Any Suggestions on Speed Issues

[Snipesbl]

I am living right in the center of Erie Pa with Road Runner Standard which is suppose to be up to 7.0 mbs down. I have done over 20 Speed guide tests over the last month and have never gotten over 3 mbs and infact most of the tests rate at 400 kbs-600kbs down and about 500kbs up.

As for my set up. My computer is connected directly to the cable modem. I am running Vista 32-bit with a core 2 quad 2.66 ghz , 4 gb ddr3 ram , gigabit ethernet. Computer is fully updated including motherboard bios and all drivers. The Modem is a scientific atlanta DCP2100.R2 .

I have tried everything I can think of and have not had any luck with increasing my speeds. It just irritates me that I am paying for the Standard speed and I am not evening getting a speed as high as their Basic package.

Any idea one what I can try or change ? Or is it that I am just in a high volume area and get bad speeds because of the amount of people in the area online ?

[YARDofSTUF]

do a www.speedtest.com test

[Snipesbl]

http://www.speedtest.net/result/590459574.png

http://www.speedguide.net/speedtest/results_img.php?test=2625023 (http://www.speedguide.net/speedtest/results.php?test=2625023)



I did talk to RR support and they said the Erie area is way over saturated. They are planning to update equipment to split amount of people up however there is no timeline for this yet.

I am also getting some packet loss so they are sending a tech out to check my lines and modem. This might improve it some if there is a fault somewhere.

[YARDofSTUF]

I would hope he could, Thats quite a bit of saturation if not. Maybe your signal strength just needs a tweak.

If he doesn't help, call them back and complain to start a ticket to get a reduced rate until they fix it.

[Snipesbl]

its crazy though because they had me go to speakeasy speed test while I was on the phone with them. Afternoon and night time I get speeds around 700kbs- 1 mbs . In the morning I hit speeds of up to 13 mbs according to that tester atleast. Which doesn't help when you work all day and don't get on till afternoon and night.

Guess I will have to wait and see tomorrow when they send someone out to my place.

Another question though,

Would switching providers do anything since your still running on the same lines? or is your speed mainly based on the ISP network and not the lines ?

[YARDofSTUF]

ISP matters, the lines can take it. Do you have multiple cable companies available to you?

[Snipesbl]

http://www.speedguide.net/speedtest/results_img.php?test=2628260 (http://www.speedguide.net/speedtest/results.php?test=2628260)

This is what I got at 10 AM this morning along with the speakeasy and speedtest below. Its just crazy that I will go from this in the morning to the up above speeds around 3-4 pm and until 1-2 am.

As for other companies I have to check on that. I know verizon has their dsl in the area and they have a 7.1 Mbs down and 768 Kbs up package wich is about the same as my road runner package only with a faster upload supposively.

Speakeasy test rated at 10152kbps down , 494 kbs up

and speedtest. net is
http://www.speedtest.net/result/592962165.png (http://www.speedtest.net)


I will test again tonight at like 9pm to show the comparisons

[mgorovoy]

Any idea one what I can try or change ? Or is it that I am just in a high volume area and get bad speeds because of the amount of people in the area online ?

You can also try using speed test tools at Broadband Reports (http://www.broadbandreports.com/) web site. They have multiple test server locations, and their Java-based tests are very good.

As far as the change goes, the only other technology that can offer speeds that are comparable to RoadRunner is Verizon FIOS. The major difference between FIOS and Cable is that in case of the former you get a channel assigned to your modem (same as with DSL), and you use that channel exclusively. On the contrary, the latter uses shared downstream channel that is split between everyone who is located on the same copper node. If your copper node is huge, and there are a lot of users on it, the drop in available bandwidth is quite profound as more users get online. If FIOS (http://www.verizon.com/fios) is available in your area, it might be worth while to check it out.

That said, have you had your wiring inspected by a RoadRunner technician? The people who do initial installation are not always qualified to troubleshoot RoadRunner. If you have an incorrect signal level, it could cause the cable modem to drop the connection speed as the number of users on the node might cause the signal levels to go further down.

I had my house set up done 18 months ago, and everything seem to have been working until the beginning of this summer. Since when, I had to replace my cable modem 3 times. Every time, the problem started to manifest itself by intermittent errors connecting to some web sites that went away after several retries only to return a few minutes later, followed within a week by the cable modem loosing ability to connect to the network for good.

Last time it happened earlier this week, and I finally decided to follow through and have a technician dispatched to my house. The guy who showed up had been able to diagnose an issue with the incoming wiring at my house that went undetected during at least 4-5 previous attempts to diagnose the problem remotely. He used a diagnostic web page that gave him the signal level reading from the modem to do that, and eventually found the proper cable splitter that provided the correct signal level.

Hope this helps,
Michael

[mgorovoy]

You must also remember that the test server location is crucial to obtaining a valid test result. If the server is located on the network that is connected to the RoadRunner service via peer connection,and not through Level 1 provider, if that peer connection is congested during the day, your test result will be meaningless. You should also try testing your connection using RoadRunner's own speed test (http://speedtest.neo.rr.com/) for your area, but this test may give results that cannot be correlated with your connection's rated speed, and are good to compare to the same test done at different times only.

Just to give you an idea about quality of these speed tests, my service is rated 10Mbps/500Kbps, and these tests were done around midnight tonight, so there's minimum interference from other users on my copper node. As you can see, the results vary quite videly.

speedtest.nyc.rr.com (i'm located in downstate NY)

Download Speed: 20077 kbps (2509.6 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 489 kbps (61.1 KB/sec transfer rate)

DslReports.com:

http://www.dslreports.com/im/80051924/81899.png (http://speedtest.dslreports.com)

SpeedGuide.net:

http://www.speedguide.net/speedtest/results_img.php?test=2629264 (http://www.speedguide.net/speedtest/results.php?test=2629264)

SpeedTest.net:

http://www.speedtest.net/result/593608105.png (http://www.speedtest.net)

[Snipesbl]

Tech came to the house and said there was one bad connector outside the house. He went into the modem and checked those settings and said they were fine. Hopefully the connector will take care of the packet loss I was getting.

He also said this area is way over loaded. Apparently Gannon University is killing the service in this area according to the tech at least. They are planning to update and add some nodes but nothing is scheduled yet so he couldn't say when they would start. They are also switching to a new building that was one of their competitors that time warner bought out and he said it was set up to handle a lot more volume than their current one though no time table on that transition either. So his advice was get on when others are not and wait for these transitions to happen sometime.

I checked on Fios and it is not available here.

[YARDofSTUF]

Thats too bad, FIOS is the service to have right now.

So has the connector been replaced?

[Snipesbl]

well he said he changed it. I did not phyiscally see him do it but it has seemed to improve my performance some. Hopefully they get their upgrades done sometime in the next few months because it is still really slow for what Im paying for.