Why don't i recieve full speed with Ethernet cable?

[naxster]

Hello guys!

I have Fiber connection with 100/10 mbit.
But for some reason i can't get a stable full speed when i download stuff, for instance games from Steam etc.
I even bought a new Ethernet cable (CAT6) today to see if it's an improvement, since i had a Cat5e before, but nope same result.

I have an ASUS RT-AC68U which i bought 6 months ago.
I have tried the Merlin Firmware, but it made it worse for some reason, so i restored it back to the latest update from ASUS..

In Speedtest i get this result:
https://imgur.com/Go5Yql9

Whenever is start download something i get like 12.40mbit/s (which is really good), but after some minutes i get everything between 100kbit/s to 900kbit/s, UNDER 1mbit/s with cable!
I have even tried 6 different cable, but ended up getting same result... Well give or take...
I do know that i can use Wifi, but i cant get 12mbit/s, like i get with the cable (when it works)...

My laptop spec is:
ASUS X550C
6GB RAM
750GB HDD
Intel i5 3337U

Is there something i can do to improve this? I mean, i recieve good results in Speedtest but i can't use it for some reason! 🙁

 

[USAFRet]

Speedtest is the only one that really counts.

"downloading" and getting 12.4 megasomethings/sec is probably right on point.

Speedtest and your ISP report in megabits/sec
Where you are downloading from probably reports in megabytes/sec

Approx 8:1 ratio.
12.4 * 8 = almost exactly 100

After some minutes, dropping to some low number is almost certainly due to wherever you are downloading this from.

 

[keeper3000]

Likely your ISP is throttling you. Have you downloaded any torrents recently? They can black list you for that. Use a VPN like torguard to conceal your traffic from your ISP and you'll likely see better speeds. I've observed speeds take a while to come back up after they saw a torrent when the vpn was not on.

 

[JamesSneed]

So your speedtest shows you are getting what you are paying for, 100/10.

For Steam see here. They are reporting in Megabytes which will be about 12 for a 100 mbits connection.
https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=9498-WPDF-3220

 

[naxster]

Yes I do know that 12.40mbit/s sounds about right dor what I'm paying for. BUUUUUT I only receive that speed, couple of minutes, after it's always under 1mbit....
And i get under 1 Mbit even when I download games from Steam, if I download Overwatch, Fortnite (even though I don't play it) etc...

@keeper3000, Actually I haven't downloaded any Torrents for about 4 years now, so no

 

[mortemas]

100Mbit is a relatively slow connection speed these days. If windows update (or any other app) is downloading anything at the same time you are downloading from steam, it could slow the steam download down because they all have to share just 100mbit of bandwidth. Streaming music at the same time would eat up network bandwidth, too. These days games are like 50GB and at 100Mbit per sec that would take over 1 hour to download.

 

[Solandri]

A lot of ISPs cheat and prioritize access to speedtest.net. Lately I've been using this site to test speed instead. It tests your speed to each of the major Internet backbones, meaning a few (the ones your ISP is not directly hooked up to) are almost always slower than what you're paying for. If the site you're downloading from is on one of the backbones which are slower on your ISP, then you're not going to get the full speed you're paying for regardless of what you do. I just ran it right now and for me (150 Mbps), two backbones are transferring at 120 Mbps, two at around 80 Mbps, and one at 20 Mbps.

http://internethealthtest.org/

That said, dropping to kbps sounds like your ISP is very aggressively throttling downloads. i.e. They've oversubscribed their lines, and maintain the illusion of fast service by prioritizing bursty web browsing traffic. Larger downloads are throttled after a few seconds. Unfortunately there's not much you can do about it other than switching ISPs. You might be able to bypass it by sending your traffic over a VPN, but that requires paying for a VPN server at the other end. Otherwise, your only option is to complain to your ISP about it.

My ISP (Cox) does this too, but they're very up-front about it. Instead of advertising the burst speed and giving you the throttled speed, they advertise the throttled speed and give you the burst speed. So I'm paying for 150 Mbps down, but the first few seconds of any transfer typically goes at 200-300 Mbps, before settling down around 120-150 Mbps.

The other factor I can think of is that you have a HDD. HDDs are notoriously slow at small file read/writes (like 1 MB/s - about 8 Mbps; laptop HDDs are even slower with some not even able to hit 0.5 MB/s). The steam downloads are compressed, but if the steam client then has to uncompress it into thousands of small files which it writes to the HDD, then it's going to slow down the download while it waits for your HDD to finish writing all those small files. Even if the HDD is writing large files, if the drive is badly fragmented (as is often the case with HDDs which were used to download torrents), its speed can be as slow as writing small files.

 

[USAFRet]

100Mbit is a relatively slow connection speed these days. If windows update (or any other app) is downloading anything at the same time you are downloading from steam, it could slow the steam download down because they all have to share just 100mbit of bandwidth. Streaming music at the same time would eat up network bandwidth, too. These days games are like 50GB and at 100Mbit per sec that would take over 1 hour to download.

100mbps is not "relatively slow".

His connection dropping down to "100kbit/s" has nothing to do with that.

 

[failboat]

You need to run a speed test when one of your other downloads is slow. have you checked with your isp?

Is there any chance anyone else is using it at your house?

If you are in a highly dense area it could be congestion on the isp side. dropping down to 100Kbs would be gross mismanagement by the isp if that's the case.

Do you have any other devices to test from?