Paying for 1000mbps only getting 400mbps. Hardware issue?

[Impulse907]

Hello, I have recently purchased a Gigabit modem with service. I had to buy a gigabit usb to ethernet adapter/dongle to achieve more than 100mbps because my network card on my laptop would not support gigabit speeds. In addition to buying the dongle I also purchased CAT6 cable for it. I am plugged directly into the modem without a router or switch and my speeds that I get when performing a test on the ISPs speedtest are in the 300-450 mbps range while on speedtest.net site I get 200 - 400 mbps range. I performed a wget command test in Cygwin with thinkbroadband.com at 1GB file and I get 4MBps.

Cables are good modem tested good, signal strength is great, im at full duplex, and I also ran the tests in safemode with networking for the same results. The USB is USB 3.0 which my laptop does have.

When the ISP Tech came out he tested the connection with his laptop and he got around 840 Mbps.
Is the ISP throttling my connection to my pc?
what hardware issues would impact my speed?

Update 12/19/2015

Tried doing another speedtest after getting home from work. I am getting now 333 Mbps on all test sites. Called and talked to a Tech I from my ISP, tried different scenarios this time, like restarted the modem, switching IP addresses and DNS. None of these worked.
It seems to me that I am being capped.. For what reason I don't know. I find it strange that 333 is persistent without fluctuation on ALL sites.

Any help would be great, thanks.

 

[kanewolf]

400Mbit sounds like the USB adapter is only able to do USB2 speeds. If you have a laptop old enough to not have a gigabit ethernet port, I am surprised it has USB 3.

 

[Impulse907]

@kanewolf, here all some specs of the laptop.

Inspiron 15 (3521) (i15RV-6145BLK)
at a glance...

Processor: 3rd Generation Intel® Core™ i3-3227U processor (3M Cache, 1.9 GHz)
Display: 15.6 HD (720p) WLED with Truelife (1366x768)
Operating system: Windows 8 Home, English
Memory (RAM): 6GB, DDR3, 2 DIMM, 1600MHz
Storage (hard drive): 500GB 5400rpm HDD
Optical drive: 8X CD / DVD Burner (Dual Layer DVD±R Drive)
Video graphics: Intel® HD Graphics
Media card reader: 8-in-1 Media Card Reader and USB 3.0
Bluetooth®: Bluetooth® tied to wireless card


It says it supports usb 3.0. Could it be a 3.0 running slower than it should be?

 

[McHenryB]

Are you sure you are plugging the adapter into the correct USB port? Your computer has both USB 2 and USB 3 ports.

 

[Mark_1970]

I don't understand the laptop has Ethernet port at 10/100/1000mbps, this is far the quickest connection for the modem to connect too. Why exactly can't you connect modem ethernet to ethernet on the laptop?

 

[McHenryB]

As the OP has already stated, that computer doesn't have a Gigabit ethernet port. It is 10/100.

 

[Impulse907]

Are you sure you are plugging the adapter into the correct USB port? Your computer has both USB 2 and USB 3 ports.

Yes, I have plugged the adapter into all of my USB ports and I get the same result.

 

[Impulse907]

I don't understand the laptop has Ethernet port at 10/100/1000mbps, this is far the quickest connection for the modem to connect too. Why exactly can't you connect modem ethernet to ethernet on the laptop?

It is because when I do plug it into my Internal NIC I only download at 100mbps.

 

[McHenryB]

As your laptop is relatively old, and I'm surprised that it has USB 3 but not Gigabit ethernet (but having checked the specs this is indeed the case) I begin to wonder whether this early USB 3 implementation is less than perfect. There were problems with some early implementations of USB 3.

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/nec-controller-usb-3-pd720200,review-31980.html

 

[Impulse907]

Ok I was able to get it to 580 Mbps by turning on the setting under the Gigabit USB 3.0 ethernet adapter by switching under Speed and Duplex from Auto Negotiate to 1.0 Gigabits per second Full Duplex. Still, not in the 75% range of what I am paying for. But an Improvement. I'll continue to see what the other settings will do.

 

[flyercan]

Ok I was able to get it to 580 Mbps by turning on the setting under the Gigabit USB 3.0 ethernet adapter by switching under Speed and Duplex from Auto Negotiate to 1.0 Gigabits per second Full Duplex. Still, not in the 75% range of what I am paying for. But an Improvement. I'll continue to see what the other settings will do.

Have you tried transferring a file across a gigabit network to confirm the USB3.0 adapter can actually perform as it claims?

 

[Impulse907]

Ok I found the solution to the problem. For anyone else who may be experiencing this issue. I ended up spending needless amounts of money on this issue when I actually didn't need to.
The actual problem was an option in msconfig. The option box was checked for number of processors.

So now I am able to get within the 75% range.
two months of trying to figure this out bought an ssd drive and more memory for my laptop
Hope this helps someone.