I have cable internet and it seems ungodly slow to be having a 1200 kbps down. whats wrong with it???

Question

sometimes my down will be at like 3000 kbps but its normally at like 1200... why is it that i hear cable should be up to like 5000-10000 kbps?? its starting to anger me that my download speeds are so slow....i download a 1 mb file in 6 seconds.....wtf?

Answer 1

Well, you have a lot of things that could be slowing down your downloads. Cable networks are shared bandwidth. Everyone in your immediate area could be sharing the same 10Mbps download speed. If multiple people are doing downloads then your speed will also go down. You can also try to power off and back on the cable modem. that can sometimes fix a speed issue.

Where you are trying to download from also affects the speed, plus how many people are trying to DL from the same place at the same time.

The number of routers you have to go through ion the internet to get to a site affects the speed. If you go through 2 instead of 20 you will probably see a difference in speed. You and your ISP cannot predict or control what routers you will go through to get to a web site.

That's just a quick list of possible issues, and no I don't work for cable.  :)  Just doing this stuff for a long time.

Try some of the speed tests at www.broadbandreports.com That should give you a better idea of your speed, and also show how distance does affect the speed.

Answer 2

could be a lot of things, could be a local issue with ur network card, could be a bad cable, could be service degradation/failure somewhere like DNS, u should test to see if ur traversing over saturated links by looking for very high ping times,, (not there is anything u can really do accept make a service call), or maybe try pinging ur dns server and comparing that with stats from other dns servers like 4.2.2.2 verizon public dns, check the site www.speedtest.net and do the speed test to get ur exact stats,,traceroute to a couple of ur frequent sites and check to see if u see IP addresses repeating many times which may indicate a routing loop,  with this in hand and knowing u haven't seen the obvious, u can always just call the ISP and complain it could be something as simple as high loads on the switch to which ur connected. =)