Why Is My Download Speed so Terrible at Home?
There is nothing I love more than troubleshooting my internet connection. I am also very pleased to note the stupidity of the plans that we pay for monthly access and take note of all the nonsense and bureaucracy that you have to deal with, no matter which service provider you use.
With that preamble, this week’s Tech 911 letter came from Lifehacker reader Ben . He’s writing:
Sir, I currently have an Internet-only Charter Spectrum. I am using the provided non-wireless router and then plugging in my Tp-Link Archer C20 AC750 dual band wireless router to provide 2.5 and 5 GHz wireless connectivity. I live in Reno, Nevada. My question is, what can I do to improve my download speed? My download speed is somewhere around 32 megabytes per second, but my download speed is still 2.8.
Please help.
Sincerely,
Trying to get up in Reno.
It’s all about the money and the pipe
Ben, I love your signature. This is good news. The bad news is that a router is probably not an issue here, although you do get some pretty mech speeds if you don’t pay for a pretty cheap internet plan. (I covered a lot of ways to troubleshoot problems that part of the equation, so take a read to make sure that your router is the best thing that can.)
You see, your download speed is usually much, much slower than your download speed. It shouldn’t come as a surprise if you read the fine print when purchasing an internet plan.
Take, for example, the way a company like Cox highlights its various plans:
There is a very specific reason why Cox indicates “download” speed rather than overall internet speed or simply “speed” in general. This would mean that the upload and download speeds were equal, which is not the case. With his plans, Cox promises that you will get up to a certain download speed (no guarantee that you will be at maximum), and this conveniently obscures all mention of the limits of his places on the download speed.
You have to dig a bit to get this information, but Cox does list individual upload / download restrictions elsewhere. Here’s an example of what it looks like:
As you can see, the maximum download speed (and again, this is the best scenario, not the average) is only a fraction of the maximum download speed. This will not always be a straight 10 percent cut; some plans give you slightly more download speed percentage, and some plans give you less.
Even though you are using Charter and not Cox, the problem is the same for most internet plans and providers – except when you pay for a home tier plan that guarantees fast download speeds (usually anything from 500 Mbps + upload speed), fiber optic service (which may offer the same upload and download speeds), or business-class data plan.
Why is this so? Well, most people just use the Internet to download, upload, and download anything else. The amount they download is much, much larger than what they download, so it makes a lot more sense that your ISP’s capabilities reflect what people are likely to do with their services. After all, the available network bandwidth is not infinite .
If you’re curious about the technical details, I love this old description I found on the Linus Tech Tips forum that might help you figure out why your download speeds aren’t that fast. From the post:
“The cable plant is all the homes and businesses that use one headend. Every connection on the cable network is broadcast – your modem actually receives every bit of data that other modems are downloading, as well as every bit of data that someone else downloads (communication between the modem and the headend is encrypted). This is more than anything else why your internet speed slows down in the early evening. During the installation of a cable plant, you must decide how large or small it will be. Let’s say a new neighborhood of 1000 houses is being built – how many individual cable factories are you installing? 10, 100 houses each? 4, each 250? The cable company has to decide now, when laying the coaxial cable, because splitting it in the future is very expensive – more expensive than splitting it now, but they don’t want to spend a lot of money now. This is the first place where the cable company can trick you. If they think the area will become less affluent, they will put more houses on one network than the average. If they think this is going to be a very affluent area, they will put fewer houses than the average on each network.
In addition, during the installation of the cable network, you must decide how the available bandwidth (after deducting TV services) will be divided between downloads and downloads. If you allocate too much bandwidth for the download, it will not be used. Commit too little and you end up causing congestion. I don’t have the data to confirm this, but my own experience with an ISP shows that usually downloaded traffic is 10-15% of downloads – and this even with the removal of bandwidth restrictions (sometimes our system is a little controversial about the application of the download limit ). At some point, all cable companies settled at around 35 MHz for downloads for residential applications and even more for areas where more business use is expected. The reason this has to be addressed when installing a cable network is because the amount of traffic to be loaded has to be set in the amplifiers. Amplifiers must not only boost downstream traffic to users, but also must boost upstream download traffic back to the headend. If you don’t set it up correctly, you will seriously mess up your signals. Therefore, after installing the cable network, you need to reconfigure or replace every amplifier in the entire area to increase the download speed. “
That’s a lot to digest. But the simple truth remains that more people are downloading data than downloading it. And while it would be great if you had fast, consistent download speeds with a lot of overhead to host your own web server or BitTorrent, well, your ISP probably doesn’t want that to happen.
At least not until you pay your ISP for the privilege of doing so, whether in the form of a better home plan or business-grade service. And there is no guarantee that any of them will provide you with the download speed you want; Comcast’s Business Class service does not instantly unlock download speeds comparable to your fast downloads. It might be slightly faster to load than the residential level plan depending on your region, but not in large numbers.
And this is the state of the Internet for you in 2020. It would be great if we all had a fiber optic service that gave us incredibly fast Internet access, period. Until this blessed day, you should be clear about what you are paying for: how fast it works in all directions, how much you can use (even if it is “unlimited”) before being charged for convenience. , and any other related additional fees (for example, the cost of renting a modem / router).
Scan everything in fine print when you receive service, call the company for details, take a close look at your first few invoices, and quickly deal with any unexpected surprises. Isn’t that fun?