Enjoying that 25Mbps internet speed, America?

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I’m not sure whether this is the best forum but I found the following article interesting:

Enjoying that 25Mbps internet speed, America? Oh, it’s just 6Mbps? And you’re unhappy? Can’t imagine why

Internet testers went down to Georgia and found a fraud

American internet users are, seemingly, getting a quarter of the internet speed they are paying for.

That’s the upshot of yet another survey, this time in the US state of Georgia, that demonstrates that American consumers are being institutionally lied to about their broadband.

More info: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/07/19/slow_internet_georgia/

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Elly, CADesertRat

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That is what happens when industry insiders are the ones making policy decisions. They almost always put profits ahead of their customers.

--Joe

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Charlie, Elly

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I’m paying for 12Mbps and frequently get up to 15Mbps.

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Could be better.

~ Group "Weekend" ~

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I have read repeatedly in commentary articles that in the USA people who subscribe to broadband providers get, on average, considerably less upload and download speeds than in some European countries.

But there is something else that might be worth mentioning here: if one uses an older router to provide either the WiFi or Ethernet distribution of the signals within the home, the router itself might be a chocking point if it cannot deliver, the way it has been designed, the higher speed the Internet connection makes possible when one has the right equipment and everything in it works as expected.

Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).

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doriel, NetDef

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… if one uses an older router to provide either the WiFi or Ethernet distribution of the signals within the home, the router itself might be a chocking point …

This is very true.  Many home and SMB routers in the past were limited on their WAN ports to 100Mbps duplex (or worse.)  Today’s medium grade home and SMB equipment have 1Gbps ports – but their processors can’t actually deliver that throughput – typically topping out with a usable speed of ~300Mbps to 600Mbps. There are other limitations on budget routers that greatly limit how many concurrent connection threads (for multiple users/machines) they can support.

In the last year, as many of my smaller clients (and myself at my home office) have upgraded to GB range internet, we’ve had to replace otherwise capable firewalls/routers to handle the increased throughput.  My speedtest above shows a download speed that is almost as close as one can get to true GB on Ethernet. (Note that the upload speed is capped at 40Mbps by my ISP on my budget plan.) This required that I replace my primary gateway router, as well as my main switch. My best possible speed when I first subscribed to the new plan before replacing those two components was around 450Mbps down – due almost entirely to the old routers CPU not being able to handle the traffic.

~ Group "Weekend" ~

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NetDef wrote:

Many home and SMB routers in the past were limited on their WAN ports to 100Mbps duplex (or worse.)  Today’s medium grade home and SMB equipment have 1Gbps ports – but their processors can’t actually deliver that throughput – typically topping out with a usable speed of ~300Mbps to 600Mbps. There are other limitations on budget routers that greatly limit how many concurrent connection threads (for multiple users/machines) they can support.

And it’s not like this is limited to “home and SMB” equipment or anything… especially if the things are a bit old.

There’s all kinds of weird things one can do to get better throughput for the same processing speed, like jumbo frames and such, but those are nonstandard and can cause problems if the network isn’t designed with that in mind.

Heh, reminds me of the (by now quite ancient) HP G/H/I server chassis which could be had with a 100BT NIC… except the thing had a main system bus that could only give it enough data to get ~46 Mbps max so trying to push it at 100fd caused buffer overruns pretty quickly and even 100hd was iffy on the receive…

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USA average Internet speed is ~33 Mbps
https://www.atlasandboots.com/remote-jobs/countries-with-the-fastest-internet-in-the-world/

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Maybe this tool/app can help some folks out.   I’ve used it, and seen marked improvement(s) on my Internet Connection.  *Some AVs/AMs may flag it (roguekiller, for eg).  Nothing illegit from my experience… last time I check VT gave the .exe thumbs up and decent community score (whatever that’s worth).  No affiliation w/ the App/exe… speedguide.net has a decent Rep. and all.  thanks.

TCP Optimizer
https://www.speedguide.net/downloads.php

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Something like that might be a good tool – it’s certainly a bit of a chore adjusting all the parameters manually…

Though, there are situations where I wouldn’t trust it much. Such as, some regularly seen nonstandard networking practices can result in path MTU being misreported and that causes problems especially for UDP traffic… and their website has some clearly incorrect statements regarding the technical details involved.

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