Slower download speeds after upgrading from 25Mbps to 50Mbps. Why?

I figure you may need more information to help with the issue so here is a speed test I just did.

Start	Cox Net	Download Speed	Upload Speed	Latency	Your IP Address	Cox Market
Sat Apr 20 5:44 PM	Yes	14 Mbps	8 Mbps	66 millisec	72.223.81.89	Phoeni

14Mbps!? Even if this is a busy time of the day I should be getting faster speeds than this if I'm paying for 50Mbps. Let me see your traffic reports and then I'll believe it is a problem with online traffic in my area. I'm in Mesa, Az 85208 whats up with the service over here?

I show that you're back to that IP address and a Belkin Ethernet MAC address right now, but a speed test 33 minutes later than the one you posted had a different Ethernet MAC connected to the modem other than the Belkin router, and the speed was 65/22. So I think you may have already found the problem.

Yes and no. I was playing around with the connections to see if there was any other way to get a better connection. First I tried to hardwire from the modem straight to the pc. This required me to reset the modem and then have the pc (windows 7 64bit) fix the connection problem. Once I had a connection again I retested the speed and sure enough 65/22. So then I would assume it is the belkin router causing the problem, but just to be sure I then reconnected the router to see what results I would get. Again I had to reset the router and modem and the PC in order to get a connection (something to do with IP address, I don't really know). Anyway I did another test now with modem wired to the belkin router then wired to the pc and wouldn't you know it I was getting 65/22 still.

So in my opinion it isn't a hardware issue instead it is an issue with your service and being unable to provide a consistent signal even close to what I pay for. It seems sort of coincidental that I post to this forum and all the sudden my connection speed jumps up by 50Mbps. Hmmm? Now today my connection is around the low 20's at its peak. So the question is where is the hold up with my speeds.

You did a great job tracking my use of the tools so could you help in trying to determine why I see such a large variation in my connection speed? Maybe you could provide data from that time to see if there were any outages that you know of or you could let me know if Cox is still trying to perfect their 50Mbps connection speeds for residential? I would also be open to any suggestions on my hardware? I would actually love for the problem to be my belkin router but Cox has a reputation of not giving their customers what they are paying for and finding ways out of admitting fault so I'm inclined to find Cox at fault for this headache. I may need a tech to come out but I can't see that helping any because I did get the 65/22 last night so I assume my lines are working just fine.

Ok so this is interesting, here is another update on the issue. 

Here is my speed before this post. I was using speedtest.net before so the time stamp on this is from the cox tools which I took after I wrote the post but shows same results I saw a few minutes before writing the last update at 6:04 pm Az time.

Then after my post.

Why the difference? Also, please note that both are using the same IP or Mac address or whateve that is. There was one thing that changed and that was I went into my belkin router settings and disabled the firewall. So I though ok now I figured it out that was slowing it all down, but just to be sure I enabled the firewall again to make sure that was the culprit. But no I still get the fast speed of over 65 Mbps which is great! So what changed then? I think when I updated the firewall it may restart the router is this usually the case? If so could the restart be making the router fast? Is that normal are we supposed to restart our routers everyday (i certainly hope not)?

I didn't actually do anything to cause your speeds to improve, I just looked up the IP address from your speed test results and pulled some data related to it. That wouldn't cause anything to change. And in Arizona, we're not trying to perfect anything. (It's in the other markets that we're trying to perfect what we worked on for years to deploy in Arizona and Nevada.) We've got plenty of customers there who can get 150 megs quite consistently, so 50 megs should be no problem. 

I don't have any outages listed specifically for your node since 2/16, and I don't see any issue with the modem signal. It's not reporting that it has timed out or reset itself in a while, and we can ping it fine. It's a 6141, so there's a firmware update we could apply that isn't really necessary in Arizona (it's meant for minor fixes in other areas with that model), but it can't hurt.

If it worked well with the router after rebooting, it might be an issue with the router's memory management or caching. Some routers keep track of old DNS entries and old entries in the NAT table for an unreasonably long time, and get bogged down after a while (the original Linksys WRT54G family was awful about this). Newer routers and newer firmware don't have this problem so much. If it slows down again, try rebooting just the router and not the modem and see if that improves it.

Edit (just saw you posted while I was composing a reply): If it improves with every router reboot, you may want to see if there's a firmware update available from Belkin, or try leaving the router bypassed for a while to see if it stays fast on a direct connection, which would  pin it down pretty definitively.