Good connection, lousy web page loading speeds

DocWagon1776

Honorable
Jan 28, 2014
4
0
10,510
I'm at wit's end on this. I have a Motorola Surfboard SBG6580. I know the wireless range sucks from other reviews, but I wanted the four ports. I have a Playstation hooked up to one port, a Gateway FX laptop hooked up to another, and an older wireless router (Netgear WGR614 v9) hooked to the 3rd. The Netgear tops out at about 19 mbps, but it feeds a Roku, a Kindle, and a Samsung Tab.

With the laptop hooked directly to the Surfboard via LAN cable, speedtest.net shows about 60mbps up and 12 down, 30 ms ping. However web pages take forever to load. When they finally do load, they load almost instantly, but I often have to hit refresh multiple times to get it to load. Right now I'm on wireless and speedtest shows 18 up and 11 down with a 37 ms ping (limited by the older Netgear router, I'm sure).

My wife complains her tablet is also inconsistent on the wireless, as does my son on his Kindle. However the Playstation always runs just fine.

I'm guessing packet loss, but have no idea where to start to address this issue. I turned the wireless off on the Surfboard thinking perhaps there was interference, but it hasn't affected it at all, and that wouldn't account for the problems with the laptop while hard wired.

 
You are correct in your analysis that says it is not your wireless when it does it from the laptop hardwired to the surfboard.

Pretty much you have your modem/router or someplace on the internet connection. To check this run a traceroute to some site. Then open a number of cmd windows and issue a continuous ping command to the first and second ip addresses. You can do more if you like. If you see packet loss or large variations in the latency then you can maybe fix the problem. If it is to the first IP this should be your router gateway address and idicates a issue with the device. You really only have the standard upgrade the firmware trick. If it happens in the second ip this is router on the other end of your connection at the ISP. Problems that start on this hop generally indicate a issue on the wire coming to your house. Ones past there and nice to know but it will take a very long time to get a person at the ISP that understands this since you are troubleshooting a issue withing their internal network or even between ISP.

If you see no issues on the ping commands then you have some issue either in the end devices or something strange like a proxy server in the path. Some crummy ISP force your though a proxy to in theory improve your speed and there is not a good way to detect this. This is just a example it get extremely tough to find this type of one since it really isn't a network problem it is more a application issue.

From you description I still suspect a DNS problem since it may try a primary DNS finally get a failure and then resolve the IP from a secondary which then causes the pages to load. It works until it needs to again ask for a dns resolution. This of course is just a pure guess based on your symptoms.
 

DocWagon1776

Honorable
Jan 28, 2014
4
0
10,510


I'll give it a go. I changed both v4 and v6 settings to Google's DNS service. I don't think its an issue with packet loss between the router and my ISP, as the Playstation would suffer the same issues when gaming online, and it always runs great.

I'm wondering if its not an issue with packet routing. If there are multiple devices running, that's when it gets very inconsistent. Two tablets running Hulu or Youtube shouldn't eat up enough of the 60mbps download speed to effect it.
 

DocWagon1776

Honorable
Jan 28, 2014
4
0
10,510
Problem has been solved. It was two fold.

One was the power on the incoming channels were out of spec. All channels were at about 10.0 dBmV. The Surfboard doesn't like anything over 8.0 per Motorola. Comcast fixed this issue. This helped and everything on the ethernet cables ran fine, but the wireless range still sucked. I up'd it from 20 mhz to 40 mhz and played with the control channels until I found the one with the least interference. Now both wireless and wired connections are fine.