General discussion related to Cable Modems, DSL, Wireless, Fiber, Mobile Networks, Wireless ISPs, Satellite, or any other type of high-speed Internet connection, general issues and questions here. Review and discuss ISPs as well (AT&T / SBC, BellSouth, Bright House, CableOne, Charter, Comcast, Covad, Cox, Cablevision / Optimum Online, TMobile, Verizon FIOS, Shaw, Telus, Starlink, etc.)
Quick question. I recent switched to a 200 Mbits per second connection and I'm still getting relatively sluggish page loads. The speed test show that my connection starts at 2 Mbits per second when the test site pings it, then the connection ramps up over the next few seconds 5... 20... 40.. 100 etc.
Is this normal? I would have thought that the connection would already be faster and active when it's "asked for".
I guess what I'm saying is what's the point in having a super fast connection if it takes 6 seconds to get up to full speed every time you contact the server.
I have a screen shot of my speedtest data, but the forum says I can add an attchement
Many of these online speed tests use multiple "threads" to ramp up to fill up your available bandwidth, that is why they may appear to start slower. TCP/IP in general can start slow and ramp up the "TCP Window" buffer to be able to utilize higher speeds. Depending on your Operating system, this can be optimizer, have you tried the TCP Optimizer?
There are also other external factors to consider, like routers' congestion, latency, the ability of servers to send that amount of data to each user, etc. If web pages seem sluggish, try doing a traceroute to see where the delay occurs to that particular server. It could even be something simple like DNS hostname resolution, or your local Wireless router slowing you down. We have a number of NIC/LAN tweaks available in articles on the main site as well.
Really good answer. Thank you. I'm using a mac so I can't try TCP optimizer, but it sounds like something I'd be interested in. Does it just optimize the connection for that computer? Or does it optimize the connection itself? And thanks for the other info, I'll read up on NIC/LAN tweaks.
