I live in Canada, and my ISP is Telus. I’m subscribed to their gigabit plan.
However, I only ever really get 250mbps. This is adequate, but I’d like to get closer to the speeds I’m paying for.
I get that peak times might have slower speeds, but I can do a speed test at 3am and it’s the same. Hell, even if I was getting 750 I’d be happy.
Called Telus up, and the only thing the guy would say is its because I have a third party router and not their own. I have a TP-Link Archer C7 with openwrt. It’s a gigabit router. My PC is connected to this via a gigabit switch.
My ISP does allow third party routers, I’ve been using it for years before upgrading to gigabit.
On the plus side they’re sending out their newest router for free so I could at least give them the benefit of the doubt, but I’m suspecting I’m gonna get exactly the same speeds more or less.
The guy kept touting its “wifi capability”, even though I don’t use wifi for anything except cellphones. All my heavy downloads are on wired devices.
So am I correct in that the guy is talking out of his ass and I’m likely stuck on a 2 year term paying $30 more than I should be?
Is the modem capable of 1gbps?
What category lan cables are used? (1 slow lan cable anywhere between your pc and the modem could be a bottleneck)
If they are sending you their router for free, might as well give it a go and see :)
You’ve got too much stuff in the path to troubleshoot- is it the router? Is it the switch? What’s your demarc? A fiber ONT?
You need to hook your computer up as close to directly to the demarc as you can. If the speed gets better, try the router and then the switch on their own to see which slows things down.
Also, try fresh cables. Damaged cables might have your router sending things a couple times before they’re successful, and only the successful packets count (so gigabit router with 75% packet loss, or 3 failures for every success).
If you’re going to go down the rabbit hole and have a friendly network engineer to reach out to who can help troubleshoot, you can run Wireshark (free) during a speed test and find evidence of excessive packet retransmissions or FIN or RST packets (connections getting terminated abruptly).
Hey OP, I’m a Telus tech in Southern Alberta. Like others have mentioned, try doing a speed test directly off of the ONT or Telus router first. If you’re getting less than full speed there then you’ve likely got a provisioning problem. If you do get full speed there then the issue lies between our router and your router. Either way, if you want to send me a DM I can look into this a bit more for you.
Why don’t you run a speedtest with the ISP modem before you bridge it and see what you get.
The first thing I’d do is to confirm is the router is indeed the issue here. If you still have the original router from Telus, switch to that and do the speed test with a cable. You should get close to 900-950 Mbps (we have 1Gig but get 900-970 on speedtest).
If the Telus modem gives you better speeds, then your modem is the bottleneck.
