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So I upgraded to FiOS 20 Mbps Symmetrical

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EricMartello

Senior member
This Monday I logged onto my FiOS account to pay a bill and decided to see if anything new was available and I found that I could upgrade from my 15/2 connection at $52 per month to 20/20 for $64 (with yearly agreement). The agreement wasn't and issue since I plan to stick with FiOS but the actual speeds I am getting are iffy.

It took until today for the upgrade to go thru. Download speed is fine, I get a full 20 Mbps down which is about 2.5 MB/s...nifty. The problems arose with the uploads.

At first, my upload speed did not surpass 2 Mbps, so I spent 30+ mins with verizon tech support and after they did a few things on their end the Speakeasy speedtest revealed an upload improvement of 7.7 Mbps. Better, but not quite what I want.

I have a Dlink DGL-4300 Router so I checked the support page for the latest firmware, updated it, and messed around with the "gamefuel" settings. No effect. SPI on/off had no effect, connecting directly to the Verizon ONT gave me 14 Mbps...hmmm... I then tried the speedtest in IE8, and my upload speed came back as 12 Mbps...so it seemed the limitation was with Firefox, or possibly with Vista's advanced TCP settings hidden in the registry.

So changed my TCP settings and specifically the DefaultSendWindow, which then got me a consisten 14 Mbps in FF and IE...but that's still 6 Mbps short of the advertised 20! Even with TCP/IP overhead I should be able to hit 18-19 Mbps uploads if the line speed truly is 20 Mbps.

At this point I am out of ideas of tweaks and changes I can do to get my upload to work at 20 Mbps...I'm debating on whether or not to keep the 20/20 or just go with the 20/5 which qualifies for a TV bundle, where I can get TV and FiOS for $80 a month, about $50 cheaper each month...then again those bundle prices seem to double after 6-12 months.

 
You can't trust the readings of those speed test sites, they are unreliable. Also "up to" means exactly that, up to 20 Mbs.
 
Quick Update:

I just logged onto my router and made one more tweak. The DGL-4300 uses QoS (aka traffic shaping) and it tries to auto-determine the max upload speed by default. I simply set the max upload speed to 20000 kbps and re-did a few speed tests - woohoo, I get a full 20/20 now.

Lesson: Don't trust "auto" settings to always be the best. (but I should have known that by now)
 
Just out of curiosity, have you tried going here: http://speedtest.verizon.net/ Then running the speed test for FIOS, afterward, there is a link at the bottom for optimize my connection for FIOS. Click that and run that. I also have 20/20 FIOS as well and I was getting around 20/6 or so on speed tests, ran that tool and now my speed tests for any number of tests comes back usually around 20/19 or so. Give it a try.
 
Originally posted by: EricMartello
Quick Update:

I just logged onto my router and made one more tweak. The DGL-4300 uses QoS (aka traffic shaping) and it tries to auto-determine the max upload speed by default. I simply set the max upload speed to 20000 kbps and re-did a few speed tests - woohoo, I get a full 20/20 now.

Lesson: Don't trust "auto" settings to always be the best. (but I should have known that by now)
Click to expand...

You'd make a good network guy - "automagic" anything is generally discouraged.
 
Originally posted by: kevnich2
Just out of curiosity, have you tried going here: http://speedtest.verizon.net/ Then running the speed test for FIOS, afterward, there is a link at the bottom for optimize my connection for FIOS. Click that and run that. I also have 20/20 FIOS as well and I was getting around 20/6 or so on speed tests, ran that tool and now my speed tests for any number of tests comes back usually around 20/19 or so. Give it a try.
Click to expand...

I did not try that verizon optimizer in the course of my attempts to get my speeds up to where they should be, but I attribute my results to:

- Tweaking TCP Settings (MTU, TTL and such) with TCP Optimizer from Speedguide.net
- Manually setting DefaultSendWindow to ([Rated Upload Kbps] / 8) * 1024
- Manually entering the Maximum uplink speed within my Router

I can now get 20/18 or better on most speedtests, and with consistency. Latency seems to have a big impact on the actual speeds, because hitting a server on the West Coast will essentially halve my speeds.

 
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