Download Speeds being random?

[Migel]

We changed from LTE to DSL earlier this year. LTE was ludicrously expensive, connection was dependant on weather and vegetation, failed every now and then and was capped at 30GB a month with 3€ for every further GB. It wasn't good for gaming. I thought that had changed earlier this year when we finally got DSL. I'm not sure how exactly the infrastructure works but we've been told we have fibre wire from some kind of access point to our village. There it is split in copper wire and goes to the seperate houses. For the first few months that worked great. Download speeds of about 6 MB/s let me do everything I wanted. That changed. I haven't really touched anything, my setup is still the same, router and my WiFi USB stick haven't moved. Still, the download speeds have gone down dramatically. I use the task manager to close everything that uses any "Network" resources, and download things over Steam and Firefox. Right now for example I'm downloading a big conversion for STALKER CoP, 3,5GB. It's excruciatingly slow. I'd say averaging at about 65KB/s which is only a little bit faster than the throttled LTE speeds we used to have. The task manager is showing firefox to be using 0.3-1MBit/s which I guess could be right. Now I'm not aware of any ModDB premium programs that cap download speeds, but maybe there are. I've seen it rarely go up to a few hundred KB/s. Now that is unusually slow, but Steam doesn't go above 1MB/s anymore either - it's stuck in the hundeds of the KB range. This is really strange to me.

So my main question is, how does WLAN / Wifi or whatever you call it... "travel"? What can it go trough, what's considered the path of least resistance? Does the distance to the router affect download speeds? Because I'm two floors away from the router, but unfortunately there's no way to get LAN cables down here. When we got new net in march it was so good that I thought I wouldn't need to look into Powerlan anymore, but something seems to have changed. The reason for this question is that when I'm upstairs closer to the router, videos load just fine. Our TV is now connected to the internet and when my sister is here we watch Netflix on her account without stutters. It seems to be just down here that the download has gone seriously bad.

When I was downloading games on Steam, my sister also said she's getting a bad connection on Discord - I don't know how DSL or WiFi reacts to multiple people using the internet at once, how it prioritizes. Could another device be "drowning out" my PC?

The biggest change I can put my finger on is that we have new tiles in the mid floor. That seems really far fetched to me, we tore out the old tiles and replaced them with new ones... That can't possibly have had an effect on my download speeds, right?

I've tried closing many background processes and repeating, no unexpected change in download speeds - so I'm assuming it's not one program weirdly swallowing all my bandwith.

There's two more things I observed that made no sense to me. One, multiple programs showed a sinus curve style download graph, Uplay for example. Download speeds going up to 1.2MB or so and then dropping back down to 0 bytes for a bit, before going back up. I can't find a reason for this and I can't tell if it's always been like that. Firefox shows a steady rate that isn't as regular or as random.

The other thing was that I used the Ookla speedtest in Firefox and the results were beyond random. Every single test gave me a different result. Download speeds Were sometimes 10 MBits, one time they were 60MBits. What? Our provider advertised "Up to 100MBits" but I won't use that as a reference. That's like saying you can get up to 150 years old when the circumstances just aren't given.

So yeah, if anyone can explain these anomalies or changes, please do. I'm sort of lost as to what caused this drastic change. My smartphone's connection down here is pretty bad too, I'd say a bit worse than my PC's. However, both show a "pretty good" connection with the "bars" - that doesn't seem to be a reliable indicator anyways. I've restarted my router several times, I've moved my receiver USB stick, I've played around with different programs, Steam seems to have the highest and most stable download speeds still sometimes breaking 2.5MB/s before crashing back down to the hundreds.

What factors could be dragging down my speed and cause it to be highly inconsistent? Here's a tl;dr list of my assumptions:

-WiFi Obstruction by walls/floors?
-High network traffic from other devices or networks?
-Signal Interference by objects or other devices?
-Software issues?
-Non-Clientside issues?
-Distance to download server?

I'm very confused and this is hard to read. Any answers help. Thanks in advance.

[Migel]

Here's a little thing I just noticed, I cancelled the download from ModDB and went for a mirror instead. Instead of 60KB/s I'm getting 700KB/s to 1.4MB/s. The server is located in CA, US, and at 76% capacity according to the site.
I then tried ANOTHER CA, US server (They only have those), which was at 40% Capacity, giving me up to 100KB/s - being slower? Is this capacity remaining or being used by downloading community members? I assume Capacity means bandwith?

I should know so much more about this but I just can't explain it.

[emoticorpse]

In my history of internet problems, quality internal adapters vastly helped stability as opposed to cheap (or even quality) usb adapters. Antennae position makes the difference between slug speed and decent speed. positioning of the router (even a slight angle adjustment) makes a gigantic difference. Had constant disconnects (not speed issues) until I replaced my modem which apparently had a bad reputation for having junk internals. Sometimes channels matter.

Edit: If you do end up messing with the antennaes and are away from the pc to actually measure live speeds, I suggest installing like tightvnc or some remote viewer program so you can actually see what speeds are for every single shift of the antennae until you find the best one.

[Talby]

Back when I had DSL it was still the old copper run to the house that was my issue, if you call and they blame the house wiring head out to where the wires plug into the house then do your bandwidth test - if you have someone on the phone who has half a brain will send the service out to look at your wiring. Yes I had to have a chair and table available in my backyard since I had many issues and calls until I got someone who understood it was the wiring to the house, and not the wiring in the house. Once that was done all was well, up until I got FIOS ONT bolted to the back of my house.

[SeriousCCIE]

Yes, capacity means bandwidth in many situations.

LTE is wireless, and all wireless is "half duplex". Duplex is how we talk; you speak and that's one half of the dupex, when you listen at the same time, that's the other half of duplex.

When something is full duplex, it is able to send (talk) and receive (listen) at the same time without affecting the quality or understanding of either the send or receive.

When you have multiple users on wireless, unless the antenna or antennas can support more than one person (meaning--a singular device) physically at a time, it has to juggle.

It often can juggle fast enough that regular usage isn't noticable. Cram 25 people into a room with the same wifi connection and they will complain; it's like party, everyone talking at the same time and its hard to hear, and sometimes you have to repeat yourself or ask for someone to repeat themselves because someone else's laughing or whatever made it so you didn't quite catch what was said. Using the same hardware and connection speeds, 5 people might not notice a problem. 1 person will go as fast as the system lets them, pretty much.

There is no path of least resistence for wifi. It is broadcast outwards, and the signals can get absorbed, or reflected, from various surfaces.

Thick watery things, like us meaty blobs, tend to absorb signals. Shiny ceramics might reflect the signals away. Microwaves may add noise into the air that makes wifi hard to hear. Even flourescent lighting can do that, because their ignition 'ballasts' sometimes send a zap to light the bulbs at a signal that generates a burst of noise on a few different wireless types.

That is all seperate from The Internet.

Assuming you have it perfect at home, once it leaves the house it can suck or be good.

Your best bet for speed determination is to use your ISP's speed test site, if they have one. That tests the speed from your hardware, to theirs. If there is a problem with that, any internet speed stuff will have problems--netflix, steam downloads, discord, etc -- all will have issues if accessed outside of your ISP. Lots of stuff isn't on your ISP, but steam does have servers that store game files and stuff closer to customers, so sometimes downloads go very fast and don't leave the ISP, other times it has to pull from steam servers from somewhere over the internet.

That stated, if your speeds are good to the ISP, there can be problems outside of the ISP, it could be that the test site or place you are downloading from is busy, etc.

A common DSL and LTE problem occurs when kids start coming home from school... by 4:30, internet speeds in areas with DSL or LTE often plummet horribly compared to what it was at say 11am or 2pm. That is because people come home, turn on the TV, start surfing the web, etc -- all sorts of additional traffic that the ISP didn't experience, and they start to get busy.

many ISPs sell more speed to people than they can ever hope to accomodate if everyone logged in at once and started streaming video. It is not too much different to think of what would happen if everyone flushed their toliet in high school at once and turned on their faucets and the hoses outside and... yeah there'd be water, nothing will break, but the water pressure will drop a bunch and the water (data) might flow at a trickle.

Here's a semi summary to your listed points:

-WiFi Obstruction by walls/floors?
*this is entirely possible. You might need to move the wifi AP or add more devices to provide a stronger signal
-High network traffic from other devices or networks?
This is entirely possible, too. It happens in my home; I run backups and file copies and work from home often enough. Wireless printing can cause horrible problems for some people--even drop their phone calls if they have wifi calling. I ended up installing 10 gigabit network hardware throughout the home, and connecting APs in a few strategic locations--I found those best spots by stomping around and testing speeds based on where I dangled an AP. Having a faster local wired network that the wifi connects to can help ease the traffic burden getting to the internet conenction.

-Signal Interference by objects or other devices?
*Absolutely possible--microwaves, lights, other devices--even bluetooth devices close to a wifi device can cause issues. Move things around and see what helps, or better yet, if you have a wifi printer, turn it off and see if that helps, maybe even go wired with it if you can. That sort of thing.

-Software issues?
*Yes -- I recently upgraded my internet service package and found that the speed tests did not go full speed on some web browsers, but did on others. Instead, the CPU went to 100% and it didnt go so fast. Yet using a different browser gave me better results. It could be that your tests are affected but data transfer might be fine.

In my case, the same laptop that did terrible on the speed tests actually copies data to my local backup server at a gigabit--I see it going 120MB/s on a regular basis, so when it failed the ISP speed test and only got half of the rated speed (10MB/s with the CPU at 100%), I knew there was some problem and it wasn't me. It was the software and their testing site. OOkla did better!

-Non-Clientside issues?

*Absolutely -- some sites even limit the speed you can download at, meaning they offer everyone downloads at say 20mb even though they have a 100mb connection. This way, people can peak at 20mbs if it is busy, but if 200 people connect, 5 people with a 20mbs connection won't prevent the other 195 people from connecting. It'll go slow--but still work.

They might report its busy, but they won't tell you the problem is on their side.

-Distance to download server?
*yes, always try to pick the closest one. There are, of course, places far away with 10 gigabit connections that are just phenomally faster than a local closer connection -- but a good rule to follow is that shorter distances often have less issues. This is also because there's just more that can go wrong over a long distance -- more ISPs, more hardware, more people in the way.

Speed tests on the internet are among the least respected and honored traffic, because it competes with commercial interests/streaming video/internet phone calls, gaming etc... so, speed tests outside your ISP might be good or bad depending on how much other stuff is going on--as well as if the site is fast to begin with, if its busy, if your network has issues.

There has never been more truth to advertising than when an ISP states "*Up To" when talking about random connections over the internet. They need to be able to prove they can go that fast for customers right up to the edge of their own ISP network -- but once outside of it, they are not to blame, and all of your thoughts about the issues... are correct.

I apologize for the wall of text; it looked like you might appreciate it though, and have worked through a number of frustrations. I can't solve your issues, but I am hoping I've confirmed some of your suspicions and given you some new ideas.