Service Providers (Internet, TV, Etc)

Returned our old cable stuff to the Comcast office today and brought up the fact we were getting modem rental charges and the guy was like, 'oh it says here you own your own, and it looks like we've been charging you for over a year. Here you go 13 months of credit.' Nice when there's no hassle.

Also the whole place was devoid of Comcast branding, it is all X1 all the time. Between them dropping our bill from $230 to $150, giving us money back for the modem rental, and increasing net speed from 30 to 70 mbps, it is almost like they're trying.

So some questions for you fellas that are probably better at this than me:

I just got Uverse gigapower installed at the house last week. My PCs and laptops are connecting to the service just fine and showing 1gb connections both when wired and with wireless. I don't care so much about the wireless but despite playing around with AT&T's router and my own equipment I just simply cannot seem to get more than ~450mb speeds despite being provisioned for the full 1gb. I've got fiber directly to the house (none of that just to the curb crap), AT&T techs have come out and actually shown me where their connections are good and showing a full 1gb full duplex connection to the house no problem. One of the last techs to come out actually re-did some of the wiring the first tech did because it appeared he had done it backwards (shocker) but that didn't appear to help.

I'm wondering what else I could be missing here at the house that I could do differently before I go all nazi on the company again to see what's up with my speeds. The select few neighbors that also ordered the service (albeit they just got internet instead of internet + TV) are getting 900mb+ (one of which is directly across the street from me). And yeah I'm testing speeds without the TV going and without the feeds even connected for those TVs so there's no way that the video is hogging part of the bandwidth.

I consider myself fairly knowledgeable about networking and tech in general but this one is baffling me and I am not sure if I'm truly overlooking something or if it really is something on AT&T's network/provisioning side preventing me from getting the speeds I'm paying for.

This is all #firstworldproblems of course because no one is really going to notice that much of a difference between 450mb and 800-900mb but whatever, I want it fixed!

Everything in the link from cable to computer 1gbps capable? Using a cat5e cable?

I'm definitely using cat5e and I just ordered some new cat6 cable the end of last week that I was going to test just for shits and giggles. I don't expect it will make a difference as it really shouldn't. The cat5e I have is older though so I figured I'd give that a shot just to try and narrow down the issue and know that component wasn't the bottleneck. It was also cheap to buy and test.

Every NIC, wireless adapter, or LAN port used is 1Gb capable and I don't know of any reason they wouldn't be able to run at that speed. I even played around to force all the network adapters to be in 1Gb mode instead of auto just to see if it made a difference and no dice.

And I do in fact understand the difference between Gb and GB or Mb vs MB. I just got lazy in my post. It's worth mentioning that though because I talk to folks all the time that get it mixed up so thanks!

I work in telecom just not on the installation/network side of things so I guess I feel like I'm smart enough to have covered everything (but something easy could always be overlooked). Perhaps I'm just hoping someone can tell me I'm not off my rocker here and I really should be complaining to the ISP.

LiquidDeath_sl said:

Are you certain your modem is able to handle 1Gb? I know that all but a very few modems currently top out from 450Mb to 650Mb. I think it has to be DOCSIS 3.1 and support 32 channels to do full Gb. 24 channels will only get to 912Mb.

*EDIT* Just looked. All DOCSIS 3.1 modems support gigabit, but only 32x8 DOCSIS 3.0 modems support it fully.

Click to expand...

Yeah I'm (at the moment at least) just using the AT&T provided router/modem which is the same device that my neighbors are using yet their speeds are @ 900Mb+ and mine just consistently hovers at around ~400Mbish.

I got the new cat6 cable in and as expected it didn't make any sort of difference. I guess I'm going to just have to keep contacting AT&T and talking to folks until someone can help me. I'm sort of at a loss.

Do you have access to your modem? Like with my Surfboard I can go directly to the IP, log in, and see all the raw signal data. Something like this screenshot. DSL Reports or Speedtest or some other broadband sites (or your neighbor) may have whatever values you should expect to see and is at least another point of data.

Not saying it'll fix it, and there are other things. But there are a lot of things to compare that could be configured.