Gig1 speed - disappointing

Just upgraded to Gig1 on Virgin Media, and was expecting much faster speeds, but after contacting the VM online help service (after a 1 hour wait, and being transferred to 3 advisors !), I was told that the 1gb speed is the speed that is 'sent' to the hub. This is then disrupted to the connected devices, so unless you only have 1 device connected, it is unlikely you'll receive 1gb download speed !

My desktop computer, which is connected by a CAT 8 ethernet cable can only get around 400mbps, using www.samknows.com/realspeed (Virgin's recommended speed test sit). This is slower than I was getting on my Hub3 router M500 package.

Anyone else experiencing the same ?

Have you got any antivirus software or similar installed (other than the default windows one)?

Hi

Yes, I have Avast anti-virus software running on my computer.

Thanks
John

I've had fantastic speeds since getting Gig1

https://ibb.co/wS9xpmr

What area are you?

Hi

I'm in area 25,near Cardiff.

I'm getting speeds of around 300/400 on my PC with a CAT 8 ethernet cable connected.

Have you got many devices connected to the hub at the same time when you get those speeds?

I have around 20 devices maybe more. still getting full speeds with Cat5E (25m).

That's impressive! Must be something in the setup although Virginmedia are saying that everything is OK, very frustrating

Remove the AV software, and get a real Ethernet cable (Cat 5 or Cat 6) rather than something sold as "Cat 8" online and likely to be junk. Is the PC capable of downloading at 900 Mbps or faster?

I disabled the AV and changed the cable, but no improvement unfortunately. The computer is cable of speeds of 1gig or more, according to its' properties "Intel 82579LM Gigabit Network Connection"

Does Ethernet Status show 1Gbps?

That Samknows realspeed link tests the speed between the speed test site and the VM hub, so if it's not hitting 1gbps the problem can only be with virgin media (or Samknows).

@JontyWilliams1 you should post on the VM community forum. They will know something is up and should be able to book an engineer - lockdown notwithstanding obviously.

Edited by Skie (Tue 12-Jan-21 23:00:41)

Yes, the Speed on the status box show 1,0 Gbps

Hi Skie,

The 1Gbps speed to the hgub4 is being hit, it's the speed to the devices that is slow.

I did post on the VM community forum, and their recommendation was to post on here ! I've now raised a complaint with VM, and see what they do

Thanks

In reply to a post by JontyWilliams1:

Hi Skie,

The 1Gbps speed to the hgub4 is being hit, it's the speed to the devices that is slow.

Then to be blunt, it sounds like your device(s) are the issue.

The Hub is receiving 1gig (higher actually).
The Hub is more than powerful enough to sustain over 900Mb/s over Ethernet.

That leaves your laptop/pc.

Having a gigabit lan card isn't enough. Older CPU's just can't handle 1 gig throughput.

Run a Linux Live OS and run a speed test to rule out the OS.

Virgin are quite clear during sign-up of the 1 gig packages that they guarantee your speed to the hub.
Your devices are your responsibility. Quite right too.

Not sure why you've opened a complaint.

Seeing as you bought cat8 cables, I have some magic beans you may wish to purchase.

Edited by j0hn83 (Wed 13-Jan-21 00:07:24)

In reply to a post by JontyWilliams1:

I disabled the AV and changed the cable, but no improvement unfortunately. The computer is cable of speeds of 1gig or more, according to its' properties "Intel 82579LM Gigabit Network Connection"

Thats a relatively old Etherenet controller it was released nine years ago so the PC could be up to 8 years old.
What specification is your PC?

In reply to a post by danielhyde:

Thats a relatively old Etherenet controller it was released nine years ago so the PC could be up to 8 years old.What specification is your PC?

Extremely important question. I have a 4 year old desktop with SSD drives, i7 CPU, 16GB RAM, and this can send to another machine at 880 Mbps over my Ethernet LAN. Anything older than this, without SSD, or enough RAM, is going to struggle.

The real speed test the original post talked about said 400 Mbps speeds, and as that test even though you press start on your PC is actually a test from Samknows server to the Gig1 box i.e. LAN does not impact at all.

So if real speed is giving low speeds suggests a service impacting issue, or samknows has its testing wrong.

Am I missing something here?

I really think your wrong with what you state, I've been using 1Gbps networking for longer than I care to remember and no computer has struggled. I've just upgraded my server to 10Gbps, and that doesn't quite reach its full potential. It's a 10 year old soon to be updated i3 540 with 8GB ram and SSD but it reached its full network speeds even when it had a traditional HDD.

Unless you have an incredibly modern (and expensive) network card capable of things like RDMA any sort of networking is going to require lots of copying of data and context switches. Some older CPU's will bottleneck and struggle to achieve a gbit/s let alone 10gb/s. In real world usage where your CPU is busy doing other stuff as well as networking you'll probably see even less throughput. I have a 10 gigabit NIC in in two machines I own and real world throughput is about 8gb/s but it can go faster (when I first tested the card with the machine idle and not doing anything I did achieve the maximum throughput).

In reply to a post by R0NSKI:

I really think your wrong with what you state, I've been using 1Gbps networking for longer than I care to remember and no computer has struggled

I guess you didn't have a gigabit ethernet on a Pentium 4 desktop, or a Pentium M laptop.

With full disk encryption requiring CPU load to decrypt, file copying from laptops to the network was slowed down for a number of years. The i5 provided AES native instructions which helped, and is one reason why corporates have avoided the i3.

Edited by jchamier (Sun 17-Jan-21 12:43:34)

I did say longer than I care to remember (which means can actually remember), and was I missing something.

Was going to check on my old Lenovo N500 laptop, but then remembered it only had 100Mbps network port when it hit about 98Mbps in Iperf3.

Interesting what you say about the i3, I'll have to check to see if that still goes for the i3 10100 as was considering that for my updated server.