Comcast, DOCSIS 3.0, and Extreme 50Mb

I upgraded to Comcast's "Extreme 50Mb" service over this holiday break. It's been a bit of a learning experience.

Scenario: I previously had Comcast's 16Mb cable internet service, running on a circa-2005 Linksys BEFCMU10 ver. 3 modem. I had a wireless-G Linksys WRT54GS ver. 4 router running Tomato firmware instead of the Linksys firmware. I was happy with this setup; I consistently achieved 24Mb download bursts with PowerBoost, and my connection was rock solid. However, it was admittedly an outdated setup, as all of my wireless devices were capable of supporting the 802.11n standard.

When Comcast rolled out its speed upgrades in the Chicago area mid-2009, somehow I missed the bus. Had I heard about the DOCSIS 3.o rollout and the higher speed tiers available, you know I would have jumped - me and my speed-obsessed self. (In my own self defense, I do quite a bit of work from home that requires a solid and fast internet connection in order for me to work most efficiently).

I stumbled across the news of this DOCSIS 3.0 rollout a bit late, when my guild leader in Ultima Online mentioned it in the guild's daily update. I poked around the intarwebs a bit, and sure enough - the new Extreme 50Mb connection was available in my area.

I called Comcast and verified that I could upgrade to the service. The woman advised me to replace my old modem with a DOCSIS 3.0 compliant one, and let me know that Comcast employees were available in most Best Buy stores to handle account modifications on-site. Well, alrighty then! Sounds like a nice business partnership for Comcast...

Best Buy carried one model of DOCSIS 3.0 compliant modems: the Motorola SURFBoard Extreme SB6120. It was listed on the Comcast Approved Modem list, and marked by Comcast as a DOCSIS 3.0 modem. It cost me $99. (Of course now, a week later, it's on sale for $85 - pshaw).

It took ages to get a Best Buy employee to acknowledge me, but after half an hour or so (they really need to have people take numbers, because the idiot children working at the store I was at were absolutely awful at addressing customers in the order they arrived), I finally got a rep. I asked him about upgrading my Comcast account. He said that the Comcast guy was on his lunch break. (Well, I'd already been waiting a half hour - he couldn't be gone much longer, right?) So, I asked if my existing router would be capable of these 50Mb speeds. I told him the model number, and he said, "Oh, sure, it'll be fine." I waited a while for the Comcast guy to return, and when he did, he brought me over to his Comcast lair and upgraded my account, badabing, badaboom, just like that.

I went home and set up the new modem. Surprisingly, my internet connection was still working. (I guess I was expecting the Comcast guy at Best Buy to screw up my account). I got on the online chat with Comcast to give them the MAC address of the new modem so they could provision my router and hook me up to the new speeds. 10 minutes later, I was ready to rock.

Time to run a speed test! I ran the test and....

Waa waaaaaaa. 30Mb or so. Well hell. That wasn't much faster than I'd had before! Suddenly, I became suspect of the advice I received from the Best Buy kiddie. I unplugged my computer from the router and plugged the cable modem directly into the computer.

BAZINGA! 67Mb down (affected by the PowerBoost, or whatever Comcast calls it, of course).

Well, hell again. Looked like my router was impeding my speeds. A little more googling and I discovered that at least for the wireless portion of things, the 802.11g routers topped out around 24Mb throughput. I would need a new router to take advantage of the 50Mb speeds.

I ran back to Best Buy, but they were closed (at 8:13pm on a Friday!! Well, it was New Year's Day, but still!) So I sucked up my pride and hit the local Walmart (and was quite surprised that they stocked routers from all of the major brand players. Maybe I shouldn't be so fast to dismiss ol' Wally World).

The Linksys WRT320N came home with me that night. It claims up to 300Mb/sec throughput, which should future-proof me for a little while, as my modem only goes up to 150Mb/sec and, well, Comcast is only at 50Mb (though the Comcast guy at Best Buy did say that they're working on 100Mb service and he wouldn't be surprised to see it available by the end of 2010 - though he told me not to quote him).

After some more cable-jostling, the new router was installed, and once again: Bazinga! No more speed impediment.

I was a happy camper.

The only thing I'm noticing is that the router seems to need to be power cycled occasionally to maintain the full speeds. After a couple days, I drop down to 30Mb. I was ready to call Comcast in a fit and revert back to my old service, but I tried once again connecting the modem to the computer, and full speeds were in place. Power cycling the router does the trick, but it's kind of a nuisance (and I'm really not so happy if I have to keep testing my speeds every couple days). We'll see how it goes.

Faster Internet on Leopard?

Check out my internet speeds since switching to Leopard. Under Tiger (and Windows Vista), I was pulling about 15000 kbps down on a good day and pushing around 1000 kbps up. I haven't changed my internet provider (Comcast). Haven't changed any internet settings in the OS - all is set as the defaults that were installed. Tested at www.speakeasy.net/speedtest, Chicago server.

SO much better

Not only has the reliability of web page loading gone up infinitely since switching to the new VoIP phone adapter, but my speeds have increased significantly.

I'm pulling 17,697 kbps down and pushing 1,577 kbps upstream, according to Speakeasy's Speed Test.

So happy!

Replaced my old Vonage box

So, I replaced my old Vonage phone box (a clunky old Motorola thing) with a new Linksys VoIP phone adapter (much smaller and easier to set up).

No internet lag since.

I got the Linksys PAP2 ver. 2.

That didn't do it

Well, the Vista net connection fix I posted in my last message didn't solve my problem. I still have occasionally awful lag on the web, despite tests showing me getting full bandwidth.

I'm currently testing a new theory: that my old Vonage phone box is slowing me down.

I have one of the first Motorola Vonage phone boxes - before Vonage came packaged inside Linksys cable modems. Currently, the Vonage box lives outside of my LAN. My network goes - internal LAN --> wireless router --> cable modem --> Vonage box.

Right now, I've disconnected the Vonage box, and I'm just running with the cable modem and the router. I'm hard-wired via RJ45 jack on this particular PC (the one with the problems), so as to rule out all wireless issues.

The good news is, even if the problem is with my phone box, a new Linksys Vonage phone adapter is only $50. I was fearing much worse.

Honestly, I hope this is the problem so I can get back to carefree surfing. I pay an arm and a leg for my internet service - I'd like to use it without suffering the urge to punch the screen or throw my tower out the window!

Slow loading web pages with Vista

"Slow and low - that is the tempo!"

Ahh, yes, but Sir Beasties, not when it comes to my internet connection!

I've been having some issues with my internet connection since upgrading to Vista Business Edition last December. Web pages routinely take 8-10 seconds to load, and sometimes don't load at all. Or, sometimes they're fine (this blog input page loaded in .520 seconds - nice). By "slow loading" I mean, the pages display the "waiting for whatever.com" in the status bar, but hang at that point. The domain name is getting resolved, so I don't suspect DNS problems (though I did try both Comcast's DNS servers and the OpenDNS servers, to no avail).

When this does happen, it is generally without a pattern. It doesn't always happen, and it doesn't always happen on the same sites. Clicking refresh multiple times will eventually "catch" and the page will load at it's proper speed. When I am unable to load a page, if I do a speed test on my connection, it's wide open, getting full bandwidth (I'm on cable and typically pull 8,000 - 12,000 mb/sec).

I tried troubleshooting all the usual suspects. Disabled all of my Firefox browser add-on's. Disabled my virus scanner (I use AVG - though I've read that McAfee Antivirus was causing page loading problems on some Toshiba and Gateway computers, and that removing McAffee fixed the problem). Ran a spyware check. Tried IE versus Firefox to see if this was browser related. None affected my intermittently slow internet connection, which for once didn't look like it was being caused by Comcast.

I found an article via Google that explains how Microsoft's new network stack in Vista is not RFC 1323 compliant. To quote the article:

In a nutshell, websites that don't fully support RFC 1323 or the default Windows Scaling factor of 8 will be very slow or even unaccessible.

See also: Microsoft Knowledge Base article 929868 on the topic, Specs of RFC1323

The article lists a couple options to try:

1. allow the autotuning level to grow beyond its default value when absolutely necessary

Start - Run - type cmd - CTRL-SHIFT-ENTER to bring up console with Administrator privileges. Type:

netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=highlyrestricted

2. disable autotuning altogether.

netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=disable

If you need to set autotuning back to normal:

netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=normal

Reboot to enable the changes.

I'm not sure this is the solution, but I'm trying it now. I'm a bit more optimistic than I was when reading the usual canned level 1 tech support answers of "check for spyware" and "disable virus scanners."