Shaw Thread

[psicodude]

I can't explain why, but I threatened to move to Telus and the retentions person didn't care. the next day, I said I am leaving for TekSavvy and they immediately dropped the price. Probably just luck of the draw.

I have been getting 330+ mbps for 2 days now, by the way.

[keratosis]

Pretty happy with my speeds. Consistently getting over 175 down and 16 up but
if they want to upgrade me to 300 for the same price? Who am I to argue.

[dino7c]

Originally Posted by psicodude

I can't explain why, but I threatened to move to Telus and the retentions person didn't care. the next day, I said I am leaving for TekSavvy and they immediately dropped the price. Probably just luck of the draw.

I have been getting 330+ mbps for 2 days now, by the way.

They know what Telus can offer in your area...if you can't get fiber they know it's bs

[psicodude]

Originally Posted by dino7c

They know what Telus can offer in your area...if you can't get fiber they know it's bs

That makes sense. No fibre in my 'hood.

[Jimmy Stang]

This morning my home internet connection is testing at 331 down, 15 up. So it looks like that 150 to 300 upgrade has taken place at home. Doesn't seem to have taken hold yet at the office where we also subscribe to 150.

I'm not sure that I will notice the difference, personally. It would have been nice to have a little more upload included, as that would help with VPN-ing back to my home/office. And 150 seemed to be blazing fast already.

Not complaining, and certainly pleased with the upgrade, but not sure that I do enough heavy downloading and multiple streams to really push the envelope.

[FlameOn]

If you want to get the speeds faster, it's a matter of resetting your modem. They updated everyone's speed on the backend, your modem needs a power cycle to pick it up usually.

[Jimmy Stang]

Originally Posted by FlameOn

If you want to get the speeds faster, it's a matter of resetting your modem. They updated everyone's speed on the backend, your modem needs a power cycle to pick it up usually.

That's what I had heard, but the irony is, my home modem was not power cycled and is now getting 300, and the office one was and is still at 150 (well, 170, as is typical with 150).

We have a couple of remote workers today, so I'll save the fiddling until tomorrow so they don't begin to hate me.

[bossy22]

I reset my modem, I'm still getting around 125


Just tested again a couple hours later, without a restart and I'm getting 340

[dino7c]

anyone getting in the 600 range? I remain in the mid 300s (had 300 all along)

[photon]

To get 600 you need an XB6 modem, the Cisco or Hitron ones won't do it (just in case that's the issue).

[Huntingwhale]

Had 150 but I'm up to 316 now. Crazy

[Fuzz]

Our office is still stuck at 150. I rebooted, but no change.

[TorqueDog]

Originally Posted by dino7c

anyone getting in the 600 range? I remain in the mid 300s (had 300 all along)

I hit 655 Mbps downstream on speedtest.net. Only thing that has come close to using the connection in its entirety is Steam game downloading. I'd wager Usenet would too.

[Lubicon]

Rebooted last night and we are up to 300 now.

So related question as I'm the designated 'nork' in our house but don't understand this one. Why do some of our devices see these higher speeds while others do not? Is it a function of their age and their processing ability? Our older devices (laptop and iPad's that are > 2 years old) don't see more than 20-30 MBPS download at best. My kids' new laptops and newer tablets are seeing > 300 on the same connection.

[Jimmy Stang]

Originally Posted by Lubicon

Rebooted last night and we are up to 300 now.

So related question as I'm the designated 'nork' in our house but don't understand this one. Why do some of our devices see these higher speeds while others do not? Is it a function of their age and their processing ability? Our older devices (laptop and iPad's that are > 2 years old) don't see more than 20-30 MBPS download at best. My kids' new laptops and newer tablets are seeing > 300 on the same connection.

Yeah, pretty much. If you've got dual bands, the 5 Ghz frequency will outperform the 2.4 Ghz, but is more limited in range. Some older devices don't even have 5 Ghz radios in them. I have an old iPad (5 years old?) that DOES have 5 Ghz, but it simply can't process those speeds.

And with anything wireless, you've always got the issues of proximity, interference, etc. to think about as well.

Finally, the Shaw routers aren't always regarded as the most powerful for wifi. They work as perfectly capable modems, but sometimes fall short on delivering wifi to your home. Many people, myself included, invest in a router of our own to handle the routing and wireless tasks, and then have our Shaw modem "bridged" so it becomes a simple modem.

That being said, it doesn't explain why some devices are getting the speeds and others not. I would turn my attention to the age of your devices, the network you are connected to (5 vs 2.4), and your proximity to the router.

Or... your kids are clever and are throttling the speed to your devices.

[TorqueDog]

It's a combination of a few things: the WiFi bands your router supports, the distance from and signal strength your wireless devices are seeing, and the actual wireless networking hardware built into the devices.


When Wireless-N came out, 300Mbps was the theoretical throughput that full-size wireless NICs were able to connect at. But if you had a laptop with a mini Wireless-N card, you could go into the connection properties and you'd see that the maximum connection speed was only 150Mbps.


So even a device that supports all the wireless bands and frequencies you have available for the fastest possible speeds might not be able to achieve them. And as you get into rated theoretical maximums for wireless hardware, there's even more that comes into play, like the fact that a wireless AP that supports 1300Mbps is referring to a number that is limit, a maximum that is cumulative of all its connected clients. You won't see that throughput for a single connected device.

[Lubicon]

Yeah. It just makes me wonder sometimes. All the devices are connected to our 5g network via wireless. You could line them up side by side (so I would assume signal strength is consistent) and get different results on the speed tests. But the results are consistent - the newer devices always show much higher speeds. At the end of the day it's doesn't matter much as we really don't notice the difference for 99% of what we do. I've just never been able to figure it out.

[GoinAllTheWay]

Wouldn't be entirely surprising if the older devices were being somewhat software throttled to entice you to buy new? Didn't apple get busted for something like that? Think their excuse was they were slowing the device to preserve battery life?

[TorqueDog]

Originally Posted by GoinAllTheWay

Wouldn't be entirely surprising if the older devices were being somewhat software throttled to entice you to buy new? Didn't apple get busted for something like that? Think their excuse was they were slowing the device to preserve battery life?

Software throttling to force people to buy new and what Apple did are two completely different things.

Apple was throttling the processors in iPhones once their batteries had degraded to a certain point and the phone experienced an unexpected shutdown because of the battery degradation. Mine was around 83% in my SE when it first happened, and if I decided to undo the throttling, the phone's battery life suffered for it since... y'know, the battery is almost 20% toast.

In newer versions of iOS (after everyone went mental about it), you can revert the throttling after it is applied if you so desire. But they also provided a cheaper replacement cost for iPhone batteries because of the outcry, so that's not too bad. I know it's cool to hate on Apple for it, but it really does make sense. By allowing the phone to throttle itself, it actually extends the usable life of the device at the cost of some performance.


As for the other scenario, just one person finds out and you have a class action lawsuit on your hands. The reality is that -- over time -- software gets bloated. There's code in there to support legacy implementations, new features, more stuff being done in the background. Windows 3.1 came on six 1.44MB floppy disks. Windows XP came on a 6xx MB CD-ROM. Windows 7 and later all come on a single-layer DVD around 4.3x GB. But Windows 7 took around 10 GB of disk space once installed and Windows 10 takes double that at 20 GB.

Barring some really awesome software and driver optimizations, newer software almost always has higher system requirements because it tends to do more stuff and usually brings legacy code with it. It's probably the biggest challenge Microsoft has with Windows 10... legacy support for applications that some of their biggest enterprise and government customers need to run.

So while it's a fun conspiracy theory, it just isn't likely in the majority of cases.

[Mazrim]

Another extended service outage in the South. It was a month and a half when this last happened. At least this time Shaw was willing to say what the problem was so I knew right away it was going to be a long wait.

I had about 10 years of basically no problems whatsoever, so it's a bit weird to have two extremely long outages in a short time.