Puzzling wireless inconsistency

[uncfan_2563]

Hey guys, I'm having a problem that's just stumped me for the last two months. I'm usually pretty good at computer related stuff but I spend most of my time here in the cpu/gpu sections so I'm really in need of some help.

To the problem.. I used to have a nice networking setup until my dad swapped out mine for his.. He gave me his combined router/modem (think it's a SBG941 SURFboard). Anyways, I've been having trouble with it because whenever I try to speedtest it I usually get good results (atleast relative to the problem I'm having) with the minimum being 14mbps and max at 25mbps. However, it seems that somehow that's not translating in to actual usage.. A lot of the time my network has a hard time browsing to sites, if I want to watch a flash video I'll have to refresh the page a few times to get the flash applet to actually load, and whenever I try to torrent my whole internet basically, sorry for the language, just eats *** and collapses. I understand enough about networking to realize this isn't a router as good as the dualband N apple router I had but I think it should be good enough that this problem shouldn't be happening. Any suggestions and help would be well appreciated.. :/

 

[fewquestions]

hey i got similiar issue with a netgear dualband r6300 router can't figure out the issue so hopefully someone can help us out, speed test goes good but youtube videos i sit and wait for buffer throughout videos cant even watch any tutorials or anything on there

 

[eibgrad]

The fact your old/prior router did not exhibit this behavior would suggest it's the router, although it's not obvious what specifically in the router that might be. I suppose it might be QoS (Quality of Service) controls perhaps manipulating the traffic. So if you have that feature, disable it.

Btw, anytime you have the advantage of a separate modem and router, always test w/ and w/o the router to see if it is the router.

Another possibility might be the ISP. It's possible they’re managing traffic flow w/ their own QoS, or perhaps redirecting you to a proxy. In order to cut down on traffic to the Internet, some ISPs will cache popular content locally (YouTube being a common target), so you’re not going to YouTube at all, but a local proxy. All well and good *if* that proxy isn’t itself overloaded or having problems, or perhaps using some sort of QoS controls of its own.

So lots of possibilities here, both w/ things you and don’t control. And really hard to pin down the cause, esp. if you can compare one router to another, or only have a combo modem+router device. Some ISPs are also sneaky in letting your bandwidth tests go through unmolested (so it always looks good), then managing your normal traffic. So they might allow you a 15Mbps initial “boost”, then steadily cut you back within a given connection to stretch resources. Of course, this sucks for you, put they don’t care. And most ppl are none the wiser because every time they do a speedtest, it all appears normal. Clever, eh!

 

[uncfan_2563]

In terms of narrowing it down, I can say that I have tried hooking in directly via a wired connection and not gotten much better results. Which would suggest it's the modem aspect of the system. However.

Also puzzling is the fact that I get really subpar local FTP performance..