Time-Warner Cable Internet: The Return of Dial-Up Speed
Posted November 28th, 2007 @ 06:30pm by Erik J. Barzeski
It's been a few months since Time Warner took over from Adelphia in servicing my area. In that time, we've paid $59.95/month: $45.95 for basic cable Internet service, $17 for "Premium" service, and -$3.00 for owning our own cable modem (I've had this particular modem since I lived in Florida!).
I had been assuming that the "Premium" service related to speed. It turns out that $17/month gets you next to nothing. Go ahead, click - I think you'll be surprised at what a pile of poo "Premium" is.
It turns out that I really want the "Turbo" package instead: for $9.95/month extra. But here's the rub: I highly doubt it matters what package I choose, and I'm seriously contemplating switching to the most basic of cable Internet Time Warner provides. Why?
DSLReports.com speed testing conducted as I wrote this post (6:21pm - and I ran several tests [not concurrently] to various servers in Miami, LA, etc.) revealed that my upload and download speeds are about 350 Kbps. Oftentimes my upload speeds were faster. One time my download speed (LA) was calculated to be 296 Kbps!
The Time Warner site says I should be seeing speeds of up to 7 Mbps. Or, if my "turbo" thing has kicked in yet, up to 15 Mbps. Yes, I know it says "up to" - but since when is less than 5% an acceptable measure of "up to"?
It ain't my home network. I'm on a Mac Pro with an AirPort Base Station that's doing 802.11g. It's ten feet away and I have full signal strength.
WTF?!?!?!
P.S. The fastest result Time Warner's own speed test gave me was 750 Kpbs down. Suuuuuuuuure. And even still that's 5-10% (depending on whether I'm getting 7 Mbps or 15 Mbps). Most of them were about 400 Kpbs.
Footnotes
Donate Life
Posted 28 Nov 2007 at 7:57pm #
Too much slower and you won't be able to play much Xbox Live....
Posted 28 Nov 2007 at 8:30pm #
I have comcast and verizon FIOS at home (redundancy and all that jazz :)). Comcast can literally max out at about 15kb/s/thread during peak periods. Absolutely horrendous for a 10mbit service.
By contrast I have 50/20 from Verizon, and I can easily do a sustained 40mbit/thread. Uploads I can easily do 20mbit/thread.
See if you can navigate to http://192.168.100.1/ (that's a special address lots of cable modems use for the internal diagnostics) and see if anything is funky.
You also should be using speed tests on the east coast, not out in LA/Miami, latency is a factor when calculating your BDP so eliminate that as a variable. Sometimes avoiding real speed tests in favor of downloading a youtube or some other highly CDN'd content (anything from google :)) is a better less synthetic benchmark. Also, for a variety of reasons any flash based speed tests should be avoided at anything remotely above a few mbit. http://www.dslreports.com/stest/ is my favorite go-to speed test. Use the Java test.
I am -very- happy with FIOS, if you can already or can soon get it do so.
Posted 28 Nov 2007 at 8:53pm #
Adam Jacob Muller said on November 28, 2007:
It'll probably be 2020 before FIOS comes to Erie, PA.
Adam Jacob Muller said on November 28, 2007:
I used to get - in this house - 3500+ Kbps. I used to scoff at T1 lines because I had a line that was always at least twice as fast.
Adam Jacob Muller said on November 28, 2007:
Yeah, I did, and didn't see anything out of the ordinary.
Adam Jacob Muller said on November 28, 2007:
To be clear, I used New Jersey primarily. Just now, and using the JAVA test, I got 400 down and 606 up. Uploading has often been faster than downloading for some strange reason. Oh, and the Flash tests have only ever corroborated the Java tests - they've not done anything odd or strange.
I've also downloaded some rather large movies lately (HD game video captures from Xbox 360 games) and progress is slow - about 35 KB/sec (which is 280 Kbps, so right in line with what I'm seeing from the speed tests).
Adam Jacob Muller said on November 28, 2007:
Thanks for bragging. Jerk.
;-) 
;-) 
;-) 
We can't even get DSL at the house for some reason. In Florida I couldn't get DSL because we had fiber optic lines. I'm not sure why we can't here (neighborhood houses built in 1991). Maybe the same reason.
Posted 28 Nov 2007 at 9:56pm #
Be aware that your download/upload issues may be because of your cable modem. I recently switched from my Motorola Surfboard to a Comcast rental and my upload went from 300k to 750k and average 3mb to 6mb. Just a thought but maybe try a rental and see if that works.
Posted 28 Nov 2007 at 11:08pm #
I now have a service technician scheduled to come out Friday between 10am and noon.
I also picked up a new cable modem. The Motorola Surfboard 5101 is only $59.99 at Circuit City. If it doesn't help, I can take it back, I guess. I'll wait for the technician to come out before I try it out.
BTW, interestingly I got the national support woman I spoke with tonight to tell me that I should see at least 7 Mbps on the 15 Mbps plan and at least 4 Mbps on the 7 Mbps plan. Realistically, she said 4-5 and 7-10.
Posted 29 Nov 2007 at 7:47am #
Man, that IS terrible speed for Time Warner. I've got TW and I can regularly pull about 700-900k/sec, even at peak periods. Of course, this comes after my service kept dropping and I had 2 cable modems swapped (and something else on the pole outside fixed).
Posted 29 Nov 2007 at 9:22am #
Gee, funny enough, the day after I call I get 3800/600 (both kbps, which to me is equal to Kbps, but which is 8x the measure of KB or kB per second). Still not the "7 Mbps" I should be getting minimum on the 15 Mbps plan, and I still intend to have the guy come out and check signal strength, but not bad.
I've got a call back scheduled: I want to plug in a new cable modem to see if it has any impact whatsoever.
Posted 29 Nov 2007 at 4:11pm #
And now I'm back down to the hundreds or low one thousands.
Posted 30 Nov 2007 at 11:07am #
[...] the Time-Warner technician came to the house to look into the slow, dodgy Internet connection I've had for the past few [...]
Posted 04 Dec 2007 at 1:40pm #
[...] previously documented the issues I've been having with Time-Warner's service here and [...]
Posted 04 Dec 2007 at 9:41pm #
I've never gotten the 7Mbps I'm paying for, but would be happy with the 2-4Mb I used to get. I now regularly get about 230Kbps down and about the same up and QOS stinks. My VoIP telephone service has been nearly unusable since Summer.
You're right. The online techs don't seem to be putting the pieces together. I figure Time Warner is the best friend Verizon could hope for, as they're sending VoIP customers back to POTS in droves.
A T-W tech is scheduled to come out on Thursday. After reading this, I don't have much hope that he'll fix anything. I may take a trip to the T-W office in the mall to at least voice my discontent.
Posted 04 Dec 2007 at 9:56pm #
Kevin M said on December 4, 2007:
The IR tech that came last week made several comments about "you think your Internet service is bad, try our digital telephone service!" BTW, Kevin, there's an update here. Are you in the affected area? Post over on that entry if so.