| [Speed] Slow Washington DC internet speed Since Saturday I have noticed my internet connection to be much slower than usual. I have the 25mbps plan and am getting 1-2 mbps at best at all hours. My service has never been this bad, and I have power cycled all my equipment multiples times to no avail.
Anyone else experiencing these issues in the DC area?
Thanks for any help.
Encoded Mac: 526c833e743c85a89f1033c08a536214c89b0a22 |
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| I'd been seeing speeds hovering around 10mbps over the past few days, but I ran a test this afternoon and it topped out at around 22mbps IIRC. Speeds have been up and down for me lately, but nothing quite that slow. |
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| Just to add some info. I have a scientific Atlantic 2100 modem. Last Saturday I had the TiVo q/preview installed by a tech. Checked all my wiring and everything seems fairly tight. |
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artjohnPremium
join:2000-11-17
Chevy Chase, MD
1 edit | reply to rdasilv
Download Speed |
Since you are not seeing your provisioned speed, you may have a splitter gone bad or a local line issue; are you testing the speed at the modem or behind a router or switch; wired vs wireless?
Actualy, I am wondering if the RCN speed test is working; it reports this morning that we are getting 100 Mbps down!
BTW, if the RCN speedtest is to be believed, that measured 100 Mbps we get is on a laptop two stories from away from the modem! We are using Wireless N, behind a Motorola Docsis 3 Modem, Buffalo Tech router, HP gigabit switch and a wired Asus Access Point.
Post back with the fix when you get it corrected. |
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| Thanks for all the help. I believe I have solved my problem. Looks like a bad wire from a splitter. D'uh! |
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artjohnPremium
join:2000-11-17
Chevy Chase, MD | Good news, thanks for posting the fix!  |
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| reply to artjohn
said by artjohn:
Actualy, I am wondering if the RCN speed test is working; it reports this morning that we are getting 100 Mbps down!
A couple of weeks ago, I saw very strange performance from the RCN speediest site. I was getting 2.2 down/.5 up when speedtest.net reported 24 down/2 up.
Bryan (negativeduck) from RCN confirmed that saw some problems with the test from his end too. Here's the thread:
»[Connectivity] Slow speeds and erratic signal levels (DC) |
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artjohnPremium
join:2000-11-17
Chevy Chase, MD | Yeah, I wonder about RCN Speedtest, since other tests report closer to the 75/6 we are provisioned.
But our test reports generally are too high (seems almost ungrateful to complain about that!  ) and we are 64-bit Windows 7 based, not Mac; don't notice any difference between Waterfox, Firefox, Chrome or IE. |
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negativeduckPremium,VIP
join:2002-02-14
Centreville, VA
kudos:1
1 edit | Jumping back into the thread since we are kinda on speedtests.
Yea the Issue with Mac's getting <2megs should actually be resolved. It seems with the migrations and updates inside flash players the way we were sending data down it really didn't like.
Regarding the 100mbps reading on 75 meg tiers actually believe it or not it will spike to that during parts of the transfer (great!). Another to note is that yea we show at the end of the test your "peak" number as apposed to the average. Several other sites show the "average" as noted when I saw the speedtest.net gauge jump to 80 and stay there but because of a slow start off during testing it reported that I got ~30.
Which is something else I've noticed but we've not yet figured out that seems unique to the speedtest.net site. Starting a test you can sit on connecting for a while if you watch the smaller graph your see a small gap at the beginning and then it shoots up to speed. That small gap may be 3,4 or more seconds that time is counted in your speed results even though your not actually transferring data. Haven't seen it alot but I've run into it enough to notice.
Oddly yet annoyingly enough we see major differences between how windows and macs behave. We actually in a test yesterday in our labs showed a mac on our site 75meg limit cap at 50 megs consistently. Boot a VM Linux install same mac and nail it full speed each test. And I get the same results on speedtest.net which makes me feel better, but is still really annoying. It's getting harder and harder to benchmark these higher speed tiers inside a browser and while we would love to cobble a stand alone app I think most people would object to an install.
But we continue to test and tweak this constantly.
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Bryan Laird
RCN Engineering |
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| said by negativeduck:Jumping back into the thread since we are kinda on speedtests.
Yea the Issue with Mac's getting Something weird is going on with the display of your message. I don't see the whole thing. For some reason, I was able to read all of it when pressings "auto quote" while replying, but then it only ended up quoting the same truncated portion.
In any case, back to the subject at hand: there has been no change in the md.speedtest.rcn.net tests for me (on a Mac). I'm still getting around 2 down. I also don't see the behavior you mentioned on speedtest.net. It shoots right up immediately, and always has. |
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negativeduckPremium,VIP
join:2002-02-14
Centreville, VA
kudos:1 | when on md.speedtest you should make sure that you do a shift reload so it grabs all the new data. We've seen almost everyone report success since that last change.
Yea I don't see that happen "EVERYTIME" And I'm fairly certain it's not something with their site but with individual macs at random times. Just haven't nailed down the cause.
NOTE: Yea I see what you mean on my post what's up with that...
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Bryan Laird
RCN Engineering |
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negativeduckPremium,VIP
join:2002-02-14
Centreville, VA
kudos:1 | Fixed the post I had to replace a litteral "<" with ampersand lt
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Bryan Laird
RCN Engineering |
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| reply to negativeduck
said by negativeduck:when on md.speedtest you should make sure that you do a shift reload so it grabs all the new data. We've seen almost everyone report success since that last change.
By "shift reload", do you mean a reload of the page? If so, I've done that many times and it doesn't have any effect. |
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artjohnPremium
join:2000-11-17
Chevy Chase, MD | Hmm, I had no problem seeing your whole post without issue, enjoyed reading it, and thought it was both helpful and interesting and, thank you for the information.
(btw, we are using Waterfox 10.0, 64 Bit Win 7)
On the RCN Speedtest, how come it no longer offers to test both download and upload speeds at the same time?
BTW I have always assumed that the *highest* speed reported is the actual speed of your connection, especially when the connection is to your own ISP which presumably has the fewest hops to the test server.
Oh, and if you guys want to up those bursts beyond 100 Mbps, or keep em coming steady (no need to mention this to the billing department) we would remain and forever be most grateful  |
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rtfm8
join:2005-07-09
Washington, DC Reviews:
 ·XO COMMUNICATIONS
·Verizon Online DSL
| reply to rdasilv
I too am seeing bizarre speedtest results
MAC: 384dcef3c96003885873190f4fa190cd74ea8559
This is one negativeduck looked at a while back.
I just got several ~1Mb/s down tests, then a reasonable one. But the upload is still dog slow.
To add insult to injury, I could not connect to dslreports the first few attempts. |
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