Improve Network Utilization?

[dseijuro]

I am on vacation and living at my girlfriend's place. She has three other roommates and they all share a cable service for internet. It is the same type that I use at home with the 100Mbps cap. However, data transfer is really slow when I use her connection. I thought it might have been her computer, but when I plug the cable onto my labtop, it is just as slow. I would say at least 5~10 times slower. I looked at Network Utilization with Task Manager, and it shows very low (< 1%) utilization no matter what I do (such as loading a bunch of webpages simultaneously).

Is there anything I can do to improve it, or is this what happens when that many people are sharing the same service?

To give an example, at home, when I load a webpage, it takes about one second for the entire content to show. Here at her place, I must wait for about 5~15 seconds before anything appears, and when the page starts to load I can see clearly the delay of images arriving after texts.

I tried Firefox and IE both, and it's the same thing.

 

[Trizoy]

Well Dseijuro you need to understand that the 100mbps cap is not for the doanlod or upload for your cable connection. The 100mbps which you see is the design limit for a lan connection, IE between two computers on the same network. If you ask your girlfriend what she pays for in speed for here cable it will probably be in the range of 1.5 mbps (150x) what your assuming. You can also test your cable speed here and find out what your getting. http://www.dslreports.com/stest What I am assuming is that you have a router with all the computers plugged into it (the best way to do it). If you dont have a router, and your connecting all into one pc... That could cause speed issues with the downline computers. What I would do, go and unplug the router (it retains all settings) and plug it back in after a few seconds. Let it stand doing its thing for 1-2 minutes. Go and click this link and get the speed test. Find out what kind of speed she has. Come back and let us know what you come up with (my router needs to be unplugged almost every 2 days..) Have fun!

Oh btw, these are ancient computers are they?

 

[dseijuro]

Thank you for the help, Trizoy.

I tried several of the connection speed tests from your link. The results are really inconsistent but generally in the range of 600kbps~1Mbps. Hmm, doesn't look like there's any problem if this is T1.

She just offered a new bit of info that might be significant. A week before I came over, one of her roommates moved out, and now a new roommate is subleasing. Curiously, she was surprised when I showed her how slow it was to load a page, and said it's always been much faster.

About the computers. I think hers is now 2 years old. With the P4 and 512 RAM. However, mine is 5 years old with P3 and 320 RAM.

They do have a router with all the computers plugged into it, and it's in her room. So I am gonna try the unplug a few times.

 

[dseijuro]

New data...

After a bunch of speed tests I found that we always get around 2.6Mbps within the first about 15~30 minutes of unplug/replug the cable router. However, after that it quickly degrades and varies wildly. Typically we will get 120Kbps~1.3Mbps. Quite often there will be 10~15 minutes of draught where we get 70Kbps(!).

Again, this is supposedly a very recent problem.

 

[Trizoy]

What I would check to see is if one of the roomates is running a mass download session.. for programs that download .torrents and limewire files the connection does not come back right way (as it should). Go look see if someone else on the "t1" is downloading a lot of stuff...