New 384 Cable service peaking at 70????
Justin
Atlanta
I have run anything I can think of to up this and I still am about at 30% capacity. What should I do? Any diagnostics I should try? I have used System mechanic since I got into PCs and it has always maxed me out. Not doing it now. No AV, no firewall, WTF???
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Cable is a shared-bandwidth type thing. That means, your neighbors cable connection could be slowing yours down. So try it again tonight sometime.
Sometimes things just crap out for no reason. I remember one day last week I was getting TOP download speeds of 20 or 30 kB/s ... the next day it was way back up again. So, if in a few days it isn't up where it should be, I'd say give your cable provider a call.
I called Wideopen West, and the tech climbed the pole and discovered that my filter (I pay only for internet, don't have cable TV) had gone bad. He said it's a very common problem. He replaced it and boom... instant 4mb.
Give your cable people a call
384 kbits = 38.4 kilobytes per second. You're actually receiving DOUBLE your rated line speed. There's nothing wrong.
If your cable connection is 384kbits, you should be getting 40-70 kilobytes per second.
If your cable connection is ~4000kbits, you should be getting 384 kilobytes per second.
Can you let us know which it is?
For example, some subscribers to the Rogers Extreme (5000/800) or Rogers Express (3000/384) services using any of the DOCSIS 2.0 compliant modems (Motorola SB5100, Scientific Atlanta Webstar or Toshiba PCX2600) across the GTA experience either 100% complete download inability or severe download inability when they are uploading across the network.
The old Terayon network & modems (non-DOCSIS) don't experience the problem, but they are only available on the slower Express service.
It's a combination problem of both the CMTS and the modem's firmware setting transfers to half-duplex and can only be corrected by your cable company.
But, the best bet is to just call your cable company and verify that there's nothing wrong with your cable line or modem (to atleast rule that out).
whoa ... simguy in from the left with the real esoteric tech knowledge
as usual, an extremely helpful post from the simdude.
I live in a house with both Cable TV and Internet. When my downloads drop to less than 150 KBytes thoughput on FTP to a known fast server for over 24 hours, I call Comcast. One of three things can happen then--- half the time, the server acting as DHCP and sometimes this is also the GATEWAY, has the wrong modem profile (Ever seen a Zoom DOCSIS 2.0 being trated as a Toshiba DOCSIS 1??? OOOPS, less than half flow instantly). 25% of the Time, the CAP has blown and my rate is about 1\10th to zero the normal rate. They've, in three years, given me 6 modems. I finally went out and bought a Zoom 5041. Under warranty, it went back to Zoom and Zoom upgraded the firmware to DOCSIS 2.0 compatible and repaired the modem. I got it back, plugged it in, and had to call Comcast three times in next 45 days, somehow records did not get changed and if you remember the old 3COM sharkfin modems (only thing the contract tech had left in truck), well, that is what it was being treated as, and those were half duplex DOCSIS 1.0 modems.
For another thing, my Intel CSA for some reason defaulted to half duplex in XP only (the Intel 10\100 embedded ethernet earlier did same thing), I had to force it to full duplex to get full flow to XP-- it was stable when forced to full duplex. In Linux, I get full duplex flow without tweaking-- I am posting, downloading email and newsgroup headers, and FTPing at 324KB (not Kb) per second average throughput simultaneously. Check your NIC driver settings also, just to make sure the dang card has not somehow gone to half-duplex and see if it works at full duplex. Problem could be in the computer itself, in NIC.
OR, could be what happened here after Charley, Frances, Ivan, and Jeanne. On Thursday I wake up, find no web, look at folding clients, which have been trying to each send a WU and not able to get new for 8+ hours as of that time, and try to get ahold of Comcast. TRY is the operative word. Turns out they had three or more amplifier and boost area nodes fail, all on the SW Florida coast. Most of Charlotte County and parts of Sarasota county had no cable then OR cable internet. Cable was out 20+ hours total while they redid (read totally replaced) the amplifier nodes (took four calls to get that info and a guess as to when it would be back up).
There are STILL some Comcast cable runs grounded to ground in Charlotte and Sarasota county (most inside damaged houses and businesses, the outside lines have been jury rigged back into a reasonable semblance of order in most parts of Charlotte county by Comcast subcontractors), as there are folks who have not been back into thier house since Charley but are still connected to Comcast as far as Comcast knows because they have not called Comcast to tell them to suspend service either. Amplifiers started dying, trying to boost signal enough to feed and handle storm-damaged lines contributing to ground\earth\waste signal drainage. Cascade effects started happening. Comcast had to cut areas out of thier network to isolate damaged stuff in order to repair it.
Another reason to call your ISP if things are not right, network assets CAN go bad with a cumulative effect, and they use call-in reports to MAP damage and know by network structure where to look for proximate cause of problem you report. Unlike four weeks after Charley, when Sprint and Comcast supervisory techs went house to house knocking on doors in Charlotte County checking the functioning of Cable and Phone service when the network basicly worked and they wanted to send folks back to thier home states, normally your ISP relies on its customers to tell them what is out for small area outages. For Comcast, Charlotte county is a small region area (about 35,000-40,000 homes and condo units and trailers and half and double-wide transportable buildings and LARGE occupied and parked RVs substituting for homes in Charlotte County right now) as they have Millions of Customers.
Comcast basically relied mostly on Sarasota nodes for most of the feed to Charlotte County and Sarasota County for a while. So, if your area has had major storms call and keep calling every six-twelve hours so they know things are still not fixed for you and accellerate focussing on repairs to you or your area. Comcast has already lost three weeks that were prorated out of most Charlotte County area bills due to the damage from multiple hurricanes, they wanted this thing fixed FAST.
I.. uhh... think Straight_Man there takes the cake on that one...!!!
Though I still don't see why everyone is tossing around big posts and esoteric information when we haven't even addressed if there really is a problem.
It's not the rest of the world bro. People who talk in kilobits, megabits, and gigabits are discussing connection throughput, often point to point on a network. Your NIC isn't 12.5MB/s, it's 100mbit... bits are just what's at the hardware level.
I still don't think anything has been solved, as nothing has been appropriately detailed by you.
What's your contract? 4 mbit or 384 kbit?
I recently configured an openbsd firewall+nat for my adsl home network. I ditched a simple linksys wireless router (no firewall s.p.i.) in favor of a cheapo system I picked up at an auction.
My download rates were terrible whenever my uploads were saturated. I'm not sure if my solution extends beyond async connections, but for me, by simply prioritizing the TCP ACKS, I was able to utilize 100% of my download capacity. It helped during p2p downloads (linux stuff on bittorrent, dunno bout others,) and general browsing whilst serious uploading to ftps.
I liked the fact that the firewall could be tweaked so much (simply because it's basically software + modifications) and I basically regret purchasing the linksys router.
I dunno if you're a *nix enthusiast or not, but if you are, you can't go wrong with a Pentium 75 with 128mb of ram, and two nics.
ps, if you're interested in openbsd, here's an older article to keep you entertained: linky