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aproxymate
join:2012-08-07
Irving, TX

aproxymate

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Time Warner throttling speeds in Steam, bit-torrent?

I upgraded to ultimate 100 and it seems that I am not getting the promised speed. The max download I have seen is around 8.9 MB/s in Steam and nearly half of the in the torrent client. I had verizon 50/50 prior to that and I was getting around 7 MB/s max in both Steam and bit-torrent. Is there a way to tell if active throttling is happening with my account?
omghi2u
join:2001-02-05
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omghi2u

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said by aproxymate:

I upgraded to ultimate 100 and it seems that I am not getting the promised speed. The max download I have seen is around 8.9 MB/s in Steam and nearly half of the in the torrent client. I had verizon 50/50 prior to that and I was getting around 7 MB/s max in both Steam and bit-torrent. Is there a way to tell if active throttling is happening with my account?

What do you get on other speed test websites such as: www.speedtest.net

maartena
Elmo
Premium Member
join:2002-05-10
Orange, CA

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There is no throttling on the TWC side. I find it actually quite annoying that the first thing people blame when speed issues arise is: Must be TWC throttling me.

There is no evidence that TWC throttles, no one has ever been able to prove it, and the answer is simple: They don't. They have no reason to. It would only cause more service calls that they really don't want to answer and deal with.

The bittorrent protocol is unreliable to determine connection speed, as it downloads packets from many sources worldwide, and there is no way to guarantee any speed with bittorrent. It completely depends on what combined speed the peers you download from are able to offer. I have seen torrents go as fast as 30 MB/s, and I have seen torrents struggling along at 1 MB/s.

I downloaded 3 games from Steam yesterday, and they came in around 5-6 MB/s, while I have a 300 Mbit/s connection that should be able to do 32 MB/s or so. I figured it was just busy on Steam, and it may very well be to ensure they have enough bandwidth for everyone that they cap the maximum download speed based on the amount of users connected. I bought 3 games for like $12 yesterday due to some great 75% off weekend deals, so there must have been some heavy downloading. No big deal either, even with 5/6 MB/s, they came in fast enough.

It's also very possible you have a 100 Mbit/s switch somewhere. Something you may not have noticed on 50/50 with Verizon, but a 100 Mbit/s NIC in either a switch, computer or on the WAN port of your router typically performs around 85 Mbit/s due to overhead and such. To make use of 100 Mbit/s and up speeds, you need to ensure both your router WAN port, any switches between you and your computer, and your computer itself is equipped with 1 Gbit/s ports.

It may also go without saying that if you are running on wireless, you will very likely not see anything near 100 Mbit/s, while it is possible to surpass 50 Mbit/s.
aproxymate
join:2012-08-07
Irving, TX

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speedtest results are quite fluctuating. I see between 65-92 Mbps during my tests.
aproxymate

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I am aware that the bittorrent protocol depends on the number of seeds/leeches but specifically for that reason I was testing with a torrent with very high seed-to-leach ratio which should ideally give you maximum speed.

I have the modem connected to my Asus AC66U router and that connects my PC via ethernet.

maartena
Elmo
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join:2002-05-10
Orange, CA

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said by aproxymate:

speedtest results are quite fluctuating. I see between 65-92 Mbps during my tests.

Are you testing wired or wireless?
aproxymate
join:2012-08-07
Irving, TX

aproxymate

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Testing with the PC connected via Ethernet. my modem is sb6183

maartena
Elmo
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join:2002-05-10
Orange, CA

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Okay.

So first off, even a really well seeded torrent can have speed issues. Second, if you configure your torrent client for too many connections per second, that usually has an adverse effect as the router may choke on too many connections per second, resulting in a lower overall speed. Torrents are not a good way to test speed at all.

The router you have is a pretty good model and the modem is able to handle the 300 Mbit/s speed. I don't see any problem there, unless there is a negotiation problem between the WAN port on the router, and the Ethernet port on the modem. Doing a few google searches I see there are some indications that this model sometimes has a negotiation problem in getting the port speed right.

Also note that if your Ethernet cable has 1 broken wire in it (out of 8), it will automatically fall back to negotiating over 4 wires, and the maximum speed it will do with 4 wires is 100 Mbit/s. So try a new cable as well. (And with overhead on a 100 Mbps port you usually don't see more then 85-90 Mbps, where you should see around 105 Mbps on 100 Mbps due to overprovisioning by TWC)

If it is not any of the above, and since TWC isn't throttling.... I think the only thing left to conclude is that there is a problem on your line. This could be inside, or outside your building, but the only real way of finding that out is to schedule a service tech to come out and take a look. It could be as easy as fine tuning the connection you have to the nearest pole or pedestal.

Smith6612
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Sometimes with Steam it's often better to pick a further away location to download game files from, due to how Time Warner's network is structured and due to load. Here in Buffalo, the Chicago location offers the best speeds for Time Warner as all of the traffic must run through that location first. On Verizon, I find picking New York City or Pittsburgh offers great performance. On Frontier, it was always totally best to go with Ashburn as anything else was a congested mess.

A long, long time ago, when TF2 and Counter-Strike updates used to take down Steam for hours on end, I often got better performance by downloading from Amsterdam or someplace in Europe, than I did downloading from North America or Asia.

djrobx
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If he's coming from a 50/50 connection, the problem with torrents might be that he's not limiting his upload speed enough to allow full throughput on the downstream.

When you have an asymmetrical connection, saturating the upload will cause your downstream to choke because the acknowledgment packets get lost or delayed. You typically want to set a limit on upload to about 80% of your cap.
soja
join:2014-01-21
Waterloo, NY

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I can always max out my 50/5 connection on Steam, bittorrent, Origin, etc.

Have you confirmed your PC, router, modem, are all connected at 1Gbps and not 100Mbps?

maartena
Elmo
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Orange, CA

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maartena

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said by soja:

I can always max out my 50/5 connection on Steam, bittorrent, Origin, etc.

I can usually get to 9 MB/sec on Steam, which leads me to believe that Steam is probably throttled their download connections to 100 Mbit/s per user, which seems quite acceptable to me. They need to manage their bandwidth probably, especially with sales going on and people always re-installing their computers and downloading their entire steam catalog again.

Bittorrent I have been able to get over 30MB/s on my 300 Mbit/s MAXX, so yeah, that's definitly not a problem if you have the right torrent. I don't download torrents a whole lot, but I do use a few private sites with high-speed seedboxes so it's not hard to get that kind of speed. With "public" torrent sites speeds are hit and miss. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Often the download is finished before it can even reach full speeds. I just grabbed Debian ISO for my server, and it came in fast.

Have you confirmed your PC, router, modem, are all connected at 1Gbps and not 100Mbps?

The OP stopped responding unfortunately, but I think based on conversation before one of the following is probably the case:

1) There is a ethernet bad cable, causing a connection to fall back to 100 Mbps, which in turn means 85-90 Mbps is probably the maximum you can get out of it due to overhead.

2) The router WAN port has a problem negotiating at 1 Gbps with the modem. I have seen those issues mentioned on several forums while doing a Google search for that router model and 100 Mbps negotiation. This could potentially be resolved with a firmware update, or using the Merlin firmware. (I use Merlin on my router, works well.)

3) There is a problem on his cable line, either internal or external to his home. This can be identified by a cable technician on-site.

Also, djrob makes a valid point. The return traffic for downloading is around 3%. Those are basically the requests being sent out to deliver the next packet, and the next packet, and the next.... etc... well you get the point, this happens thousands of times a second. So to download at the full 100 Mbit/s, you need a steady upload of around 3 Mbit/s. Now if on top of that you actually UPLOAD on a torrent, it is very easy to saturate the 5 Mbit/s upload you have available, and if you upload at a higher speed then 2 Mbit/s, you won't have enough available to sustain the full download of 100 Mbit/s. Additionaly, if you are uploading at say 3/4 Mbit/s, and you perform a speed test, it is no wonder that the download speed comes in at only 60 Mbit/s.

Whether that could be the case, is on the OP to clarify.

In any case "throttled" is the magic word being thrown at it when someone can't explain a speed problem. Usually there are logical explanations for speed problems, but they can be hard to pin down sometimes. Anyways, TWC has never throttled, and does not throttle anything now.

why60loss
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join:2012-09-20

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On Comcast with the 105mbs plan steam seems to never use more than 80mbs or so. The connection gets real world speeds of 125mbs. »www.speedtest.net/my-res ··· 23712822

Many servers seem to have a hard time going all the way up to 100mbs. But many can use a 50mbs connection. I think that is part of it.

If TWC was throttling steam it would run below 1mbs. While they did throttle YouTube for sometime. They seemed to quit after Google started blaming the ISP's with a pop up that would come up when YouTube thought the connection was slow.

anon_5224
join:2001-10-23
united state
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said by aproxymate:

I upgraded to ultimate 100 ...

as far as i'm aware the top speed in any part of Ohio is 50 down 5 up.

maartena
Elmo
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I'm guessing the OP's issues are completely fixed as he hasn't been heard from since....

hobgoblin
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join:2001-11-25
Orchard Park, NY

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said by maartena:

I'm guessing the OP's issues are completely fixed as he hasn't been heard from since....

Amazing how often that happens.

Hob
aproxymate
join:2012-08-07
Irving, TX

aproxymate

Member

Sorry for not providing an update on the issue. I have been quite busy with the move and getting furniture for the apartment.

I am not sure if there is an issue or not as I am completely basing my observation from my past experience with Verizon Fios 50/50. I will list down a few differences between now and then. Note that except the modem (SB6183) which I got new on amazon, all my infrastructure is the same, even the ethernet cable:

1) On speedtest.net, I always saw speeds above 50 up/down on FIOS. With TWC, these results are all over the place from 65 to 95 Mbps. The up speeds are even dismal as most of the time I do not go over 1 Mbps most of the time. All the testing was done on my PC which is connected to the router via the ethernet cable.

2) Even on my iphone 5s and ipad mini retina, I was seeing close to the 50 Mbps speeds on the speedtest app. Now, I am lucky to see even half of the 100 Mbps speeds.

3) On the Fios connection, almost every torrent was getting downloaded at 5 Mbps speeds or above. Now I am lucky to get even 1 Mbps on any torrent and this is after trying with a lot of different ones with good seed-to-leach ratio.

To be clear, I do not have any major issues with internet but I just wanted to make sure that TWC is not throttling. I know this was an issue earlier when a friend had TWC and he wasn't even able to stream Youtube without significant buffering.

Also thanks to everyone who contributed with their experiences and tried to help.

anon_5224
join:2001-10-23
united state
Asus RT-AC66

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are you actually in Milford, OH or somewhere else? i was under the strong impression that there are no areas in Ohio currently running faster than 50x5.

as for your issue, it is probably nothing to do with 'throttling' as that is not something i have ever heard of happening with residential TWC. your area may need work, but it could also be something closer to your home if not inside. check for loose coaxial cable(s), splitters that are out-of-spec (non-TWC; and ideally there are no splits to speak of), a house-amp (again hope not in use for HSD) or 3rd-party 'broadband signal boosters' that do nothing. call and have tech support run a ping-plotter to your modem's IP. you might need a tech to fix something on-site.

and if your account was somehow provisioned for 100Mbps and the area is only currently compatible with 50, that would almost certainly cause problems. you really need to call in and have someone at TWC help. there's also »/forum ··· erdirect , and online chat at »www.twc.com

keep us updated though cause it doesn't sound good so far and i know it will get better.
grenefroggie2
join:2012-05-28
Simpsonville, KY

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I noticed in your original post that you are getting 8.5MB/s on your 100Mbps internet connection. If you cannot see immediately where I am going with this, no worries. Most people easily miss it.

On Steam, download speeds are measured in MegaBytes per second (or on slower connections KiloBytes per second). Internet speeds are marketed and sold in Megabits per second. While similar in name and look, they are two different measurements of speed. The 8.9MB/s you are seeing in Steam is about 72Mbps. I downloaded a few games last night to make sure. I am not aware of a setting to change this, but I could be mistaken.

I would say that 72Mbps out of a 100Mbps connection is pretty good for a Steam download.

I can't speak for torrents. Different programs and trackers use different measurements for speed. I believe uTorrent uses Kilobits per second. Your speed test results seem to reflect close to what you are paying for speed. As noted earlier in the thread, different speed test servers on Speedtest.net have different amounts of bandwidth available to them. Speed test results are not always accurate simply because the provider of the server does not have enough bandwidth.

TWC has their own speed test which can be found here: TWC Speed Test

Just some thoughts. It looks like for the most part every other possibility has been covered.
alexintexas
join:2003-01-11
San Antonio, TX
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Lol, seriously i have to lmao every time a thread like this comes up.

Everyone thinks just cause "i upgraded" to X speed every damn site must give me that speed! WOW is all i can say!!

not even stream is going to give a consistent download at any given time. when are people going to learn just because you pay for 20/30/50/100/300/1gig speeds not every site is going to give "max" your download speed. You are NOT the only one on the WWW, how hard is that to understand???

this goes for torrent files as well, and from my experience the vast majority of folks dont know how to properly setup a torrent client but quickly scream and bitch when when they fry the router out of their own ignorance. SMH....

edit/add to above just a little info, big box routers DO NOT TOLERATE an exorbitant amount of concurrent connections for extended periods of time and is a sure fire way to kill that $200+ big box router, do trust that!!

Dont we all wish we had our own lane on the freeway
aproxymate
join:2012-08-07
Irving, TX

aproxymate

Member

Even though your post might have some substance, your tone comes across as condescending at best. Maybe next time you should try helping or better not post at all.

I am well aware that many websites have an upper limit on the upload speeds but my experience with steam has been that they do not seem have such restriction. My issue was that I could see speeds all over the place with my downloads and that was my concern. I know people in European regions get higher speeds than what I am getting all the time. So its definitely not steams upload that is being limited in this case.

Case in point, I had a 25 mbps up/down with Cincinnati Bell and I still used to see upto 6 mbps down in steam.
aproxymate

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I understand the difference between MBps and Mbps. I had Cincinnati Bell and Verizon Fios before and with both providers I was getting more than the advertised speeds so I am not sure why TWC should give me less than advertised speeds.
aproxymate

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Sorry I have moved to Dallas. Should have updated my profile.
grenefroggie2
join:2012-05-28
Simpsonville, KY

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No worries. I just wanted to make sure because of how I interpreted your post.

Your router has a traffic monitor. What does the traffic monitor tell you? It should show you what your bandwidth usage is like. When you run speed tests, use more than one source. If I think I am having a bandwidth issue, I try a few different test sites.

When are you running these tests? Peak usage hours? What about population density in your area? Most ISPs habe some sort of over subscription ratio. If the noxe you are on is saturated, it will show.

Just a few more things I thought about.
alexintexas
join:2003-01-11
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said by aproxymate:

Even though your post might have some substance, your tone comes across as condescending at best. Maybe next time you should try helping or better not post at all.

As it should, as was its intention. no offense

however with a topic as such what do you expect??
said by aproxymate:

I am well aware that many websites have an upper limit on the upload speeds but my experience with steam has been that they do not seem have such restriction. My issue was that I could see speeds all over the place with my downloads and that was my concern. I know people in European regions get higher speeds than what I am getting all the time. So its definitely not steams upload that is being limited in this case.

Case in point, I had a 25 mbps up/down with Cincinnati Bell and I still used to see upto 6 mbps down in steam.

ok now i'm confused, in your original post you state you got dl speeds from steam @ upto 8.9 MB which = 71.2 mbps of your 100 mbps plan, if you ask me that is damn good
said by aproxymate:

I upgraded to ultimate 100 and it seems that I am not getting the promised speed. The max download I have seen is around 8.9 MB/s in Steam and nearly half of the in the torrent client. I had verizon 50/50 prior to that and I was getting around 7 MB/s max in both Steam and bit-torrent. Is there a way to tell if active throttling is happening with my account?

^^^
your original post, as far as steam goes looks to be the best you are going to get. now as for your torrent client look into your number of connections, also do not ever saturate the upload or you will never see max download, and concurrent connections keep it under 100 or less is best
spdickey
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said by alexintexas:

not even stream is going to give a consistent download at any given time. when are people going to learn just because you pay for 20/30/50/100/300/1gig speeds not every site is going to give "max" your download speed.

And to prove this point, here's a graph from my SamKnows panel of the last 30 days with my 100/10 connection. Download speeds are different depending on the endpoint they are testing against.

In this case TWC's routing to M-Lab (red) is more variable than either the internal routing within TWC's network (blue) or to Level3 (green).

On Net (1 unit)
Off Net (M-Lab) (1 unit)
Off Net (Level3) (1 unit)
alexintexas
join:2003-01-11
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said by spdickey:

said by alexintexas:

not even stream is going to give a consistent download at any given time. when are people going to learn just because you pay for 20/30/50/100/300/1gig speeds not every site is going to give "max" your download speed.

And to prove this point, here's a graph from my SamKnows panel of the last 30 days with my 100/10 connection. Download speeds are different depending on the endpoint they are testing against.

In this case TWC's routing to M-Lab (red) is more variable than either the internal routing within TWC's network (blue) or to Level3 (green).

On Net (1 unit)
Off Net (M-Lab) (1 unit)
Off Net (Level3) (1 unit)

What exactly is your point of the graph? no i.s.p. has control of data flow "outside" the network.

and what is the starting point, your pc? and only using 1 outside "network" for testing? Level3 is a backhaul provider and one that deals with most i.s.p's in the U.S. I have also heard/read M-Lab is not a reliable source, its only what i have read as far as M-Lab goes

sorry the graph "only" shows a healthy "internal" network

edit:

had to add, looking at your 1 outside network "M-Lab" you still Avg. about 80mbps. just saying
spdickey
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spdickey

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said by alexintexas:

What exactly is your point of the graph? no i.s.p. has control of data flow "outside" the network.

Except when the isp controls the interconnection point to the outside network (see Netflix vs. Comcast).

The graph points out that there are different speeds reported from different sources, as the OP was complaining about.

The starting point is the SamKnows box connected directly to my modem, not my PC.

MLabs is a reliable independent testing organization. You can learn more at »www.measurementlab.net/ and for more info about the SamKnows project at the FCC see »www.samknows.com/

maartena
Elmo
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Orange, CA

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said by aproxymate:

1) On speedtest.net, I always saw speeds above 50 up/down on FIOS. With TWC, these results are all over the place from 65 to 95 Mbps. The up speeds are even dismal as most of the time I do not go over 1 Mbps most of the time. All the testing was done on my PC which is connected to the router via the ethernet cable.

Are you sure the link speed between the modem and the router is set to 1 Gbps? Your particular router model (ASUS) has been known to have some negotiation issues on the WAN port. If it is set to 100 Mbps, you are subject to overhead on the Ethernet protocols, which generally limits your speeds to around 80-90 Mbps.

If there is a 100 Mbps bottleneck (an old 100 Mbps switch somewhere, a NIC in your computer not negotiating right, a cable that only uses 4 instead of 8 wires because one out of 8 wires is broken, etc, etc.... you can see these issues.

2) Even on my iphone 5s and ipad mini retina, I was seeing close to the 50 Mbps speeds on the speedtest app. Now, I am lucky to see even half of the 100 Mbps speeds.

My iPhone5, iPhone6, iPad Mini, and iPad Retina this household has ALL do not get more then around 50-60 Mbps. None of them really get any higher even if I am right on top of my router, even though I have a 300 Mbps connection. This is partly due to the fact that wireless connectivity has its limits, partly because Apple iDevices (and androids too btw) do not support MiMo (Multiple Input, Multiple Output) partly because they support 802.11n and not 802.11ac and partly because they only have 1 antenna built in to the device to save space. On top of that, there is a known bug in iOS that still hasn't been fixed in 8.2 that affects wireless speeds. I think I managed to squeeze 70 Mbps out of my iPhone 6 once after a fresh reboot.

You are simply never going to see high speeds on those devices. Nor do you really need to quite frankly, even 4k streaming is around 15-18 Mbps, and you don't need 4k on a device like that.

My wife's laptop in the same room (a macbook) gets 120-130 Mbps of my 300 Mbps connection. My wired computers (with 1 Gbps switch and properly negotiating at 1 Gbps) get the full 300 Mbps, I test at 322 Mbps down, 22 Mbps up regularly.

3) On the Fios connection, almost every torrent was getting downloaded at 5 Mbps speeds or above. Now I am lucky to get even 1 Mbps on any torrent and this is after trying with a lot of different ones with good seed-to-leach ratio.

I have no problems with torrents. But you do need to change your configuration appropriately taking in to account you have only 5 Mbps upload as opposed to 50/50. To download a torrent (or anything for that matter) at full speed of 100 Mbps, you need about 3 Mbps in sustained upload. (NOT part of your upload setting in a torrent client) So you probably want to limit your upload in your torrent client to a maximum of 1 Mbps upload, and a maximum of 200 global connections and 50 connections per torrent. I have mine set to a maximum of 5 Mbps upload, but I have 20 Mbps upload. I have seen torrents go to 30 MB/s no problem, but usually they aren't large enough to see that speed a lot, because they finish in like 30 seconds.

To be clear, I do not have any major issues with internet but I just wanted to make sure that TWC is not throttling. I know this was an issue earlier when a friend had TWC and he wasn't even able to stream Youtube without significant buffering.

TWC is not throttling, and never did throttle. A few providers in Canada once throttled bittorrent traffic, but it was more costly to manage then it was worth it. AFIAK no providers really throttle anything right now.

A lot of the Youtube problems had multiple causes.... one was that geolocation of IP addresses was incorrectly reported, causing people to connect to Google datacenters much further away. Another was that peering problems with Google and routing isn't setup right, causing traffic to be routed to a prefered peer further away on the network, and then routed back to the datacenter that is in the same city as you. In any case, none of that was caused by throttling.

"Throttling" is the magic word that is used if you can't explain a speed problem. "My equipment is working but I get slow speeds? --> THEY ARE THROTTLING!!"
alexintexas
join:2003-01-11
San Antonio, TX
Netgear CM500
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said by spdickey:

said by alexintexas:

What exactly is your point of the graph? no i.s.p. has control of data flow "outside" the network.

Except when the isp controls the interconnection point to the outside network (see Netflix vs. Comcast).

The graph points out that there are different speeds reported from different sources, as the OP was complaining about.

The starting point is the SamKnows box connected directly to my modem, not my PC.

MLabs is a reliable independent testing organization. You can learn more at »www.measurementlab.net/ and for more info about the SamKnows project at the FCC see »www.samknows.com/

so you let the box "SamKnows" control your network?
you should have this device installed behind your own equipment, just saying

if this is the case of the OP
1. what router is the SamKnows?
2. where in the network is this box located?
3. this testing is "extremely flawed" based for residential use and or monitoring due to
a: viruses
b: saturating your network due to torrenting, etc
c: file serving.
d: your pc hacked and or running as a hacked file server. Most common with avg users!

the above are just to name a few of the flaws

d, i find most common with avg. users who have no clue and download and or install "things" they should not be!

your stated answer to me shows that if the OP has the "SamKnows box" ahead of his own equipment as you do then the problems exists when he/she or someone else is online using the connection.
ie: streaming movies, torrenting, etc.

so in essence your stated comment shows the problem lies within his own network and or equipment, and TWC not throttling