How can I test a router?

Hello everyone,

I recently switched ISPs, from High speed DSL at 6 Mbps to FiO at 60 Mbps. We switched because instead of paying tons of money to DirectTV/Charter we want to use Amazon Instant video. (With student discount it costs half of a Netflix subscription). While I generally love the performance lately I have been experiencing issues.

Normally around 5 PM the internet speed slows to about 10-20 Mbps. I am not sure why. After talking to the ISP they keep blaming my router. Honestely I think the ISP is just giving an excuse. I bought the router in July 2013, a Netgear R6300 dual band router. (This was right before the R7000 Nighthawk was released) For local traffic I don't have any issues so I highly doubt what my ISP is saying.

However, to confirm the issues, does anyone have any ideas on how I could test the router? We watch Amazon instant video on our Smart TV in the living room which is connected to the 5Ghz frequency (up to 1300 Mbps). My laptop connects to the 5Ghz frequency also. (intel 7260 NIC). Desktop/server is connected via ethernet. There is another laptop connected at the 2.4 Ghz freq and a few other devices that are also connected at 2.4 Ghz. Do I have too many wireless devices? I think this router can handle it.

EDIT: for example, I have 6 devices connected to the router and I am having issues watching Youtube. Actually, I am not sure about some of these devices.

I am not sure how well these two links will help you.

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/wireless/wireless-howto/31679-how-to-test-a-wireless-router

http://www.itproportal.com/2013/10/14/a-guide-to-testing-your-wireless-routers-performance/

According to IPERF throughput tests, the router is fine.

The easiest thing to do would be to plug you laptop directly into your modem via network cable. When you see the slowdown again, you can tell your ISP that it's not the router since you eliminated that from the chain.

This is my normal test scenario for issues with an ISP - eliminate every item they could blame so the issue is back in their court.

James Fisher said:

The easiest thing to do would be to plug you laptop directly into your modem via network cable. When you see the slowdown again, you can tell your ISP that it's not the router since you eliminated that from the chain.

This is my normal test scenario for issues with an ISP - eliminate every item they could blame so the issue is back in their court.

Click to expand...

Clever thinking. That would fix Ryan's problem.

Food for thought: What if the ISP blames the cable or the laptop's Ethernet ports?

Hey thanks @James Fisher . Not a bad idea at all.

Right now I have the internet DIRECTLY connected to my laptop. I am having Youtube troubles; the issue is NOT the router.

The speedtests (speedtest.net) are inconclusive however. They range from 6 mbps to 12 mbps depending on whether or not Youtube is buffering. Definitely not the 60 we were promised.

I am now wondering about how to best setup our network. So many devices...

@DevynCJohnson Well, I have no idea how they will respond to my tests. All I can say is my laptop has gigabyte Ethernet..


(I almost uploaded my IP address. )

What you might want to do is while you are streaming Youtube is do a packet capture to see if you are seeing anything odd in the network traffic.

@grim76 Good idea. I might run wireshark just to see.

DevynCJohnson said:

Clever thinking. That would fix Ryan's problem.

Food for thought: What if the ISP blames the cable or the laptop's Ethernet ports?

Click to expand...

What if it _REALLY IS_ the cable, or ethernet port? Just another simple test to make to swap them out when the signal is bad. I don't know much about fiber systems, but they are fairly immune to various RF interference issues. But if you connect to a modem with a ethernet cable, it could pick up interference more easily from something within your home or from a nearby neighbor. RFI problems are often very hard to detect, but almost anything electrical or electronic can cause RFI.

And my silly question: you're not using an old ethernet cable, right? I don't know when the specs change to support higher speeds, but an old Cat-5 would not be good.

Well, the FiO cable runs into the house then into a "Converter box". There is no modem, just our router. I can actually connect to the "Converter box" because of the Cat-5e (gigabyte speed, very new) cable running from it to the router.

The ethernet cable is on my laptop...would rather not replace it. Although I could get a USB ethernet port. I did try this with my desktop also. Same issues.

ryanvade said:

Well, the FiO cable runs into the house then into a "Converter box". There is no modem, just our router. I can actually connect to the "Converter box" because of the Cat-5e (gigabyte speed, very new) cable running from it to the router.

The ethernet cable is on my laptop...would rather not replace it. Although I could get a USB ethernet port. I did try this with my desktop also. Same issues.

Click to expand...

You mean an Ethernet cable is permanently mounted to your laptop? Could you show us a picture?

DevynCJohnson said:

You mean an Ethernet cable is permanently mounted to your laptop? Could you show us a picture?

Click to expand...

It was during tests. Not all the time. I was talking about the ethernet port...sorry.

Here is a very crude diagram of our network.

I talked to my ISP again. They are still blaming the router. This time the issue is supposedly the wireless channels...I set the router to what the "engineer" told be me to and now the internet is slower and I cannot access local machines on the network. Even via ping. For example if I try:
ping 10.0.0.3 I get no reply but if I try
ping *******.no-ip.biz (My minecraft server no-ip.com address) I get a response.

So sick of these so called experts.

I don't know if this will help, ryanvade, but did you ever try Ookla speed test? Sorry, I can't give the web address. I always love the numbers I get...Verizon, my provider rates D+.

ryanvade said:

I talked to my ISP again. They are still blaming the router. This time the issue is supposedly the wireless channels...I set the router to what the "engineer" told be me to and now the internet is slower and I cannot access local machines on the network. Even via ping. For example if I try:
ping 10.0.0.3 I get no reply but if I try
ping *******.no-ip.biz (My minecraft server no-ip.com address) I get a response.

So sick of these so called experts.

Click to expand...

Call the ISP more often and demand that something be done.

That is the first time I have seen someone on this site use "". I thought I would never see its use.

Of course, when you bypassed the router and coupled direct to the converter box, you proved the router isn't THE problem, or the only problem. New or not, you can get bad cables. Also, even though Cat=5e is rated for gigabit speed, it is inferior to Cat-6 (or they wouldn't have developed a Cat-6, right?). So the first thing your top-grade service encounters is medium-grade cabling.

Here is a brief quote I found on the web: "...a category 6 connector is 12 times less “noisy” compared to a category 5e connector." True or not, I don't know. But it is certainly a likely weak link in your system, if it's not the FiO service itself.

I'm no expert either, but a new Cat-6 cable would be my next step. (A good quality cable... nothing from Radio Shack! LOL)

@DevynCJohnson I emailed them again. Here is their response:

Ryan,

We have identified that the internet connection coming for our services have become saturated. Because of this, we asked the City Council to approve the availability to bring more bandwidth into the City. They have approved us to bring in 2 gigabits of service for internet.

Our current provider cannot provide the size connection we need so we are working on getting another provider into the City. We have acquired the new supplier for internet bits and working on getting them connected.

This new service can grow along with our customer growth and can provide up to 20 gigabits of internet speed per second. This way as we continue to grow all it takes is a phone call to increase the bandwidth.

The issue we are currently having is the new internet connected games are effecting the download speeds. These games are constantly pulling data down and is not burstable as normal web pages are. With the schools closed this has placed quite a load on our current connections.

If all goes well, we plan on having the new connections made by mid February to solve this issue. We apologize for the issue but be assured that we are addressing the issue as fast as we can.

Click to expand...

Is 2 gigabits a real improvement?

ryanvade said:

@DevynCJohnson I emailed them again. Here is their response:




Is 2 gigabits a real improvement?

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If it will be increased by 2Gb/s (Gb = Gigabits) for a WHOLE city, I guess that is an improvement. I hope you live in a small city. If the average person gets 10megabits a second and the city will soon support up to 2000megabits/sec, then 200 people can enjoy 10Mbit/s at the same time in addition to the original population.

Later in the email, they say 20gigabit/sec; I assume this will be the new total after the increase. That would support 2000 people at 10Mbit/s at the same time. I guess that is good, but I think an increase larger than 2Gbit/s would be more logical.