Internet50 continuously limited between 2.5 to 1.2 Mbps

[BigPowNow]

So like most people latetly I'm working from home.  Since I've had my Telus service in this house (3yrs) it's been life with small kids (meaning I have hardly been watching any streaming shows, so my internet habits are limited to mostly a few emails and light online shopping activities.  My service has seemed passable, but bordering on too slow...but I never "checked."  A little while ago (maybe 1yr) I got offered a free upgrade to Internet50 and a new modem.  Was able to coordinate my wife's day off work to meet the tech.  Nice guys, things seemed fine...but honestly I could never tell the difference from the prior Internet25. 

Now that'd I've got this home office going these days, I've been running daily speed tests in the background.  I peak with burst up to 2.5 Mbps, and my sustained (for what it's worth) is 1.0-1.2 Mbps.  Running the Telus speedtest is shows 2.5 Mbps continuous.  Like OMFG are you kidding me...that's way off!!!

So I try to get this resolved tonight after purchasing a show through Apple store on my old 3rd Gen AppleTV and the **bleep** movie is saying 5.5 Hrs to download before I can start watching!!! That's total garbage.  Going through the Telus RobotChat I see my minimum speed before I have a "problem" is 38MBps...hello that's 15x faster than what I'm getting.  Hell if I was getting 10Mbps I would be a happy guy...but 1.0 MBps come-on now...this is 2020 not 1998.

No online agents on a Sunday night with COVID-19 in the air.  I'm sure they are all happily streaming their movies on a Sunday night while I'm bent over plugging wires and forking over dough for glorified dial-up.  I'm going to have nightmares with my old 56K modem dial-up noise "crackle-crackle-bing-boing-ga-boing-now-nowww".

End rant...seriously wtf Telus!

[Nighthawk]

I would recommend calling tech support. For connection or speed issues you would lose the chat partway through the troubleshooting and have to start over.

[FuzzyLogic]

You didn't say where you are running the speedtests. Are you running it directly on the router or from a wireless device? There can be a significant difference between the two. If it's wireless you may need to get a wifi booster. If it's from the router you will need to talk to Telus.

[BigPowNow]

Thanks FuzzyLogic,

I ran them from my high-end work desktop, with a 100Mbps wired link to my WiFi Bridge.  From your suggestion I did some digging and found the speedtest under the admin pages of the router.  It tested 55Mbps!!! ^_^...  After that I ran speedtests from an Apple MacBook (2012) laptop, iPhone 6, and they were all hitting the 50-55Mbps speeds...so hurray!

Now I'm eating my words now as the problem is mine...it's limited to everything connected via my WiFi Bridge that is choked back to 1.0-2.5 Mbps...user error indeed! FYI all my high-demand items:  AppleTV (gen3), Sony Blu-Ray player, and my office PC are all patched-in with wired connections to my WiFi Bridge (Linksys WES610N, hardware v.1.0, firmware 1.05), which has a dual band internal antenna and is advertised with 300 Mbps throughput (whatever that means) so I never though this was the weak link...turns out it is.

After that I played for hours with my WiFi settings at my home entertainment hub's WiFi Bridge and the Telus router [T3200M, Firmware: 31.164L.18 (loaded by ACS on 12/07/2018) ].    Somehow it's only connecting to the 2.4Ghz antenna on the Telus router and the Bridge doesn't display a "full-duplex" connection type in the router's WiFi mapping.  I tinkered to force it onto the 5 GHz band via MAC steering on the router but this just broke the connection to the Bridge.  Looks like the Bridge will only stay with the 2.4 GHz connection.   

Although the Bridges' UI is garbage, I did notice that the Status pages does infact "update" and it is showing an unstable link to the router (see images below).  Fluctuating between 6.5 MBps to 65 Mbps.  FYI the Bridge is about 30 ft away from the router with direct line-of-sight...just have a finished basement with no easy way to route an ethernet cable across the kids play room!!!

Anybody with the skills to assist with setting a Linksys WES610N settings?  FYI I have my Linksys E4200 router still lying around, I stopped using it when we switched off Shaw's in favour of Telus, can it be plugged into the T3200M without causing issues?  Also we have two WiFi ranger boosters from Telus... So I'm worried all these WiFi devices would not play nice together? 

Thanks in advance!

[BigPowNow]

I see elsewhere on this board I've found the ability to switch my T3200M router's port 1 into a Bridge mode (https://forum.telus.com/t5/Home/Bridge-Mode-Using-Your-Own-Router/ta-p/52181 ), which would let me switch and resurrect my Lynksys E4200's antenna's which should provide the needed compatibility to eek out all the performance from my Lynksys WES610N bridging device.

It's not my first choice as I recall needing to periodically cycle power to that Lynksys router occaisonally...which I've not yet needed to do for the Telus router.  But maybe that was more of a Shaw problem with how they rolled out their IP leases which needed a force device reset to re-aquire settings in a timely fashion. 

Does anyone know of any T3200M antenna settings/parameters to tinker which to improve connectivity to the WES610N Bridge?

[FuzzyLogic]

Sounds like some progress is being made. I had lot's of problems with poor wifi from the T3200M in our 2 story concrete condo. I installed assorted powerline adapters, including a wifi extender, and have been pretty happy with the results.

[BigPowNow · Accepted solution]

I have solved my speed issues with my Bridge.  As this may affect other users too, not ones limited to my specific Linksys WES610N, I'm posting this to complete this thread (to make up for my earlier Telus bashing...).

The fix was a setting-change on the Telus router (T3200M):

The key was the Channel Width parameter, it was defaulted to 20 MHz for 5G ... same frequency bandwidth as the 2.4G signal... I then looked up my WES610N's specs (shown below) and found that 5G ought to be 40MHz and changed the parameter accordingly.

For good measure, as I have no 5GHz 802.11ac devices, I dropped the compatibility for it off that second drop-down menu, and limited it to only A and N.  I changed both variables at once, maybe a no-no, but it worked so I won't go back and increase the compatibility options. 

Finally at last I get internet download speeds in the rated range to my work computer (~41 Mbps)...I would assume then that media devices also hardwired into my WiFi Bridge will have better throughput now!

My last resort would have been to turn-off SmartSteering and have separate SSID's for each 2.4GHz & 5GHz radio, but since I also have the range extenders, that would give 4 SSIDs total for the house, and the need to train (i.e. sign-into) all 4 on every device to be sure things went smoothly.  No-thanks not how I want to spend my 1 hour of daily free time after the kids are asleep before it's my turn!

Hope this helps somebody else...RTFM as they say!

[xray]

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@BigPowNow wrote:

The key was the Channel Width parameter, it was defaulted to 20 MHz for 5G ... same frequency bandwidth as the 2.4G signal... I then looked up my WES610N's specs (shown below) and found that 5G ought to be 40MHz and changed the parameter accordingly.

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Some comments

1. Using a 40 MHz channel width on 5G forces some older 5 GHz devices that don't support a wide channel to use the 2.4 GHz frequency. This will reduce congestion on the 5G frequency but those devices that drop to 2.4GHz will have a slower connection.
2. 20 Mhz channel width on 5G can easily support 50 Mbps speeds so the wider channel width isn't necessarily the direct cause of the improvement. See next comment.
3. Changing the channel width likely triggered the router to choose a different channel on the 5Ghz band. This could mean better or worse speeds depending on the channel traffic in your general vacinity. I suspect it chose a better channel.
4. I believe the T3200M defaults to auto channel selection. The channel it selects could change at any time. Make note of the current channel it's using on the settings page. If you find the connection speed changes in the future have a look to see if are using a different channel. You may want to override the auto setting and force it to use a specific channel.
5. The best channel may change over time as your neighbors buy replace/add devices. Their routers which are on auto channel selection will also adapt by switching channels. It's a vicious cycle.