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w384r93
join:2007-02-24
11111

w384r93

Member

Upped line speed trains at new speed, but throughput same

I'm curious if anyone has ever seen something like this before. It's getting exasperating, no doubt to the techs handling it to.

Background: I moved in with my girlfriend last year and merged my existing speakeasy account with hers. She had a very old account (3 digits). At the time I moved in, Speakeasy said the highest speed we could get in our location was 1.5/768. Something about the hardware in the neighborhood being too old.

Flash forward to a couple of weeks ago, when I flip out about how slow my VPN to work is. I check with Speakeasy to see if anything can possibly upgrade my speed - and this time, they're all "sure, we can do higher." So a tech pokes around, decided 6.0 is too flaky, but 3.0 looks good. According to the ticket, he temporarily set the line to 3.0/768 and said to wait 3 days for it to take permanently.

Here's where the fun starts. I'm getting exactly the same speed tests as before the upgrade - 1150/300. I've bounced this back and forth a few times now; they upgrade and downgrade, have covad do packet loss tests or something, but the net result remains the same - my 3000/768 line gives the exact same speed test result as when it was a 1150/300.

Diagnostic information:

DSL modem is Broadxent Briteport 8120, which I know can handle really high bandwidth; I've used it for 6.0 down before. It shows the line as 3008/512, interleave both directions, attenuation 44.5, down noise 21, and up noise 15. I've plugged the dsl modem into the telco box and tried multiple computers from there directly; I get the same results. Maybe 1 db better on noise.

I'm about 7000 feet from the telco. They say it looks like a 3.0 sync at their end, but they're unable to figure out why I can't get higher speeds.

That the speed test is exactly the same makes me suspect there's a rate limiter some where. Any ideas?

KoolMoe
Aw Man
Premium Member
join:2001-02-14
Annapolis, MD

KoolMoe

Premium Member

Screw with your router or computers MTU in the past?
I dunno...that's weird. If SE and the modem say you're synch'd at 3.0, it's gotta be something behind the DSL modem...right?
Try another computer? Borrow a friend's laptop?
KM
jmcaruso
join:2001-09-07
Rowley, MA

1 recommendation

jmcaruso to w384r93

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to w384r93
There was one time that I ordered a T-1 line for a business and ordered it with the full 1.5/1.5M, not a fractional T-1. Once installed and come testing time, I am getting about 512/512K. To make a long story short, it turned out that there were two speeds at play. One was the line speed. In the T-1 case, that is always 1.5M (unlike the adaptive ADSL), whether you order full or fractional. Then there was the port speed. This was the speed that represented the bandwidth purchased on the ISP's network. In my case, they had made an admin. error and had set it to 512K as if I had ordered a fractional T-1 service. So in this case, the ISP's port speed that went with my virtual connection to them was the rate-limiting factor. Once adjusted, I could move data at the full rate.

Along these lines, is it possible that Covad has your physical line set to sync at the new speed yet at the same time SE has not adjusted a port speed for you? The effect of this would be that you get from your house to the Speakeasy network (they run their own) faster, but once you hit the SE network, you progress at the same rate as before.
mackintire
join:2004-03-26
Pittsburgh, PA

1 edit

mackintire to w384r93

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to w384r93
How are you testing your line speed?
Are you running a router? If so what brand?
Are you running a software firewall?

Are you testing your throughput to the VPN on the other side for your speedtest? If so the encryption/decryption speed will probably be the limiting factor.

If you are testing your speed between sites using a VPN....

If you want to get much faster then 1Mbps your going to need hardware to accelerate the VPN on both ends.

Just some thoughts,

Mackintire
w384r93
join:2007-02-24
11111

w384r93

Member

I get these results with the DSL modem plugged directly into the telco box and my laptop plugged into the DSL modem. No vpn, no router.

I'll check on the admin thing, that's all I can think of.