Not getting the full 1 Gbps internet I subscribe to even though I should. What might be the cause?

[samkmt]

I have this Gigabit FTTH internet that's new in my area. It's 1 Gbps down and 100 Mbps up since it's a residential service. Which I was told is the reason for being asymmetrical fiber. I am not novice in computers. I understand that my network speed can vary because of many different factors but I feel that I have sufficient hardware to achieve the full speed but my tests disagree eitherwise.

My setup scenario is below...

Modem/Wifi (It's a 2-in-1 device from the ISP)
My Test Device - My MSI Laptop (more details about its specs below)

All devices are connected straight to this modem, also there is no devices between my test device (such as a network repeater).

I am connected to the modem via a Cat6 Ethernet Cable. I think it's about 100 ft long (bought it when I was in a bigger place) now I only need about 50-60 ft of it.

My Laptop has three M.2 SSD in RAID 0 (I think each of the SSDs is rated at about 300-500 MB/s R/W).

I am using a Windows 10 Home computer with the following specs

• > i7-4810HQ
  > 16 GB RAM
  > 3x SSD 384GB total as C Drive
  > a 2.5" SATA3 7200 rpm as D Drive

Software I use to obtain the test file is called "Internet Download Manager". It's the fastest file downloader I know (it split a single file into many parts for maximum speed).

I prefer not to use sites such as speedtest.net as they're too synthetic for me. I'd rather literally download a large file and speed its speed reading.

I downloaded test files from these sites:

• ■Dallas 01 server of Softlayer
  http://www.softlayer.com/data-centers%20
  ■Chicago server of FDCServers
  https://www.fdcservers.net/lg/
  ■Chicago server of LeaseWeb
  https://www.leaseweb.com/platform/network

I used the largest test files each site has. Out of all the tests, the highest I could get was 60 MB/s - megabytes/second (which is about 480 Mbps, 48% of theoretical 1 Gbps). I want at least 800 Mbps.

I thought maybe my location is not receiving with a good signal from the ISP, so I did a speed test in the module app of the modem. It has some utilities that I can use (accessed the modem page in a web browser).

There, my speed test was 1.13 Gbps Down and 114 Mbps Up. So I am getting fed with the correct speed from the ISP.

What else might be bottle-necking my speed?


Thank you for time reading my post.

 

[JalYt_Justin]

You're seeing the reason why Gigabit internet connection isn't exactly all that it's cracked up to be. You're receiving the Gigabit internet connection, however, the site you're trying to download from has a limit on how fast you can download from them. Whether this is a hardware problem or self-imposed software limit, who knows. The site is the limiting factor, not your internet.

Most of the times these sites don't expect Gigabit internet connections since this is the VAST minority when it comes to internet service. Of course ping, network congestion and otherwise are factors, but the main limiting factor is likely the site's infrastructure. Downloading from web pages was never meant for Gigabit speeds.

 

[samkmt]

You have a point. So I did another test of downloading from several sources at the same time to saturate my end of the bandwidth as much as possible.

3 files:

• ■10GB file from FDCServers' Chicago server
  ■10GB file from LeaseWeb's Dallas server
  ■10GB file from LeaseWeb's WDC server

I noticed my AVG Antivirus was doing a realtime protection at first and it was lagging my whole system and was causing a little bit of bottle-necking. I couldn't get past 20-30 MB/s but after disabling that, I was constantly near 50-55 MB/s most of the time. That's not at all a bad speed but still quite far from theoretical 125 MB/s.

Here's a screenshot

So, the sources limited the speed doesn't have anything to do with why I am not getting near 1 Gbps.