Double speed

Hello Elm,

What speeds are you currently getting?

Thanks,

Allan - Cox Support Forums Moderator

Hi Allan,

Today I'm getting 14 Mbps per second.  Normally I get 31 Mbps.  I was expecting with the announcement of double speed I would see the advertised 50 Mbps.  

Elm

I don't have a UPS or splitter.   I do have a surge protector on the modem. However, this is the same power configuration I've used for years.  And, during these years I got 31-32 Mbps.  My performance continues to slip.  Today I'm down to 12 Mbps.

I'm happy to run a test without the surge protectors, but that is unacceptable configuration as a permanent solution.

Ok...I powered everything off.  Removed the surge protection and powered back up.

Download speed is now 20% faster than usual.  It comes in at 37 - 38 Mbps. 

The Upload speed, after a hiccup where it went to zero, is now back to where its been for years:  6-7 Mbps.

Umm....yes.  I do have another surge protector I can swap out.  It's in use now...so I'll have to wait until tonight before swapping.  

While I'm operating without an surge protector do you any other ideas what we can do to get download performance somewhere near the advertised 50Mbps?

I'm connected wirelessly thru an Apple airport 802.11n.  So I should be capable of 130 Mbps.  I'll give a wired connection a go and see what we get.  I disconnected and turned off the airport.  Connected the ethernet cable AND got a zippy 59 Mbps!  Wow, kind of cool!  Wonder why I'm not getting that wirelessly?

I've kind of angered the entire house disconnecting the wireless.  So got to restore it.... I've reconnected the airport BUT now I'm seeing 5 Mbps with lots of unhappy voices from across the house.  Makes ya want to cry.  I'll power off and see if I can get back what I had.  

I cycled power on the modem and router.  The speeds returned to 37-38 Mbps range.

How do I tell what channels are in use? Or possible congested? I thought the airport extreme chose a channel automatically based on least interference. I can change channels, but I can't tell if I'm moving to a less or more congested frequency.

I tried multiple channels:

1, 3, 6, 9, 11

Channels 1, 6, and 11 did the best - all 39 Mbps.  Channels 3 and 9 did slightly worse at 37 Mbps.

Channel 11 was ever so slightly the best and when I returned the wireless setting to automatic that was the channel it chose.  So the automatic feature appears to work as expected.

However, I'm left wondering:  how to get that blazing 59 Mbps wirelessly?  Would an older 802.11g computer on the network slow the network down?

I talked to a Cox representative and she said that the speed increase will take place on 09/25.

Sorry to take so long to get back to you.  I pulled an old computer out, set it up and have spent hours unsuccessfuly trying to get it to run.  So I was only able to test two computers.  I ran 50+ tests consecutively.  I compared computers, wireless, wired thru router, wired direct to modem.  I also compared speedtest.net to cox while logged in and while not logged in.

Computer A 802.11N, ethernet 1000Mbs

Computer B 802.11G, ethernet 100Mbs

SPEEDTEST.NET DOWNLOAD RESULTS

Comp A wireless 36 - 40 Mbps   Wired 59 - 64 Mbps

Comp B wireless 19- 20 Mbps.   Wired 58 - 65 Mbps

There is no difference between wired thru the router versus wired directly to modem (bypassing router).

Blind test thru cox's residential/internet/speed-test.cox under every condition always produced the slowest speeds. These speeds were 37% to 96% of speedtest.net.  Logging into cox and testing always produced the best results, typically 5 to 15% faster 

SPEEDTEST.NET & BLIND COX UPLOAD RESULTS

For 6 of 8 servers tested

Comp A wireless 6.7 - 7.0  Mbps        Wired 6.7 - 7.0 Mbps

Comp B wireless  6.5 - 7.0 Mbps        Wired 6.5 - 6.9 Mbps

For two remaining servers

Comp A wireless 13.6 - 16.11 Mbps    Wired 10.2 - 10.4 Mbps 

Comp B wireless 12.5 - 13.2 Mbps       Wired 10.1 -10.2 Mbps

Computer didn't matter, upload was same.

In the blind test to the cox site uploads were always at the bottom of the range

While logged in to cox uploads were 20 Mbps.

CONCLUSIONS:

Cox's advertised download speeds are not achievable wirelessly but are achievable wired, using ethernet cable.

Upload speeds are not really affected by connecting wirelessly or thru an ethernet cable.  

Upload speeds are significantly affected by server

The improved performance numbers reported from cox when logged in is suspicious. When testing it is better to go to a third party with no conflict of interest.

Hmmm.....When I ran that battery of tests I did it on servers both closer, lower ping, and further away, higher ping, than cox.  Which means for the distances we are dealing with this is not the driving factor.  

What kind of differences should I see between wireless and wired?  I was all set to believe the note Cox posted that said wireless connection speeds are slower than wired.  But if you think there is a faster better configuration I'd love to find it!!  The router manufacturer is Apple.  I configured it in accordance with their instructions and the Airport Utility.  I also went to Apple's support forums to see if there is a better way to configure it.  Plus I looked on some other apple forums not run by Apple Inc.   What sort of differences does cox expect to see between wireless and an ethernet connection?

Here, let me illustrate why I think your rationale isn't correct.  I ran two tests, back to back.  The test was on the same computer, with same router config AND both on cox.

The first is the blind test at www.cox.com/residentail/internet/speed-test.cox.  

The results were a ping of 33ms, download of 31.26 Mbps and upload of 6.61 Mbps.  

The second is logged into myaccount.cox.net....

Here the ping was 38 ms, download 41.28 Mbps with upload of 20.46 Mbps.

Note, when the ping was lower and I did not get better speeds.  In fact I got the opposite in both download and upload.     

I thought of those....

I manually logged on to 50% of all channels and compared speeds.  I found the automatic feature is in fact picking the channel that is least used.  Plus, I'm in a house and there are only four other signals from the neighbors I can detect..so most channels are empty or have a signal so weak as to be undetectable.  Saturation is not an issue.

The the router and modem are 10 inches from each other.  And both are less than 10 feet from all computers.  They are sitting on a cabinet with a direct line of sight to my computers....no floors, no furniture, no phones, no microwaves, no garage doors to interfere with the signal.  The only electrical noise is a light in the ceiling....Signal strength is not an issue.  Electrical noise is not an issue.  Distance is not an issue.

I mentioned earlier the router and computer I'm using are 802.11N which are reported to be capable of 130Mbps.  I'm only seeing 33% of that.  Per your suggestion I did test an old computer with an 802.11G card - and it is not seeing 54 Mbps - it's getting about 40% of that.

When I ran those 50+ tests I turned off all other devices.  Only 1 computer was on at a time.  Interference from other devices is not an issue.

I really do appreciate all the time and help you are giving me...I have exhausted every reason why I can't get close to Cox's advertised bandwidth wirelessly.  

What speed differences does cox expect when using a wireless router vs ethernet?

Here's a few things concerning wireless that may have not been taken into consideration:

If you're using the 2.4Ghz band there are only 3 wireless channels to choose from which are 1, 6, or 11.  This is because the 11 channels that appear to be available are 4Mhz wide however wireless-g/n use 20Mhz channel widths so for example if you select channel 1 you're actually using 1-5.  This means if you have more than 2 neighbors you're guaranteed to get noise interference overlap.

If you have wireless-g devices connected to a wireless-n network that will pull the whole network down to g because wifi is a shared bus technology that operates at the highest common denominator. Note when you see the connection speeds indicated on the wifi adapter connection status these are why we call the phy link speeds.  Once you factor in overhead you can expect a single device to be able to achieve slightly better than 1/2 of that rate assuming you have no other devices connected.  Using wireless-g for example which has a max phy link of 54Mbps you can expect maybe 28-30Mbps of actual throughput.  Because this is a shared bus link once you start adding more devices to your wifi network you can expect them to have to divide up among themselves from that usable bandwidth available.

Another factor to consider is the encryption you're using.  WPA2 is the only hardware based encryption routers support.  Anything but WPA2 and you'll see throughput drop even more due to software overhead. For the most part a wired connection is always going to be faster and more reliable however some of the pointers above may help you better optimize your wireless network for maximum performance.