Wired speed with 1G speed?

[Tatsu666]

Just switched to Telus 1G from Shaw yesterday, and max speed test on wired connection I can get is about 850. I called tech and he went through the standard procedures, restarting connection and modem, but no improvement. With no other efforts of doing anything else, he simply said "You're getting what we contractually guaranteed, there's nothing further to be done." Is this the best one can expect from Telus? This kind of technical and customer service?

[FuzzyLogic · Accepted solution]

From their website Get Gigabit Internet for only $99 per month | TELUS

"Up to 940 Mbps download and 940 Mbps upload speeds"

"Maximum speeds require optimal network conditions on a wired connection. Internet access speeds may vary depending on location, usage within the home network, internet traffic, user device capability, applicable network management or server configurations. Maximum download speed for a hardwired device connection is 940 Mbps. Maximum speeds may not be achievable using a single device. Concurrent data streams may be required to access maximum speeds (i.e. 2 or more devices running at the same time)."

Shaw has a similar disclaimer Fibre+ Internet | Shaw

"Connection speeds may vary based on modem equipment, client device capability, building wiring, internet traffic and environmental conditions. "Up to" speeds are based on optimal conditions. Maximum download speed for a single hardwired device connection is 940 Mbps. Additional wired or wireless device connections are required to reach maximum download speeds of up to 1Gbps or 1.5Gbps (i.e. 2 or 3 x devices concurrently running at 500 Mbps each)." 

This is a reality of the technology and generally advertised speeds are under "optimal conditions" and in reality may be considerably less.

I'm curious how the speeds you got from Shaw compared to the advertised speeds for the plan?

I'm actually getting speeds slightly higher than advertised on my Telus plan.

[Tatsu666]

I was getting full advertised speed with Shaw or more sometimes. And whenever I couldn't, tech support would try various ways to assist me.

[xray]

Not everyone on Shaw gets gigabit speed tests. It depends on a lot of factors, same as TELUS or any other ISP.

https://support.shaw.ca/t5/internet-discussions/gigabit-speed-test/td-p/21726/page/3

[FuzzyLogic]

You are likely getting the best speed you can get, at this time, with Telus. You could talk to them again and have a technician come out and look at it if you feel you should be getting better speeds. Otherwise you may wish to return to Shaw or another ISP.

[Upcraft]

Frequently the computer may not be capable of full 920-940Mbps speed.  Either the network card or drivers are a little inefficient.  Speed of the computer along with Security software you may have installed for security are not fast enough to be doing the antivirus or filtering at full wire speed.

Also if you have TV boxes, they will be using bandwidth from the 940Mbit maximum for each channel being watched or recorded per box.  If you are doing these tests with TV boxes and the tech just left they often leave the TV on a 4k nature channel when doing their setup so they can pull down 45Mbit each for 4k streams.  Turn off the TV box, or physically plug in testing computer directly to the ONT port 1 if you can to do a speed test without any other equipment. If you have the fiber direct to the router you should power off tv boxes while testing along with other computers and devices that might be connected to wireless. 

Turn off any background security scanning software or boot into a linux desktop environment (or windows enterprise to go if you have it) off USB key to run a test without any extra stuff in background.  If you want to test a clean install of windows with only the proper motherboard chipset drivers and network card drivers without installing bloat ware utilities too.  If you have the "killer" brand network card or other gamer focused network cards you should also watch out because their utilities offen apply a QOS rule that it claims makes gaming smoother but it messes up your speed test numbers by preventing any single application from saturating the upstream bandwidth to "supposedly" prevent a ping spike to gaming.  removing those QOS rules can fix the test.  

Last if testing with Wifi (this is for others reading this later because you already said you test wired) then most wifi radios cannot do anything close to real world gigabit speeds.  Remember the specs of wifi combine send and receive numbers, they ignore all air interface overhead and only publish the maximum raw signalling rates without accounting for overhead and market this as the speed class.  If wired ethernet did this your typical 1Gigabit port would be called 2Gigabit for combined send and receive speeds.  Wifi is not a valid method of testing your internet connection speeds, you should test wired only and wifi should be tested independently with a local tool like iperf between wifi and wired server connected to the radio.