New Contributor
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Very slow upload speeds (30KB/s at most)
I have the Ultimate package (150Mbps down/20Mbps up) and while my downloads are fine (on average of 19MB/s), my uploads are beyond dismal; formal testing yields 30KB/s (yes, kiloBYTES a second). For reference, my home network is wired gigabit fully switched, and internal transfers from one machine to another basically cap out the gigabit connection (110MB/s on average). I have a DOCSIS 3.0 compliant modem and a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite (full gigabit routing); I had a MikroTik RB2011UiAS-2HnD-IN before I switched to the Ubiquiti, but the upload issues persisted then as well. Cox sent out a technician to diagnose the issue and he said that it was something out at the post; a few days later a construction crew apparently did some work further along the line from the post, and that appeared to resolve the issue for a while. It's back, and the upload speeds are slower than before. Either there's some kind of cabling issue beyond the post, or there's a misconfiguration somewhere. My internal network is solid, the hardware I'm using is good, and I have no reason to believe that the issue is with my setup.
ChrisL
Former Moderator
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7.1K Messages
10 years ago
Would it be possible to try some speed tests on our page with a PC connected directly connected to the modem?
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Tecknowhelp
Valued Contributor II
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2.8K Messages
10 years ago
+1 for results direct to the modem. What modem are you using? Can you provide it's signal levels?
Also, when your upload crawls, any change to latency? Packet loss? I doubt it's throttling. Throttling that extreme would cause more problems for Cox then it would help. Also throttling wouldn't be constant; it would either be intermittent based on congestion, or specific to bandwidth use. Also, I have never heard of Cox throttling throughput. Latency yes, but not throughput.
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ADAGIO
New Contributor
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1 Message
10 years ago
I have an ultimate package as well. It is now 175Mbps downloads and 20Mbps (25Mbps now). I get excellent Download speeds (190+ Mbps) to most SpeedTest servers. Upload speeds to good servers are 23Mbps+.
End-to-end downloads speeds to my dedicated Linux server in Florida (I am in RI) are around 100Mbps which is almost 50% off the Ookla Speed tests but still very good.
Uploads are dismal; Ookla as I mentioned gives 23Mbps+ but if I do FTP or HTTP (wget) I get 2.66 Mbps Max to my server.
I did extensive testing using M-LABS (google search keyword) tests and other tests and I am convinced the problem is in the Cox Core network especially because until the morning of Jan 20, 2015 I was getting 20Mbps+ end-to-end.
As a test I tethered my 4G LTE phone and used that for uploads and I got 14Mbps+ uploads end-to-end.
I did some very detailed testing and emailed the results to Cox Tier2 Support and they said they will pass it on to network support - that was last week. No word yet.
I also did tests to prove that there is hardly any packet loss (<0.01%) and that the TCP data flow was "smooth" and the overhead of FTP, TCP etc is only about 10% (from other testing).
So there are two questions: 1. Why is Ookla speed test showing fantastic results but end to end gives not so good results even after factoring out the overheads.
Answer: 1. All carriers route Ookla packets at the highest priority 2. Ookla tests use UDP datagrams and the protocol is tuned for testing
This is not rigging but Ookla tests provide a benchmark for end-to-end tests.
Why are end-to-end upload speeds so poor then?
Answer: Until not too long ago and even now with most users most traffic was bursty and in the inbound direction (downloading movies, streaming video etc) or bursty HTTP web traffic.
But this is not so true with Dropbox, Box etc and uploading backups - not as heavy a traffic as downloads but up there.
Carriers & ISPs are mostly still using the asymmetric model (even Quantum FIOS is asymmetric although they claim symmetric speeds).
The problem with Cox uploads which in my case developed Jan 20, 2015 is that they use MPLS (a lower level routing protocol) to prioritize traffic (different plans) at least I believe they use MPLS but they do use a prioritization scheme otherwise they would not be able to offer the various tiered plans especially on a broadband infrastructure - they could use something at the DOCIS level for prioritization but I am not too familiar with DOCIS but I know that 3.0 offers QoS.
Bottom line - there is a problem either in some switch configuration or some systemic problem in the Cox Core network (depending on the user population effected it could be either). I have fairly reasonable data and analysis to show that. I have no access to Cox Network Engineers who do the configurations and network fine tuning and have to go through TIER2 so it is taking some time to get the message across.
BTW Verizon had similar problems (I had 500Mbps) and it took me 2 months to convince them and pinpoint the problem for them - they still have problems in many areas.
The reason for not being responsive on uploads is that few people complain about uploads - they either think the problem is their PC or the server at the other end, or the network path or they don't notice as they are mostly concerned with downloads.
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DerrickW
Valued Contributor
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1.2K Messages
10 years ago
I see that you've been in touch with us and also have done some extensive research on your end to figure this out. I'd like to follow-up on the escalation that was done, please send an email with your name and address, also if you have the ticket number that can be included in your message. Thanks!
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