Upgrade to Charter Spectrum Results in Slower Wired Speeds?

[Bobby R]

Hello All,

I'm about to jump off the ledge with this issue. I hope an expert can help.

It all started when I got a postcard in the mail from Charter. They are upping their speeds from 30Mbps to 100Mbps. Awesome! Wrong! After receiving my new upgraded modem in the mail I followed the procedures to install it AND... no more internet. After several calls to Charter and several hours of troubleshooting with them I had 1 Win7 desktop computer direct connected to their modem returning a 98Mbps result on the speedtest.charter.com website (at this point Charter stopped helping).

Hooking up my Linksys Cisco EA6500 wireless router in the mix and a quick recycle of everything (router, modem, win7 desktop)... resulted in a paltry 9mps (wired), and oddly I saw 28Mbps on several wireless devices I tested.

Here's what I've tried:
1. Recycled everything many times.
2. Swapped out the cable between the modem and router (3 separate cables)
3. Did a factory reset on my Linksys router - reconfig'd, same results
4. Bought a NEW ASUS N750 router - set it up, same results
5. Tried multiple speed test sites - similar results
6. Tested with all wireless devices disabled

Prior to the upgrade I was reliably getting 30-40Mbps on my wired win7 desktop going through my Linksys EA6500. Now, it struggles to get 10Mbps when a router is in play.

Since I see 98Mbps when hardwired to the modem, it seems to indicate that there is no problem with the desktop, modem or cable. Leading me to believe the issue is with the router, however I bought a brand new router and saw the same issues!

Super frustrating. I've spent hours researching and trying different ideas with no solution.

Any help would be great.

 

[USAFRet]

resulted in a paltry 9mps (wired)

Something in your chain is limited to 10Mbps. Possibly a setting in the router.

 

[Bobby R]

resulted in a paltry 9mps (wired)

Something in your chain is limited to 10Mbps. Possibly a setting in the router.

As I stated, I was getting 30-40Mbps prior to the modem upgrade. That seems to indicate there isn't a 10Mbps limit on any of my original equipment.

 

[ex_bubblehead]

Autodetect on the WAN port may be causing it fall back to 10Mbps. Whatever the problem is it's between the modem and the router.

 

[Bobby R]

Autodetect on the WAN port may be causing it fall back to 10Mbps. Whatever the problem is it's between the modem and the router.

Hi ex_bubblehead, thanks for the response. I agree that the solution is going to be found between the modem and router. I'm technical, but not a network expert. Do you know of something specific I should try? I'm looking for suggestions. Concerning the "autodetect", are you suggesting that I disable it on the WAN port of my router?

 

[ex_bubblehead]

I'm not familiar with that specific router, but if the admin page/s give you access to settings for the WAN (Internet) port you can try hardcoding the port to 1000Full. You can try 100Full as well. You'll also want to make sure that patch cord between the router and modem has all 8 wires (CAT 5E or 6) as all 4 pairs are required for gigabit.

 

[Bobby R]

I'm not familiar with that specific router, but if the admin page/s give you access to settings for the WAN (Internet) port you can try hardcoding the port to 1000Full. You can try 100Full as well. You'll also want to make sure that patch cord between the router and modem has all 8 wires (CAT 5E or 6) as all 4 pairs are required for gigabit.

Ok, I'll check the cable, but I'm using one that came with the (gigabit) router - so I feel like it's legit. I've also tested with 2 other cables, one of which came with my original Cisco 'gigabit' router.

 

[Bobby R]

Well, I spent a long evening working on this again. Including about an 1.5 hours of working with ASUS technical support - actually for 30 mins of that I was on hold. Here's what we did:

1. Reconfirmed that Desktop direct-to modem tested at roughly 100Mbps. Check.
2. Hooked up ASUS router, ran speed test and got roughly 9Mbps.
3. Factory reset the router, reconfigured, ran speed test, 9Mbps.
4. ASUS Tech support declared the router bad and recommended I take it back and swap it out.

That's fine. I'm going to do that today, but I'm doubtful. My Cisco router is behaving the same exact way. Two routers, from two different companies, with the exact same issue seems unlikely to me.

In addition:

1. I downloaded and ran the TCP Optimizer, chose the 'Optimal' settings. No change.
2. I tested with no firewall - no change
3. I messed around with turning off NAT and plugging the modem directly into a non-wan port on my router. I saw this suggested on the net as a test, but I could not get it to connect. Gave up.
4. In Win7 I changed the speed of my NIC from 'auto' to 1Gbps.
5. Tested all 4 available ports on the router.

One thing I noticed is that the ASUS router has two lights per port, green and yellow. According to the manual, green means 10/100, and yellow indicates gigabit. With everything hooked up, the WAN port lights up yellow. That's great. However, the port that my desktop hooks up to is green. Even after forcing my NIC to 1Gbps. There are 4 ports available for wired connections, I tried them all, same results - green.

 

[Bobby R]

Ok, so I solved it last night and when I did I almost threw my computer out into the street and drove over it. The big solution... I reinstalled my NIC driver. Ran the speed test. Needle pegged at 96.xMbps.