Very strange experience with DL speed and U-verse.

[kahoona]

What do you think causes this!!!

Yesterday I had the new ATT U-verse installed. It was supposed to give me up to 6megs down. Thats the same as my current ATT DSL was supposed to have but it only worked sometimes and nobody could figure out why. Thats not the question though. When the techs (Moe,Larry and Curley) were finished I tried some speed tests and they all averaged about 1.6megs down. Yes I tested it right. Turns out that the techs set me up with a wireless system without enough range to deliver the bandwidth. Today a better tech came and hard wired it and I got an average of 5.6 megs. Now the odd thing is this... With both the wireless connection (1.6megs tested) and the hard wired (5.6megs tested) I had the same download rate on Utorrent! Just over 600kB/s with either setup! I was getting the full BW with the wireless according to Utorrent but 3 major dl rating sites read around 1.6. Can anybody explain the reason?

Thanks

kahoona

[Switeck]

Packet loss from wireless?

uTorrent handles the packet loss a little better because it's downloading from 20+ peers/seeds at once.

[kahoona]

Thanks Switeck.

Your reply prompted me to learn a bit about Packet Loss, about which I am somewhat ignorant. So I was dealing with packet loss due to a cheap wi-fi receiver too far from the U Verse Router/modem. Am I right that dslreports.com is reporting speed based on "good" packets received while Utorrent is showing total packets and possibly handling the loss better? Might I also find that the actual time to receive the complete file may have been longer regardless of the dl rate shown bu Utorrent?

Thanks

Kahoona

[Switeck]

dslreports.com is indeed reporting speed based on "good" packets received.

But uTorrent isn't handling packet loss better or worse, just differently.

Individually, the packet loss probably drastically slows a seed/peer upload/download ability...but that doesn't always mean packet loss nails them all at once. I expect it would though sometimes.

dslreports.com speed tests are probably using few ip-to-ip packet streams at once...maybe 1-10. Any of those get hit by packet loss and you'll likely lose more than 5% of the overall speed.

uTorrent probably has 20+ peers/seeds. Any 1 of those gets hit and you probably wouldn't notice.

[kahoona]

HI

Very interesting. It is always good to learn more about things!

Thanks

Kahoona

[Firon]

U-verse's results with speed test sites are a pretty mixed bag. Try using AT&T's own test server. http://helpme.att.net/dsl/speedtest/