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.
I ran archer A7( same as C7) with openWRT before. While the ports are capable of gigabit speed, its processor is not up to a task routing a gigabit internet. I was getting around 200mbps through wifi.
I suggest to test on your ONT whether you are getting a gigabit speed as promised.
This ^^.
I was having similar problems with a TP-Link C9. Tested with iperf
PC->router->PC, wired
iperf indicated that the C9 topped out at 432 Mbps. Other than a static IP address on the WAN port, the C9 was in the default config.
Jumping on here as well to say Yes, I have also encountered this. The ISP could be correct but OP will want to test and validate this.
Not using wifi, I know wifi speeds are slower. This is on wired.
I will try testing at the ont though
hi ballisticks,
out of curiousity i pulled of my C7 and installed the latest openwrt (23.05.2).
With software offloading through ethernet im getting around 200mbps.
Some people built openwrt with QCA specific feature enabled hitting 900mbps, but that was a long way back then.
Let me know if you found a good build.
The trouble is you need to enable flow offloading in LUCI, I believe it’s under the firewall settings or else you’ll be pretty speed limited regardless of wired or wireless. I believe the default for the C7 is to have it turned off.
Update: I tested at the ONT - speeds are marginally better (about 100mbps more) but still nowhere near gigabit.
You’re not going to get gigabit out of the C7 unless you use stock firmware, if even then. Stock firmware can use hardware offloading that openwrt can’t, though it has some. Get a more powerful router.
See it is usually difficult to troubleshoot customer owned devices, wait for their router and see how it goes, if you are getting around the same speeds, it’s time for a service call.
router is unlikely the primary issue affecting your download speeds.
It’s absolutely possible. It’s not that you’re using a third-party router, but rather the one you’r using may be too slow. I ran into this personally – I had a Netgear R7900 that wouldn’t get anywhere near the gigabit speeds I was paying for. Connected directly to the ISP’s fiber ONT, I got the full 940 up and down. Connected through my Netgear router, I’d get maybe 330 maximum using the same Ethernet cables.
Factory resetting it would fix it for a few hours, then it would slow down again. QoS was switched off. Finally, replacing the router with an Asus RT-AC86U completely solved the problem for me. That was a few years ago, so I’m sure there’s better stuff out there now, but this one keeps right on trucking. (And I’m like you, I only use wireless when I have to. Everything that can be wired, is.)
One other thing that was slowing me down a bit: the little Anker Thunderbolt dock I use to connect my laptop couldn’t really do the full gigabit. It’d top out at maybe 650 Mbit. Mostly adequate, but it was definitely slowing down my laptop. I doubt that’s your issue as slow as you’re seeing, but something else to check on.
I didn’t realize it might be the specific router. I remember buying it after reading rave reviews on Reddit lol. I will try out the ISP router at the very least when it comes.
ISPs in Turkey will tell you a lie along the lines of “You will get 20% lower speeds on 3rd party routers” because they don’t want to bother debugging issues on routers they don’t control. I know that’s not true since I get all the speed I pay for, but to connect at all I have to clone the ISP provided router’s mac address because 3rd party routers aren’t supported.
It’s not impossible that your ISP could be doing something similar where they say they support 3rd party routers but throttle speeds based on your router’s mac. If you do end up asking for an ISP router and get better speeds on it, you could try cloning the mac and see if that solves your issue for your own router.
Check your ethernet cable.
Make sure you’re using at least Cat6, and less than 100 feet
Cat5e is fine for gigabit.
Remove the 3rd party router and retest directly from WAN to PC? Easy answers here.
Telus Fibre? I think you need to take a step back and tell us how you’ve got your network configured. Telus ONT to their gateway to your Archer? Is this a double NAT scenario? Have you tried taking their hardware out of the path and having your archer handle the authentication?
Telus ONT straight to the Archer, I took the telus router out of the equation years ago because it sucked.
i was just dealing with similar situation yesterday. After i reset my modem with a paper clip it came back to normal speeds
It could be. I have no personal experience with your router, but I googled it and I saw quite a few mentions of it reducing download speeds with various configuration options enabled.
The best way to determine where the restriction might be would be to connect your pc directly to the ont and running the test. If it’s faster, it’s your router. If it’s not, replace the cable with a new cat6 cable. If that’s faster it was the cable. If it’s not, it’s an isp problem and their new modem probably isn’t going to help.