House next door getting 3megabit/second but I am not

[Nocturnal]

I live right next door to my girlfriend's cousins. Last night I was fiddling with their computer and did a speed test at dslreports.com. It almost hit the 4megabit/per second mark. I was like WTF? Then I went home and made sure that I wasn't hitting that same mark. Lo and behold I was NOT hitting that same mark.

Now what could be the reasons for this?

The house I live in is a three story house, kinda old. The cousins' house is about two years old, with only one floor.

My house has three floors. The top floor and the most bottom floor both have RR. I guess you could say that our line is split in numerous places where as the cousins' line is not.

Besides a signal amplification problem what else could be the culprit of me not getting the proper speed?

Also will a cable company usually re-wire the house or at least run a seperate wire so that I can get those 3megabit speeds?

 

[BigFatCow]

i had a problem where i wasnt getting full speed, i just called up SBC and they ran another line to my house, this helped out my speeds alot.

 

[cmetz]

Nocturnal, assuming you can get a hold of someone clueful at your cable modem ISP (a huge assumption), get your MAC & your neighbor's MAC and have them check the signal level & SNR readings in the CMTS. This should be able to tell you whether or not there's a cable plant issue (if they read about the same, it's all you, if they're much different, it may be the cable co).

Assuming you're running Windows, look around for all the tweaks you need to do in order to get better performance out of the OS. They matter.

If you have a SOHO router, try running without it.

Try connecting your cable modem as close as possible to the demarcation point and see if that helps. Maybe your inside wiring is not so good.

If all else fails, call up support and try to push through a truck roll for "performance problems." They'll try hard to convince you that it's you, though - see the first paragraph for a technical thing to push back on. Unfortunately, all reports I'm hearing is that the cable companies are now heavily insulating the clueful people from the customers, and the layer in between is pretty bad.

 

[JustMike]

For one, the newer house will, in theory, have newer wiring which may make a difference. The number of splits and quality of splitters almost will make a difference.

With that said, assuming those conditions, different network cards will have difference performance. Different versions of Windows perform differently.

There are FAR too many variables. It could be a signal quality issue or it could be a PC configuration issue.