Bandwidth problems

December 2, 2008 1:55 PM

I have a Business Cox Internet account which is supposed to be 6mb/s down and 768kb/s up. The problem is that it never comes close to providing those speeds. I spent about an hour on the phone yesterday with a tech support guy. It was a terrible circular discussion that hinged completely on speakeasy's bandwidth test. His position was that since speakeasy's results showed that I was getting the proper amount of bandwidth everything was fine.

I have several servers that sit on PureGig's backbone here in Phoenix. I also have some domains hosted at DreamHost . Despite my servers being somewhat robust and having an insane amount of bandwidth available to them, I can not download from them at speeds greater than 800 kb/s. A mere tenth of the bandwidth I am paying for. It is the same when pulling stuff from DreamHost.

On top of that I started looking at my download speeds for things like Firefox updates and other large files. None of them achieve speeds over 800 kb/s and virtually all of them peak out at about 150 kb/s.

So a tech guy comes out this morning and does the speakeasy test and says everything is fine. I show him example after example of real world speeds that never exceeded 800 kb/s. He just kept saying but the Speakeasy test shows that you are getting the bandwidth you are supposed to.

In a perfect world downloading the latest version of Firefox should take no more than 10 seconds, however it consistently takes almost 6 minutes. I know that it will never be 10 seconds but 6 minutes? Speakeasy tests before and after downloads continue to show over 6000 kb/s.

The only possible explanation I can come up with is that Cox is throttling traffic from everywhere but speakeasy. What tools are there out there that can help me figure out what is happening between a remote machine and my office computer?

I want to be able to show them hard evidence that their network is the culprit.

posted by Mr_Zero to computers & internet (16 comments total)

Are you sure you're not mixing up bit/s and bytes/s?

6Mb/s (mega-bits per second) is about 750 kilo-bytes/s
posted by RustyBrooks at 2:08 PM on December 2, 2008

So you are saying that I should max out at 600 KB/s instead of 6000 KB/s?
posted by Mr_Zero at 2:17 PM on December 2, 2008

Speakeasy shows over 6000 kbps.
posted by Mr_Zero at 2:19 PM on December 2, 2008

It's not just you. At Comcast I get absurdly high results on bandwidth tests (25mb down, 6mb up) while my real-world throughput is throttled to 750kB down, 120kB up.
posted by bunnytricks at 2:19 PM on December 2, 2008

RustyBrooks has it. that's 6 megabits, not 6 megabytes per second. Your speed seems fine.

See here for a calculator.
posted by autojack at 2:20 PM on December 2, 2008

I want to be able to show them hard evidence that their network is the culprit.

While you're at it, you should rush into their board room and hurl a sledge hammer through their gigantic screen.

Seriously, it's Cox. You're not going to convince them that there is a problem with their network. The problem isn't that you can only download at 800 kb/s, the problem is that you're paying for one thing, and expecting another.

You don't pay for bandwidth, you're paying for a package, a service that is marketed to consumers (or small businesses) that theoretically can allow for the speeds advertised, but of course, doesn't always deliver.

You did read the small print didn't you?

Question: Do the packets moving between your computer and Speakeasy travel at the speeds advertised by Cox?

Answer: Yes they do.

Therefore you're provably getting the service you're paying for. Oh, your download from website X isn't going as fast as your tests with Speakeasy? That's your problem, bub. Or the website's problem, or something in between.

I'm not saying that you aren't getting the run around, but I am saying that there is nothing you can do about it except take your business elsewhere (and probably encounter the same problem of a gap between service and expectations.)
posted by wfrgms at 2:21 PM on December 2, 2008

I'm saying you get 6000 kilobits/s but when you download something with firefox, or whatever, it shows you the speed in kiloBYTES/s second. 800 kiloBYTES/s is the fastest speed you should expect to see. Sounds like everything is fine.
posted by RustyBrooks at 2:22 PM on December 2, 2008

First off, I'll second what RustyBrooks said. Most browsers report active download rates in megaBYTES or kiloBYTES per second, and most ISPs describe their offerings in megaBITS per second. There's a eight-fold difference between the two. ~800 kiloBYTES per second is ~6.4 megaBITS per second.

Second, keep in mind that the internet is a network that is only as fast as the slowest connection between two points. You may have a 6 megabit connection, and your servers may be sitting on some ridiculously fat pipe in the data center, but if there is something between the two computers that is only 1.5 megabit, you'll never see anything close to your 6 megabit limit.

Further, the fact you're in the same city as your hosting company doesn't always mean that you've got a close, direct connection to the servers at your host's facility. Here's a good example: I'm on the Gulf Coast in Corpus Christi, TX. One of my clients is five miles up the highway from me, but because of the different upstream providers we use, any data that I send or receive from my client goes through Dallas first, which makes the round trip between about 1000 miles and 30 hops. The more hops you're taking, the greater chance of having a slow link somewhere in the middle.

One last factor is that while the remote host you're talking to may have 100 megabits of bandwidth available, but they've got to share that with every concurrent connection. So when you are downloading files, you will only get a fraction of that bandwidth because there are other people using the bandwidth from the remote host at the same time.
posted by ElDiabloConQueso at 2:24 PM on December 2, 2008

The only thing that saturates my downlink is torrents and downloader programs that use multiple connections.
posted by smackfu at 2:28 PM on December 2, 2008

One thing I forgot to include is that because of the nature of the internet (see my second and fourth paragraphs above), your ISP will only guarantee the speed between a customer and their immediate network.

Beyond that point, they CAN'T guarantee the speed because anything outside of their network is out of their control.
posted by ElDiabloConQueso at 2:41 PM on December 2, 2008

With all respect, I think many of the points raised here are confusing the real cause: the Speakeasy speed test, and the speed Cox is advertising, is 6 megabits per second, or 6000-6144 kilobits per second. The speed your browser is reporting is in kilobytes per second, which you have to multiply by 8 to get kilobits per second. If you're downloading at 800 kilobytes per second, that's 6400 kilobits.

What people are saying about routing, intermediate connections, server speed, and the like is all true, but it's not what's causing this problem for you. 800 kilobytes/sec is a perfectly respectable speed for that connection.
posted by pocams at 2:57 PM on December 2, 2008

You're confusing Kb/KB and Mb/MB. They are not interchangable , so you're off by a factor of 8.

To clarify, 6Mb/s down and 768Kb/s up = 750KB/s down and 96KB up.
posted by wongcorgi at 3:26 PM on December 2, 2008

I see guys. It just turns out that I am an idiot. Thanks for all the help.
posted by Mr_Zero at 4:49 PM on December 2, 2008

It just turns out that I am an idiot.

This is the result of all my askme questions also.
posted by RustyBrooks at 6:36 PM on December 2, 2008 [2 favorites]

To drive home the point that's not yet been made explicit here: lowercase 'b' is used for bits, uppercase 'B' is used for bytes. Notice how everyone above uses b or B as appropriate.

Telecom networks work in bits and bps (bits per second), and that's what the speed test sites report to you. Computers work in bytes and Bps (bytes per second), and that's what your browser reports to you. Just throw in the factor of 8 to convert between them.

The tech support guy was a tool for not explaining this, or he did and you didn't understand, or he's, uh, underqualified for his job.
posted by intermod at 7:40 PM on December 2, 2008

The tech support guy was a tool for not explaining this, or he did and you didn't understand, or he's, uh, underqualified for his job.

He did not explain that.
posted by Mr_Zero at 8:02 PM on December 2, 2008