 2023, 11:39:39 PM
I get 160 Mbps download/210 upload according to the online speed test.

It's really awful where my parents are in Utah. For some reason, their neighborhood still has never gotten cable, much less fiber, so a DSL connection through CenturyLink has pretty much been their only option. They pay extra to get the fastest speed CenturyLink will offer them, which is supposedly 40 Mbps download. It's actually more like 2. I was there for Christmas and was horrified at how bad their wifi was. Couldn't watch 10 seconds of a YouTube video without it buffering and it would take 30 seconds to just load a simple web page. They're certainly not Elon Musk fans, but they're getting close to jumping on the Starlink satellite internet train because the CenturyLink monopoly is so bad.

It's not like they live out in the sticks, either. They live in a suburb 20 minutes from downtown SLC.

Reminds me of White City -- stubborn suburbs that did not combine with others and cannot afford infrastructure improvements on their own.

Quote from: Rothman on January 12, 2023, 06:58:01 AM

Quote from: US 89 on January 11, 2023, 11:39:39 PM
I get 160 Mbps download/210 upload according to the online speed test.

It's really awful where my parents are in Utah. For some reason, their neighborhood still has never gotten cable, much less fiber, so a DSL connection through CenturyLink has pretty much been their only option. They pay extra to get the fastest speed CenturyLink will offer them, which is supposedly 40 Mbps download. It's actually more like 2. I was there for Christmas and was horrified at how bad their wifi was. Couldn't watch 10 seconds of a YouTube video without it buffering and it would take 30 seconds to just load a simple web page. They're certainly not Elon Musk fans, but they're getting close to jumping on the Starlink satellite internet train because the CenturyLink monopoly is so bad.

It's not like they live out in the sticks, either. They live in a suburb 20 minutes from downtown SLC.

Reminds me of White City -- stubborn suburbs that did not combine with others and cannot afford infrastructure improvements on their own.

Unlike water or sewer, cabled utilities are often privately owned - electricity, phone, TV cable. So town size shouldn't matter too much, I would think. I wonder if there is anything preventing expansion in certain areas? Overly jealous permitting system, soil structure or what?..
In NY, state certainly pushes utilities to cover as many areas as possible.

Quote from: kalvado on January 12, 2023, 07:19:06 AM

Quote from: Rothman on January 12, 2023, 06:58:01 AM

Quote from: US 89 on January 11, 2023, 11:39:39 PM
I get 160 Mbps download/210 upload according to the online speed test.

It's really awful where my parents are in Utah. For some reason, their neighborhood still has never gotten cable, much less fiber, so a DSL connection through CenturyLink has pretty much been their only option. They pay extra to get the fastest speed CenturyLink will offer them, which is supposedly 40 Mbps download. It's actually more like 2. I was there for Christmas and was horrified at how bad their wifi was. Couldn't watch 10 seconds of a YouTube video without it buffering and it would take 30 seconds to just load a simple web page. They're certainly not Elon Musk fans, but they're getting close to jumping on the Starlink satellite internet train because the CenturyLink monopoly is so bad.

It's not like they live out in the sticks, either. They live in a suburb 20 minutes from downtown SLC.

Reminds me of White City -- stubborn suburbs that did not combine with others and cannot afford infrastructure improvements on their own.

Unlike water or sewer, cabled utilities are often privately owned - electricity, phone, TV cable. So town size shouldn't matter too much, I would think. I wonder if there is anything preventing expansion in certain areas? Overly jealous permitting system, soil structure or what?..
In NY, state certainly pushes utilities to cover as many areas as possible.

Right.  Could be a ROW issue as well.  Even in NY, smaller municipalities need a lot of help navigating the legal framework when private utilities come a-knockin' (or, as a totally separate topic, if some idiot awards them federal funds -- they typically have no idea how to navigate the federal processes, especially for consultant hiring...).

Quote from: kalvado on January 12, 2023, 07:19:06 AMI wonder if there is anything preventing expansion in certain areas?

Could be as simple as "there aren't enough potential subscribers to cover the cost the expansion."  My parents bought a new-construction home in suburban Atlanta in the early 90s, and the local cable company wouldn't connect the subdivision until X% of the houses were completed and occupied.

I work for a contract vendor that does its bread-and-butter work with Cox and Spectrum/Charter.

At my house we have a plan from Cox that is billed as 100/5 Mbps.  When we first subscribed, I think it was 15 Mbps download, but of course they keep increasing the speeds every couple of years.  This is the second-lowest plan that Cox offers, and it's all we need.  We stream video, and my eldest son does online gaming, and we don't have any issues.  The higher-tier plans are really for serious gamers and people who need to upload a lot of data.  Otherwise, in my opinion, the lower-tier plans are fine for most people.

Modems these days have a lot of downstream channels and multiple upstream channels, so that's rarely a bottleneck concern.  For example, my modem is DOCSIS 3.1, with 32x8 channel bonding:  that can easily handle gigabit speeds, so I'm obviously not worried about it bogging down my plan's measly internet speed.

The router is where it's really at for most people.  If you're using multiple devices simultaneously and having lag issues, then it's a good idea to have a dual-band router and tie specific devices to one band or the other.  With recent advances (meshing), however, that's becoming less of an option, because newer devices are designed to constantly hunt for the best signal band and switch back and forth between them to optimize service;  usually that's fine, but it would be nice to have the option to force-stop that process if warranted.  Our modem is a rental from Cox, and it has a really good built-in router.

As for actual speed, I don't really care.  I'm not voting in this poll, because I never actually test my internet speed.  If we have issues, the first thing I check for is packet loss.  Most times, the interruption is because service fluctuates between 0% packet loss and 100% packet loss.  This means there's probably a network issue, a mainline issue, or something wrong with our service drop;  it isn't anything in our house that's causing it.  Only rarely do we have small yet persistent packet loss and, the last time I remember having that, the mainline tech ended up tracing the problem all the way back to the headend.  If my wife calls with issues, and I'm at work, I can also check for area outages that might be affecting service.

I was really surprised at the disparity of service in West Virginia, which is where I spend a considerable amount of time. My girlfriend lives 10 minutes on the wrong side of Beckley and can only get Frontier internet, so their speeds are in the 2-5 Mbps range. Unusable.

Before Altice bought it, Optimum was Suddenlink, and had great local customer service, and offered some of the fastest speeds in the state. While they still have higher speeds than most providers, they are constantly being dragged by the state for their unreliability and poor customer service that's now been outsourced - the company isn't even based in the US.

On the flip side, I was going through most of the long valleys in Pendleton County in some of the most sparsely populated areas of the state... and they were served by gigabit fiber connections. The proximity to D.C. helps as there are a lot of transplants and "work from home" folks who have more recently located to the area.

ISP is OzarksGo.

Gigabit fiber up and down.  Tests with wired connection to router are 934Mbps down and 941Mbps up, which is pretty close to maximum speed available over Gigabit Ethernet.

Pretty reasonable at $79.99/month.  Perks of having our electric cooperative own the poles and get into the Internet game without a profit motive.

104/57 on a Netgear. It has a tendency to drop to one bar on my laptop.

(https://www.speedtest.net/result/14216966371.png)

CenturyLink Gigabit Fiber plan. For $65/mo, that's about as good as you can hope for in the US. Not looking forward to possibly giving this up if I ever move, though the local cable company has gotten a lot better in recent years, if I move locally to somewhere without fiber.

This is how it is all the time:

(https://i.postimg.cc/T3gxwytk/Screenshot-2023-01-16-115233.png) (https://postimages.org/)

I have great loading speed though

Quote from: jlam on January 16, 2023, 01:54:25 PM
This is how it is all the time:

(https://i.postimg.cc/T3gxwytk/Screenshot-2023-01-16-115233.png) (https://postimages.org/)

I have great loading speed though

Hughesnet, tho I am in 'throttled' mode right now. It's either that, Viasat, or Starlink. Starlink costs too much to put in.


Retrieving speedtest.net configuration...
Testing from Unknown (67.44.160.215)...
Retrieving speedtest.net server list...
Selecting best server based on ping...
Hosted by Vistabeam (Gering, NE) [1297.50 km]: 1012.327 ms

Testing download speed.......Download: 2.06 Mbit/s
Testing upload speed.........Upload: 3.16 Mbit/s


205 Mbps down, 5.5 up.

Suckeye cable, Western Lucas County, OH.

Paying more than twice the price for broadband than I did for gigabit service in NorCal.

At a decent hotel this week outside Detroit. Internet speeds are about what I expect, after pushing about 50 photos to Flickr.

4.5-5.5 MB/s downstream and 3.0-4.0 MB/s upstream, though large file downloads seem to get pushed down to a mere 700-750 KB/s. It's enough to get work done, and it's nice that upload speeds are at least half of download speeds, because some hotels really throttle that back to like 10-20% of download speed.

Interestingly, at home I sometimes get faster upload speeds than download speeds. But it's like 100/100, with my work VPN choking it back to about a third of that number. Seems to handle everything our family needs.

Quote from: formulanone on January 16, 2023, 08:17:48 PM
At a decent hotel this week outside Detroit. Internet speeds are about what I expect, after pushing about 50 photos to Flickr.

4.5-5.5 MB/s downstream and 3.0-4.0 MB/s upstream, though large file downloads seem to get pushed down to a mere 700-750 KB/s. It's enough to get work done, and it's nice that upload speeds are at least half of download speeds, because some hotels really throttle that back to like 10-20% of upload speed.

Interestingly, at home I sometimes get faster upload speeds than download speeds. But it's like 100/100, with my work VPN choking it back to about a third of that number. Seems to handle everything our family needs.

Asymmetric speed with slow upload is often a feature of DOCSIS, internet through TV cable. Fiber is getting out there, but looks like general understanding of the situation is that there will be no resources to build it up to phone network scale, or even cable tv scale. 5G will probably be the best bet in many areas.

My city has no less that 4 fiber-to-the-home providers vying for a slice of the market. Just waiting for the first one to reach back out and sign me up!

Spectrum (Charter) has 300/10, 600/20, and 1000/40 tiers. AT&T barely reaches 50Mbps down and 10 up; they're working to replace with fiber.

(https://www.speedtest.net/result/14230809642.png) (https://www.speedtest.net/result/14230809642)

(https://i.ibb.co/wsqkytr/chrome-2023-01-19-08-19-32.png) (https://ibb.co/wsqkytr)

This is much better than the ADSL that I had in Sacramento, CA which had 15Mbps down/1MBps up. Also, it's nice for my employer to pay for my Internet each month. And, yes, that nice upload speed is important to me, especially when I upload backups to a offsite cloud storage at 1 AM while I'm sleeping. When I moved in, AT&T was still laying down the fiber, so I was with Spectrum Internet which had Gigabit down/35 Mbps upload, and it was more expensive than AT&T by $30. When they refused to price match, I switched.