JDPFu.com 2025

Update 2020 at the bottom.

Tonight I got an automated call from Comcast asking how well my recent service calls had gone. My answers got me handed over to a real person, which turned out to be a good thing.

She transferred me to a Tier 3 guy. Basically, he strongly suggested I plug the modem into a different wall jack with just a PC. He stayed on the line while I did this … My almost empty living room is the only open jack in the house … carry, carry, find cable A, B, laptop, check firewall is on … plug, reboot router. Speedtest … 22Mbps down, 3.2Mbps up. DAMN! Kewl!

a) I was using a gold plugged coax cable this time. Perhaps it was the cable in my office or the coax from outside to the office … or something else … start simple. Only 1 change at a time.

b) Take the setup back to the office … plug the identical golden coax, modem, ethernet and PC in. Speedtest … 19M/2.2M! I can live with that.

c) Swap just the coax – I’d figured that was the issue. Nope.

d) Add the router back in, unplug all but the uplink and cable to the PC – no switch 1.9M/110K up. My router? Nooooooooo! Swap the 10+ year old ethernet cable with the one I’d been using for the router/modem connection. No change.

e) Swap in 2 old routers … forget to reboot the modem so they refuse to get DHCP addresses … finally figure that out on my original 1-port linksys router circa 1998. Run speedtest. 7M/300K … it is 10 years old, so the network chips weren’t meant to get that much speed.

f) Back to my $20 Buffalo running an OSS OS with 1.9M/110K up. Turn off the SPI firewall and QoS – port filtering is still enabled. Now that I’m on a different phone system, I don’t need QoS. 32M/3.3M Yippy!!!!

Ok, so what did I learn today?
1) I’m not convinced it was the router slowing everything down. My connection has been 2M/256K for years.
2) Retighten your coax cables.
3) Swap any legacy ethernet cables.
4) Lastly, go to a simpler router config – especially if you are using QoS or any complex features.
5) I doubt any of this would have mattered 2 weeks ago, before Comcast found issues with my outside cable and put a line amp on the coax inside my home.

Obviously, those speeds are using the “speedboost” and aren’t real world “grab a Linux ISO” speeds. Still, they are impressive. The last wired test was 32M/3.3M, wireless was 7M/2M, that’s 802.11a with a 72Mbps connection.

So in 2020, after years of getting 15/2.5Mbps, I swapped in a GigE router running OPNsense and ran the a speedtest:
Download: 29.71 Mbit/s Upload: 5.96 Mbit/s
That’s a little more than the promised performance for the tier of service we get. I’m on a 25/5 plan (to my knowledge). Nothing else has been changed in any major way the last 10 yrs. Same ethernet cables. Same Coax cables, just more capable APU2 router hardware. Doubt I can get better throughput, but there is 1 more setting in the APU2 I need to check for getting full GigE speeds. To be fair, very little local traffic even hits the APU2 router at all. Local traffic is mostly on the same LAN or directly connected via dumb ethernet switches for the storage network.