OT: Reporting communication speed

Reference: the little dual-monitor looking icon, bottom right of screen. In dial-up use,it usually shows the modem speed and not the top possible speed (ie: may show 42Kbps and top is 56Kbps). That was not always the case, in certain set-ups,it would always show

56Kbps, and there was a trick to fix that to make the true speed show.

Well i have been on high speed (Comcast cable) for a goodly time, and would like to implement that trick, as 100Mbps is just not happening.

Ideas?

Thanks.

Reply to
Robert Baer
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I have Comcast internet service. It used to be 25M or so, then it was

50, now it's 130/12 according to a couple of online speed tests. I think it's real, because things like PDF loads are really fast, and video is amazing.

Soon there will be no need for cable TV technology or channels. All Comcast will supply is Internet.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
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Reply to
John Larkin

Netpseedmonitor

Cheers

Reply to
Martin Riddle

Google . There are many, and they all seem to report about the same numbers.

Comcast has to compete with AT&T and Sonic and Monkeybrains and other ideas, and is apparently cranking up their speed. I'm now getting 130 Mbps, more than I really need. My kid has AT&T fiber to her condo, even faster.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
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Reply to
John Larkin

He's asking for client side. Not some speedtest website.

Cheers

Reply to
Martin Riddle

He could download a big file and see how long it takes. That would assume the server is fast.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
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Reply to
John Larkin

I am in the Portland/Beaverton OR metro area. My recent experience with comcast showed that they are dishonest and unethical. Their advertisement claimed "up to" 85Mbps." My testing via speedtest.net showed a consistent less than 10Mbps over 2 days of testing. Calling their customer service drones resulted in many "please holds" ,disconnects, and waits for over 20 minutes. It was the worst customer service I have ever experienced. I finally got to tech service and was told that the west coast only had speeds "up to" 50Mbps but their ads still state "up to". Complaints that 10Mbps wasn't even close and the "up to" crap was clearly fraudulent fell on deaf ears. Their phone service let me call out, but I could receive no calls. Complaining did no good.

I cancelled all comcast services on day 3, well within their 30 day no charge window. They still billed me for 3 months of service which I refused to pay. So they handed me over to a collection agency. I told them the situation and threatened to sue not only comcast, but the agency as well.

2 weeks later I get a nice letter from the agency apologizing for comcasts error and stating all charges had been dropped and no report was sent to the credit reporting agencies. I have yet to receive anything from comcast re their part in this.

To add insult to injury scumcast held my phone number hostage for weeks when I tried returning to my previous ISP. Calls to comcast re this were always forwarded to a dead end. Previous ISP told me comcast was notorious for this tactic in trying to retain customers.

Dishonest, unethical, liars, and poorly trained customer service droids yield a terrible customer experience. Never again. Art

Reply to
Artemus

They have been fine here in SF. The install was great and the service is reliable. It keeps getting faster. POTS is "free", where AT&T phone service was flakey and they charged me a fortune.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
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Reply to
John Larkin

I also have Comcast, and i also see 130/12 according to a couple of online speed tests. BUT. Would like to see that 130 number courtesy of that icon.

Reply to
Robert Baer

Well, NOT the "trick", and definitely not Win2K compatible. Almost better than a kick in the head.

Reply to
Robert Baer

Check - well, almost. In dial-up, the reported number could either be the max 56K,or the actual (say 42K). It was so long ago, that i do not remember the "trick" used to get the actual speed reported.

Reply to
Robert Baer

Less useful and less desirable than using the Comcast test.

Reply to
Robert Baer

Hmm... Was in Lake Oswego area when i switched from (then: swearword) Qwest POTS (for phone and dial-up) to Comcast to get a LOWER monthly rate and the benefit of high speed internet (ANYTHING faster than 48K is fast). Never a problem with Comcast there for about 3 years; moved to Lacey WA and no problem here either. I even BOUGHT the same modem online and installed it with no problems either.

In LO when i started with Comcast, modem rental was $5/mo and (compatible, "approved") modems retailed well over $200. Now, after about ten years, modem rental rate had slowly ratcheted up to $10/mo and online sale prices were in the $100 region - making the transition a no-brainer.

Reply to
Robert Baer

You need to tell the modem to report the channel rate instead of the DTE rate, some command in the initialisation string.

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Reply to
Jasen Betts

In the old days, most of the time a dialup modem had a one-to-one relationship with the host computer. Reporting the connection speed made sense. (While a couple attempts were made, to create a dialup modem shared with two PCs, there don't seem to be a lot of those in circulation.)

All your computer knows at the moment, is it's on some sort of LAN. It didn't participate in any DOCSIS stuff itself, and could be receiving vanilla packets from its position in the network.

The DOCSIS modem has a web page, and some details may be reported there on operation. The trick would be, pulling those details and making an icon for you.

*******

Some examples from the ADSL world.

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The latter one, only works with certain firmware revisions. And also has a dependency on whether the subnet the modem is on, is visible to your computer or not. I keep a version of firmware on my ADSL modem, known to work with one of the versions of DMT, but have never had an opportunity to use it.

And the "numbers" on DMT, relate to a group of modems it works with. Maybe version 1 is SGS, version 2 is Alcatel, version 3 is TPLink, and so on. Rather than version 3 being newer than version 1 or something. Presumably that's done, so the software developer has a smaller download to deliver to each user.

Paul

Reply to
Paul

I don't know this trick and I don't see how useful this would be since the speed is always changing. I use Networx. It's free.

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It has a speed meter but I don't use it. I like the graph for figuring how well my connection is working. It also can tell you what applications are using the network so you know if something is stealing your bandwidth.

Reply to
Wanderer

That might have been the trick involved. Am guessing that cannot be done on the Ethernet connection from modem to computer. And certainly not available as the software is "proprietary" and may even be burned in as firmware on the ASIC that supports Ethernet.

Reply to
Robert Baer

Only if doing serial over ethernet and running PPP (etc) on the comuter (extreme odd-ball case)

Normally with an ethernet connection the other end is a router and the router talks to the modem and handles the passwords and the connection to the ISP. (it's common to have router and modem in the same box) Each brand/model/version of router has a potentially a different user interface so getting the connection parameters to the PC can't be done in a standard way.

I'm not sure what you mean there: ethernet usually doen't get involved other than as transport. eg: ddclient can scrape the external ip address from the web interface of many ADSL routers, but it's an ad-hoc interface.

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Reply to
Jasen Betts

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