[SOLVED] Upload speed fluctuating

[Mattp2017]

Hi, have a question about my upload speed. During Speed tests on DSLreports.com it fluctuates up and down between around 20Mbs to 25Mbs the entire test. I've included a screenshot. Not a huge deal but just curious as to what is causing it. I'm using a wired connection... https://ibb.co/9gQ0hzf

 

[bill001g]

That looks like a artificial limit being imposed. My guess is it based on the ISP attempt to say limit your traffic to 20mbps. Maybe a better example would be a ethernet connection in your house you wanted to limit to say 10mbps. Lets also say your limiting software averaged the rate over 10 seconds. So if you transmit data for 1 second at 100mbps and then spend 9 second doing nothing. or you transmit 20mbps for 1 second and do nothing for 1 second. Both give you 10mbps average rates but if you actually were to observe the data rate 1 time per second the graphs would look very different. In addition ethernet always transmits at 1gbit or 0gbit so it is even more messy.

It all depends on how much you really care. You can load wireshark on your PC and actually see the packets being send. You can see the delays between the packets and the response they get. What you will likely see is it send larger and larger groups of packets as fast as it can until it gets some error. (ie the limit) It will then send at a slightly slower rate trying again and again to go faster until it gets a error. With wireshark you can create reports that show extremely tiny delays of less than 1ms between the packets.

 

[Mattp2017]

That looks like a artificial limit being imposed. My guess is it based on the ISP attempt to say limit your traffic to 20mbps. Maybe a better example would be a ethernet connection in your house you wanted to limit to say 10mbps. Lets also say your limiting software averaged the rate over 10 seconds. So if you transmit data for 1 second at 100mbps and then spend 9 second doing nothing. or you transmit 20mbps for 1 second and do nothing for 1 second. Both give you 10mbps average rates but if you actually were to observe the data rate 1 time per second the graphs would look very different. In addition ethernet always transmits at 1gbit or 0gbit so it is even more messy.

It all depends on how much you really care. You can load wireshark on your PC and actually see the packets being send. You can see the delays between the packets and the response they get. What you will likely see is it send larger and larger groups of packets as fast as it can until it gets some error. (ie the limit) It will then send at a slightly slower rate trying again and again to go faster until it gets a error. With wireshark you can create reports that show extremely tiny delays of less than 1ms between the packets.

Ok thanks for the explanation.... I haven't really had any issue with speeds just thought it was strange so I will probably just leave it alone. So it isn't really a major problem then as far as speeds or packet loss?

 

[bill001g]

If you have the connection loaded to the limit you will see packet loss that is how they limit it. If you stay below the limits you should not see loss.

 

[SamirD]

I see this regularly when I used the speed test. It's normal.