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High download speed, yet pages load slow

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JR8
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Post by JR8 » Thu, 02 Oct 2014 11:33 am

PNGMK wrote:After reading this I'm going to buy a 5GHZ router. At 1030pm sharp every night something messes with my 2.4GHZ router.
Weird you say this. There are days I spend way too much online, ... working naturally [cough cough]. There are regular outages every day. One is 8.40am, which is the most annoying as that definitely interrupts work!

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Post by zzm9980 » Thu, 02 Oct 2014 11:42 am

PNGMK wrote:After reading this I'm going to buy a 5GHZ router. At 1030pm sharp every night something messes with my 2.4GHZ router.
Back in about 2005, I lost wifi for about 2-3 hours every Saturday morning. By the third week I realized it was during this time my neighbor would make his weekly calls to India.

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Post by zzm9980 » Thu, 02 Oct 2014 11:52 am

For those who have trouble, but don't understand what I say by "ping your router", this is how you do it in Windows:

Code: Select all

Open your Start Menu

Click on "Run"

Type cmd in the box, and click "OK"

In the black terminal windows that opens, type "ipconfig".

Look for a value labelled "Default Gateway", with an IP next to it. An IP will be four numbers, separated by periods, between 1 and 255.  In most cases, your Default Gateway at home will be something like "10.0.0.1", "192.168.1.1", or something similar.

In this same black terminal, type:  ping -t #.#.#.#
#.#.#.# == IP of your default gateway, which you learned in the previous command.

What this command does is send 1 packet per second to your router, and then measures how long a reply takes. Think of it like radar or sonar.  What you're looking for is the "time" value. It's rated in milliseconds.

On a 2.4Ghz Wifi network with good signal this value should average below 20. It's normal to see a number of replies in the 1-10ms range, but an occasional few packets in the 20-50ms range.

If you see a significant number of packets in the hundreds of ms, or errors like "Request Timed Out", you most likely have  interference.  Any values over 200-300ms will be noticeable.

If you don't see any replies, or you only see "request timed out" replies but your wifi is working, you did something wrong.

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Post by zzm9980 » Thu, 23 Oct 2014 2:55 am

So did you ever fix this wd40?

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Post by JR8 » Mon, 27 Oct 2014 5:06 pm

xiaoluoj wrote:are located within inches of each other. FIFA 15 Coins I also have neighbors with WiFi (don't we all). Never had an interference problem with either WiFi network.
Bye-bye...!

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Post by Wd40 » Mon, 27 Oct 2014 5:27 pm

zzm9980 wrote:So did you ever fix this wd40?
Nope, still living with it. It has become slightly less annoying now compared to the time I started this thread.

The funny thing is when I sit in the same room(bedroom) in which the router is, it is even worse compared to sitting further away in the living room. In the bedroom, I see all bars of the wireless whereas in the living room I see only 2 or 3 bars, yet the experience is better in the living room.

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Post by zzm9980 » Thu, 30 Oct 2014 8:42 am

Wd40 wrote:
zzm9980 wrote:So did you ever fix this wd40?
Nope, still living with it. It has become slightly less annoying now compared to the time I started this thread.

The funny thing is when I sit in the same room(bedroom) in which the router is, it is even worse compared to sitting further away in the living room. In the bedroom, I see all bars of the wireless whereas in the living room I see only 2 or 3 bars, yet the experience is better in the living room.
The number of bars you see often has little relation to actual performance. It is just a software engineer's arbitrary graphical representation of some value they're relying on for signal strength on layer 1 of OSI, but may have no relation to packet loss or anything else (layers 1-7).

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Re:

Post by aster » Mon, 05 Jan 2015 1:05 am

Steve1960 wrote:
x9200 wrote:Getting 100Mbps on a 100Mbps plan is a true achievement on its own.
Is there a way of actually measuring real world speed accurately?

I used Ookla speedtest on my Mac Pro connected to the router via Ethernet. I have 200Mbps fibre and the download speed Ookla reported was 204Mbps.

Doesn't seem plausible to me!
This is an old one but it is still applicable today. :)

What you're doing is simply measuring the bandwidth between yourself (here in Singapore) and your IPS (here in Singapore). You are connected to them with a nice 200mbps connection, which just goes to show that the fibre cable is working as it should. :)

This does not mean that when using the internet you have a 200mbps connection to the world. This is the unfortunate bottleneck that people experience when comparing the speeds marketed by their ISPs to the true internet experience here.

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Re: High download speed, yet pages load slow

Post by Steve1960 » Fri, 09 Jan 2015 10:17 pm

Yes I understand that now cheers :D

So testing the line with an App like OOKLA is not testing the ISP throughput?

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Re: Re:

Post by Strong Eagle » Fri, 09 Jan 2015 11:02 pm

aster wrote:This is an old one but it is still applicable today. :)

What you're doing is simply measuring the bandwidth between yourself (here in Singapore) and your IPS (here in Singapore). You are connected to them with a nice 200mbps connection, which just goes to show that the fibre cable is working as it should. :)

This does not mean that when using the internet you have a 200mbps connection to the world. This is the unfortunate bottleneck that people experience when comparing the speeds marketed by their ISPs to the true internet experience here.
It's easy to measure speed to far more than your local ISP with speedtest.net. You set the server that you want to ping to and go.

Example: I use a local server in Houston, get 44 ms ping time. 43 Mbps down, 6 Mbps up.

Then, I select a Singapore server, a Singtel server. I get a 309 ms ping, 20 Mbps download speed, 3.97 Mbps upload speed.

Then I try a server in Bangalore... 276 ms ping, 13 Mbps download speed, 3.98 Mbps upload.

So... seems the stories that about 20M bps in/out of Singapore seem to be true.

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Re: High download speed, yet pages load slow

Post by x9200 » Sat, 10 Jan 2015 5:45 am

Sure, but I guess nobody should doubt Singapore has a 20Mbps connection to the outside world and what is tested above is the speed between an ISP outside SG and some SG based server (unlikely within the end-user ISP infrastructure).

This way I can show even more impressive numbers.

UK to SG (SG download):
xxx@s1:~ ssh yyy dd if=test|dd of=/dev/null
664093149 bytes (664 MB) copied, 70.1846 s, 9.5 MB/s

SG to UK (SG upload)
xxx@s1:~ dd if=test|ssh yyy dd of=/dev/null

664093149 bytes (664 MB) copied, 60.6011 s, 11.0 MB/s

This is just a random video file sent between two virtual servers and as it can be seen the in/out speed is over 70Mbps.

The true limitations are within the end-user ISP structures.

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Re: High download speed, yet pages load slow

Post by NicBlais » Thu, 15 Jan 2015 11:14 am

Steve1960 wrote:Yes I understand that now cheers :D

So testing the line with an App like OOKLA is not testing the ISP throughput?
Testing over wifi (especially on your phone or tablet) is not recommended since the biggest factor affecting the results is actually your router and the hardware in your phone or tablet.

Try to do a wired speedtest (connect a Cat5e, or better, ethernet cable directly to your router). Local speedtests will show you how good your connection is to your ISP (you should be seeing your subscribed speed, if you don't call your ISP to see if something is wrong with the connection).

For international testing, speedtest.net is not the best tool to measure since it only uses 4 threads and uses HTTP. Very often the connection doesn't have time to ramp up to full speed before the test is over.

What you can do instead is try to download large files from international servers using a Download Manager (there's a bunch of free ones) where you can set a higher number of threads. Torrents (legal ones...) can also be a better indicator of your bandwidth than a speedtest.

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Re: High download speed, yet pages load slow

Post by zzm9980 » Thu, 15 Jan 2015 3:20 pm

NicBlais wrote:
Steve1960 wrote:Yes I understand that now cheers :D

So testing the line with an App like OOKLA is not testing the ISP throughput?
Testing over wifi (especially on your phone or tablet) is not recommended since the biggest factor affecting the results is actually your router and the hardware in your phone or tablet.

Try to do a wired speedtest (connect a Cat5e, or better, ethernet cable directly to your router). Local speedtests will show you how good your connection is to your ISP (you should be seeing your subscribed speed, if you don't call your ISP to see if something is wrong with the connection).

For international testing, speedtest.net is not the best tool to measure since it only uses 4 threads and uses HTTP. Very often the connection doesn't have time to ramp up to full speed before the test is over.

What you can do instead is try to download large files from international servers using a Download Manager (there's a bunch of free ones) where you can set a higher number of threads. Torrents (legal ones...) can also be a better indicator of your bandwidth than a speedtest.
^- Good advice, especially on the wifi.

My Gigabit fiber gets ~950mb/sec on a speed test inside Singapore. 400mb/sec only over wifi to my Macbook Air, and 600mb/sec to my Macbook Pro. The discrepency is due to having a four-antenna AC router, the Macbook Air however only supports two, and MBP three.

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