Does getting a new router mean better Ethernet/Wifi?

[IShyGuyI]

I have at&t fiber and I've seen a ton of videos where they get a different router and it makes their internet better. I want to know if this works and if it will work for me. I have 500 Mbps up and down. and have an Ethernet cable connected to my PC. If it does could anyone recommend any, I am very new to this and will have no idea what is considered good. My budget is around 50-100$ ish. I live in California my closest servers are in L.A.. Idk if this helps. Thanks

[Blue4130]

25 minutes ago, IShyGuyI said:

I have at&t fiber and I've seen a ton of videos where they get a different router and it makes their internet better. I want to know if this works and if it will work for me. I have 500 Mbps up and down. and have an Ethernet cable connected to my PC. If it does could anyone recommend any, I am very new to this and will have no idea what is considered good. My budget is around 50-100$ ish. I live in California my closest servers are in L.A.. Idk if this helps. Thanks

It depends. Are you having issues with your internet now? Drops? Inconsistent speeds or connections?

[wseaton]

Yeah...it depends. What typically crushes low end routers is a lof of connections...not so much the speed of your connection.

 

Most routers made in the past half decade or so, even the cheap consumer ones can handle a 500Mb pipe pretty easy.

[IShyGuyI]

1 hour ago, Blue4130 said:

It depends. Are you having issues with your internet now? Drops? Inconsistent speeds or connections?

There are some instances of it dropping or being slow for a bit. Downloading also takes some time although quicker than before it seems like it doesn't take full advantage of the 500Mbps.

 

[AKDENGIE]

If you're reliably maxing out what you pay for, it's unlikely to help.  But keep in mind that the other end of the connection matters too and you have no control over what's going on over there, they could be having issues there or just not uploading at 500Mbps.  

[Alex Atkin UK]

14 hours ago, IShyGuyI said:

There are some instances of it dropping or being slow for a bit. Downloading also takes some time although quicker than before it seems like it doesn't take full advantage of the 500Mbps.

 

Depends where you are downloading from.  Steam and game consoles should easily max out 500Mbit most of the time for fresh game downloads, particularly out of hours.  Game updates can vary more.

 

Pretty much anything else will be hit and miss, especially downloads in a browser which are single threaded so can be restricted by congestion or speed limits between you and the server.

 

IPv6 sometimes also has issues on AT&T from what I hear, if you have that enabled.

 

Do they even let you change the router?

[Lurick]

20 minutes ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

Depends where you are downloading from.  Steam and game consoles should easily max out 500Mbit most of the time for fresh game downloads, particularly out of hours.  Game updates can vary more.

 

Pretty much anything else will be hit and miss, especially downloads in a browser which are single threaded so can be restricted by congestion or speed limits between you and the server.

 

IPv6 sometimes also has issues on AT&T from what I hear, if you have that enabled.

 

Do they even let you change the router?

Nah, their IPv6 functionality is solid, it's their shitty implementation where you can't request more than a /64 so you have to make multiple /64 PD requests even though they allocate you a /56 and give you half of it to use.

 

You're also, in most cases, required to use their BGW device. You can technically bypass the 210 pretty easily, the 310 is more difficult however it's a big PITA for most people so I wouldn't bother and recommend tossing it into passthru mode instead for most people.

[Alex Atkin UK]

6 hours ago, Lurick said:

Nah, their IPv6 functionality is solid, it's their shitty implementation where you can't request more than a /64 so you have to make multiple /64 PD requests even though they allocate you a /56 and give you half of it to use.

Do they use a different network on the Fibre service to the DSL?  Because my friend on the DSL service only got IPv6 last year and it was utterly broken, when they eventually sent an engineer they disabled it on the router.  I had already told him how to disable it on Windows to test which I think had sorted the problem already.

 

I guess it could have been a regional issue.

[Falcon1986]

On 10/5/2023 at 7:17 PM, IShyGuyI said:

There are some instances of it dropping or being slow for a bit. Downloading also takes some time although quicker than before it seems like it doesn't take full advantage of the 500Mbps.

 

You're on ethernet directly to the fiber gateway, so you should be getting the best speeds.

 

Try rebooting the gateway.

 

Are you measuring these speeds?

[Lurick]

12 hours ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

Do they use a different network on the Fibre service to the DSL?  Because my friend on the DSL service only got IPv6 last year and it was utterly broken, when they eventually sent an engineer they disabled it on the router.  I had already told him how to disable it on Windows to test which I think had sorted the problem already.

 

I guess it could have been a regional issue.

I would imagine so which doesn't surprise me, I've had their Fiber service for probably 5+ years now and always had IPv6 enabled no issues.

[IShyGuyI]

On 10/6/2023 at 5:39 PM, Falcon1986 said:

You're on ethernet directly to the fiber gateway, so you should be getting the best speeds.

 

Try rebooting the gateway.

 

Are you measuring these speeds?

I have rebooted multiple times even still if i am downloading a game from steam or something else it will reach maybe 60mbps then it will dip to single digits or 0 then go back up.

[IShyGuyI]

On 10/6/2023 at 7:21 AM, Alex Atkin UK said:

Depends where you are downloading from.  Steam and game consoles should easily max out 500Mbit most of the time for fresh game downloads, particularly out of hours.  Game updates can vary more.

 

Pretty much anything else will be hit and miss, especially downloads in a browser which are single threaded so can be restricted by congestion or speed limits between you and the server.

 

IPv6 sometimes also has issues on AT&T from what I hear, if you have that enabled.

 

Do they even let you change the router?

Steam doesn't even get close to 500. The most i have gotten is maybe 80 then it dips straight to single digits or 0, after a bit it does climb back up until it decides to dip again.

[Falcon1986]

3 hours ago, IShyGuyI said:

I have rebooted multiple times even still if i am downloading a game from steam or something else it will reach maybe 60mbps then it will dip to single digits or 0 then go back up.

Steam's default speed unit is MB/s. 60MBps is 480Mb/s, which would be close to your maximum attainable speeds. Are you sure your units are correct?

 

Have you run speed tests at speedtest.net and fast.com?

[IShyGuyI]

1 hour ago, Falcon1986 said:

Steam's default speed unit is MB/s. 60MBps is 480Mb/s, which would be close to your maximum attainable speeds. Are you sure your units are correct?

 

Have you run speed tests at speedtest.net and fast.com?

Ok so I did have my units mixed up I have 500Mbps, sorry about that. Now that I understand that I still need to fix the issue where it suddenly drops to 0 and slowly climbs up. Thanks for correcting me.

[Alex Atkin UK]

On 10/11/2023 at 3:19 AM, IShyGuyI said:

Ok so I did have my units mixed up I have 500Mbps, sorry about that. Now that I understand that I still need to fix the issue where it suddenly drops to 0 and slowly climbs up. Thanks for correcting me.

If you mean during Steam downloads then that is normal for some games, depending on how they are distributed.  It may download one large file of the game then decompresses it before writing to storage, then it will download the next file.  Smaller files wont have time to ramp up the speed.

 

Updates are even more prone to doing this.  Even on a top-end PC on some games updates take much longer to patch than to download the patch, or download the whole game from scratch sometimes.

[Falcon1986]

@IShyGuyI

 

All the more reason for us to see what speed tests are showing:

 

speedtest.net | fast.com

 

You can also check for bufferbloat.

[IShyGuyI]

On 10/11/2023 at 11:05 AM, Falcon1986 said:

@IShyGuyI

 

All the more reason for us to see what speed tests are showing:

 

speedtest.net | fast.com

 

You can also check for bufferbloat.

idk which one I should do so I did all of them

 

Here is the Bufferbloat one: https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat?test-id=0984c956-4af6-441c-ac08-66e54360c891

 

Here is the Speedtest.net one:

 

And here is the Fast.com one: 

 

These results test were performed at 7pm. Since it is night time these results are good but during peak hours it does go down. If you want those results as well let me know.

[Falcon1986]

1 hour ago, IShyGuyI said:

idk which one I should do so I did all of them

Those speed tests look good. Your latency is also good.

 

1 hour ago, IShyGuyI said:

Since it is night time these results are good but during peak hours it does go down.

Not surprised. Speeds tend to drop during peak hours when everyone on the same node are using the connection.

 

I don't think there's any problem with your connection to your ISP. It's the speed of the connection between your ISP and the servers you are downloading from might be slower than your connection. Additionally, if the rate at which your computer can store the data is slow, it can also result in the behaviour you're observing.