Computer experts?

[kbjohn]

It seems I am having an issue with the speed of my internet. Some background information is I live on the outskirts of town, Telus is my internet provider. ADSL I think is what they call it. I use a wireless router for my computer.My kid was trying to play a few games online it is too slow and cuts it off. Same as the PS3 it is too slow. The wireless router says it is good up to 10mb/s but when I run a speed check program on the computer is tells me my internet is running at 1.34 mb/s download speed well below the national average. Any ideas?

[Bound2Fish]

Call telus and get them to diagnose and fix it. It is usually caused by their sub-par modems.

[kbjohn]

Got to the bottom of it. Seems unless you call Telus they just give you a basic plan....I phoned them and within 10 mins I got double the speed for the same price....Funny how that works.

[Fish-killer]

Originally Posted by kbjohn

It seems I am having an issue with the speed of my internet. Some background information is I live on the outskirts of town, Telus is my internet provider. ADSL I think is what they call it. I use a wireless router for my computer.My kid was trying to play a few games online it is too slow and cuts it off. Same as the PS3 it is too slow. The wireless router says it is good up to 10mb/s but when I run a speed check program on the computer is tells me my internet is running at 1.34 mb/s download speed well below the national average. Any ideas?

Go to www.speedtest.net Runt eh test from calgary.

1.34Mb is not fast enough for games and internet browsing.

Also you have to port forward the PS3 or xbox your using.

I have telus and I get about 8Mb/second.

I'm sorry your only choice is Telus. I'm switching over to shaw. Got my landlord to switch to the 100Mb Down and 5Mb up!

Standard is 15Mb, That should fix your problem.

Also How many things are connected on your network? Are you sure none of your kids is downloading or streaming videos while your on the internet?

End of the story is you don't have enough BANDWIDTH!

[Fish-killer]

Originally Posted by kbjohn

Got to the bottom of it. Seems unless you call Telus they just give you a basic plan....I phoned them and within 10 mins I got double the speed for the same price....Funny how that works.

Only thing there going to suggest is to upgrade to a faster plan!
Nothing wrong on his end.

Reason he is getting bumped off is because not enough bandwidth or to many users are connect to the router, You can change that in the telus modem settings.

The default IP address for a Telus router is 192.168.1.254. The default username is blank and i don’t mean type in blank, just leave the field blank, the username could also be admin and the default password is telus or Wireless.

Hope this helps

[rhuntley12]

If you are talking internet gaming, such as xbox and what not 1.5 MB is plenty. I regularly game on a 1 MB connection.

Gaming is more reliant on latency, you can have a 100mb connection but if the latency sucks the gaming will suck.

Anyway, if you are on DSL you should be getting way better then 1.5MB.

As mentioned above go to speedtest.net and run the test. There are three things at the top, Ping time, download speed and upload speed. The ping is really important and should be under 100MS.

[Whiskey Wish]

And what about "throttling" ?
Both Bell and Rogers have recently been busted by the CRTC for throttling and have been forced to cease and desist by years end. Both have said they will "begin" to cease and desist in June with full compliance by end of year.

If Bell and Rogers were doing it you can bet the other majors are doing it as well.

If I understand the news release properly the CRTC had the assistance (sounded like grudgingly) of Cisco Systems in the investigation and that Cisco stands to benefit from increased equipment sales to the major ISP's because they will need to upgrade their equipment in order to comply.

Anyone understand this better than I do and if this might be part of the OP's issue?
Regards,
Dave.

[insurgus]

Frankly, 1M download is more than enough for most average users and you won’t typically see that slow of internet “browsing” unless something else is going on. Typically, when I’m called to a site to investigate slow internet speeds, I’ll look at a few things such as

1. Is someone using bittorrent to download music or movies?
2. Are one of the machines infected with a virus that may be using bandwidth?
3. Could there be unauthorized users on the network doing any of the above?

In areas where you have a lot of wireless, it takes a money on a typewriter to hack into it and start leeching internet. I’d make sure you don’t have any open windows first of all

Increasing your line speed may fix the problem in the short run, but if you have any issues with viruses, unauthorized users or bastard children downloading sh!t, you may have to go Chuck Norris on someones ass.

[dpoisson]

Originally Posted by kbjohn

It seems I am having an issue with the speed of my internet. Some background information is I live on the outskirts of town, Telus is my internet provider. ADSL I think is what they call it. I use a wireless router for my computer.My kid was trying to play a few games online it is too slow and cuts it off. Same as the PS3 it is too slow. The wireless router says it is good up to 10mb/s but when I run a speed check program on the computer is tells me my internet is running at 1.34 mb/s download speed well below the national average. Any ideas?

Quick Computers 101 basics
Computers talk with 0's and 1's. A spot in memory used to save either a 0 or a 1 is called a bit.
8 bits = 1 Byte

They say your modem is good for 10 Mbit or 10 Mb (and I'll spell it out) megabits (10 000 000bits, or 10 million 0's or 1's).
The site you visited that gave your your internet speed likely told you your speed in megabytes/second. Since there's 8 bits per byte, you take 1.34 megabytes/s * 8 and you end up close to your original stated speed of 10 megabits (there is a certain marging caused by the way they calculate your speed, so 1.34 megabytes isn't 100% accurate, but a good indicator).

Edit Remember also that the capacity of the 10 megabits is for all supported devices. If there's 5 people downloading from the internet, for sure it's going to be real slow for everyone. You can only send a limited amount of data through the pipe!

As the name states, the A in ADSL stands for Asynchronous. Meaning, you download a lot faster than you can upload. You can download a movie fairly fast, but the time it takes to send requests to download a movie takes forever (exagerated to illustrate a point).

I would check your papers for your internet provider: Do they garantee a certain minimum speed? ADSL isn't that fast if I remember correct, but you should be able to play games online. Maybe something on your end is the bottleneck (is your computer slow/outdated, graphics card old, etc)?

Cheers,

Fish

[Whiskey Wish]

Just for poops and giggles I went to speedtest and checked my connection. Here are my results.

Ping 45 ms
Download 1.10 Mbps
Upload 0.22 Mbps

I am with Xplornet subscribed to their "Residential Express" service but I cannot find any description of what my connection is "supposed" to be.
Regards,
Dave.

[insurgus]

Originally Posted by Whiskey Wish

And what about "throttling" ?
Both Bell and Rogers have recently been busted by the CRTC for throttling and have been forced to cease and desist by years end. Both have said they will "begin" to cease and desist in June with full compliance by end of year.

If Bell and Rogers were doing it you can bet the other majors are doing it as well.

If I understand the news release properly the CRTC had the assistance (sounded like grudgingly) of Cisco Systems in the investigation and that Cisco stands to benefit from increased equipment sales to the major ISP's because they will need to upgrade their equipment in order to comply.

Anyone understand this better than I do and if this might be part of the OP's issue?
Regards,
Dave.

Bell, Rogers, Telus, Verizon, AT&T you name it. The reason they throttle is because digital traffic is all the same on their network. Voice, email, downloads, web browsing, tv etc etc etc.

They wern't really ready for smartphones in the capacity they became, in the time frame it happened. so they started to throttle high usage customers to make room for the rest of the people. Internet traffic on cell networks uses far more bandwidth than voice traffic, and that was the reason behind their move.

Internet service providers typically only throttle you if you have one of the 3 conditions I noted above, however Telus is one of the few that won't. They really don't care. Shaw runs on a "shared" environment where 10 users share the connection to their neighbourhood. Telus is a direct, "private" connection where the speed of other users does not impact you. So if you're connection is being eaten up by something, they (shaw) will lock you down so you don't impact the other users on the shared infastructure.

.02

[insurgus]

Originally Posted by Whiskey Wish

Just for poops and giggles I went to speedtest and checked my connection. Here are my results.

Ping 45 ms
Download 1.10 Mbps
Upload 0.22 Mbps

I am with Xplornet subscribed to their "Residential Express" service but I cannot find any description of what my connection is "supposed" to be.
Regards,
Dave.

Sounds about right. You may want to call them and see if you can get their High Speed or High Speed Turbo connections out there. I would suspect 6Mbps would be more than enough for what you want to do, unless you spend a lot of time downloading music and other goodies.

I run a 50mbit shaw line here, and 1,000mbit in the datacenter and I can tell you that I rarely even scratch 2.5 on the home line unless I'm transfering data to the work network.

http://www.telus.com/content/internet/high-speed/

Packages listed above for alberta.

[Whiskey Wish]

Originally Posted by insurgus

Sounds about right. You may want to call them and see if you can get their High Speed or High Speed Turbo connections out there. I would suspect 6Mbps would be more than enough for what you want to do, unless you spend a lot of time downloading music and other goodies.

I run a 50mbit shaw line here, and 1,000mbit in the datacenter and I can tell you that I rarely even scratch 2.5 on the home line unless I'm transfering data to the work network.

http://www.telus.com/content/internet/high-speed/

Packages listed above for alberta.

Thanks for the info. I am actually pretty happy with my internet speed and service. I download very little of anything and about the only time I find myself wishing for more speed is when I am watching a TED.com video presentation.

Xplornet is making noise about a new and faster service "coming soon to your area" calling it a 4G Satellite connection. I think I will wait and see what the costs and service results are like before I jump on the bandwagon.
Thanks again.
Dave.

[rhuntley12]

Originally Posted by Whiskey Wish

Thanks for the info. I am actually pretty happy with my internet speed and service. I download very little of anything and about the only time I find myself wishing for more speed is when I am watching a TED.com video presentation.

Xplornet is making noise about a new and faster service "coming soon to your area" calling it a 4G Satellite connection. I think I will wait and see what the costs and service results are like before I jump on the bandwagon.
Thanks again.
Dave.

Guessing you live in the country if using Xplornet? We use platinum and it's advertised at 3 but really only get 1.5. It's plenty for 2 people on our network playing online games.