Paying for Gigabit, getting 1/2 the speed...

[Feejai]

I have been paying for Gigabit internet, yet that maximum download I get is usually around 600Mbps (which is not horrible, but only 60% of what I am paying for.  Also my upload speeds, I am lucky if I get 15Mbps, only 50% of the advertised speed.  Yes I know, the fine print...  up to those speeds, but honestly Rogers hasn't invested any money in my neighbourhood since the pandemic, yet their internet/tv prices keep climbing ever year.

Anyone else experience this issue in Vaughan L4J area?  Thanks in advance.

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@Feejai  I am currently able to get download speeds of 750 Mb/s and upload speeds of 21 Mb/s with my 500u service.  I can attain those speeds with my Ignite gateway in Bridge Mode (using my own router and WiFi gear) as well as in Gateway mode, with just the Rogers-provided hardware.

Have you tried to test your connectivity with Bridge Mode disabled, using a fast computer (with a fast network card and good device drivers) that is directly connected to the gateway via Ethernet?

[Feejai]

Thanks for taking the time to respond, and yes I have tried all options, bridge mode, regular mode with only a single device connected, hard wired with GbE card etc.  It just doesn't matter what I do, I really think the issue is the amount of capacity Rogers has in my neighbourhood.

Even the technicians that I've had to come look at it have been useless, one says its a modem, so I get it replaced, one says my line is fine, one puts a filter on my line, the next one takes it off.  One can only dream that one day FTTH will be available, but until then there are really no other choices for me at this time.

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@Feejai  If you could log into your gateway, go to "Gateway > Connection > Rogers Network" and post the Downstream, Upstream and CM Error Codewords tables here (similar to what was posted in this thread) we could have a look the stats and perhaps give you some advice as to how you might be able to resolve the issue.

Is there ever a time of day or night that you can achieve your advertised speed?  If the speeds that you are seeing are VERY consistent and your modem's signal tables and error stats all look good, then it could be your equipment that is the bottleneck.

[Feejai]

Thanks I will get back to you on the modem stats, but as far as it being my equipment there is just no way.  Hardwired directly to the modem gives me the same results, and on my network equipment I have a 2.5GbE ethernet card going to my 10 GbE switch which is connected to with GbE Rogers modem...

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Okay, just asking because if you, for example, had a 2.5 GigE USB-C network adapter connected to an Apple Silicon Mac, you would think the performance would be great, but all the common chipsets are only supported by the USB CDC-ECM driver on macOS, which does not support hardware offloading of any kind and will only deliver a fraction of the sustained throughput that you might expect.

[57]

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@Feejai wrote:

...maximum download I get is usually around 600Mbps ... upload speeds, I am lucky if I get 15Mbps

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Most people on Rogers, who are not on the highest tier, typically get significantly more than they pay for.  That's why it's rarely worthwhile to pay extra for Gb service.

If you're consistently getting around 600/15, it's possible that the modem is improperly provisioned, although you'd think they would have checked that first.  It's possible you may be provisioned  for 300/15 or 500/15...  Lots of people with 300 now get 500-600 and with 15 up typically get 15-16, sometimes more.  Did you/they check specifically for provisioning numbers?

PS. There are still some areas that may be bandwidth limited, but typically pretty rare since people do (mostly) get what they pay for and raise a stink if they don't (and then get credit or billed the lower rate).

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@Feejai  I see in your picture that you have a UDM Pro in your network.  Is it still in your network path, regardless of whether or not you have Bridge Mode enabled in your Ignite gateway?  If so, do you also have SQM enabled on your WAN interface, or any other interface?  (I think Ubiquiti calls it "Enable Smart Queues")  If Smart Queues are enabled, try disabling it, restart the device, and retest.

[Feejai]

@-G- Oh my goodness, I disabled smart queues and the speed jumped up to 919 Mbps and 31.6 Mbps up.  I would also like to apologize and will have to eat my words earlier when I said there is no way it is my equipment.  Thing is though, I was getting those speeds directly connected to the modem with nothing else in-between.

Thank you so much, I will monitor my speed going forward over the next couple of days and report back if there is any negative change. 

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Yeah, SQM (and other active queue management methods) is VERY CPU-intensive.  If your router does not have enough CPU power available, that option will severely limit its packet forwarding capacity.

The queue disciplines also work by limiting the amount of bandwidth that different classes of traffic can consume on a link.  If you have ample CPU power to support your link speeds but do not have QoS configured properly or optimized for your link speed and type, you can, unknowingly, either severely constrain the amount of bandwidth that will be consumed or make the QoS controls ineffective.  You can also artificially cause your device to drop packets unnecessary.

Implementing this option properly requires knowledge of how it works and the trade-offs that you will need to make when configuring it... and if you don't actually need to implement QoS, then don't because you will probably just end up causing more problems than you will solve.

[Feejai]

After check the 'Smart Queues' setting on my Ubiquiti UDM Pro device, this was indeed the issue that was preventing me from achieving 'full speed' on my connection.  This setting is enabled by default, something that I completely overlooked and didn't pay attention to.  Below I am providing a few screen shots to help others that might come across this issue, including the description of what 'Smart Queues' does on the UDM Pro.  When the option was enabled, the uprate speed was only set to 15 Mbps by default and the reason why I was not getting faster upload speeds (the speed test screen shots below both show 32 Mbps up that is because I had changed/removed the upload restrictions).

Smart Queues Description:

Speed with Smart Queues ON:

Speed with Smart Queues Off:

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@Feejai : Glad to see you got the issue resolved. It does explain why Rogers (and we) often ask people to remove all non-Rogers equipment from the equation (no matter how innocuous) when troubleshooting, and explains why the technicians saw nothing wrong with your connection.

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@57 wrote:

Glad to see you got the issue resolved. It does explain why Rogers (and we) often ask people to remove all non-Rogers equipment from the equation (no matter how innocuous) when troubleshooting, and explains why the technicians saw nothing wrong with your connection.

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This is also an example of why Rogers provides customers with combination modem/gateways and does not allow them to use their own cable modems.  The average support and field techs are untrained and unable to support third-party equipment, especially equipment with advanced capabilities, and Rogers knows that the equipment that they provide works and will meet the needs of most customers.

@Feejai  Also, it wasn't clear from your post whether you disabled Smart Queues or whether you changed the parameters for your link speeds.  The idea behind the QoS configuration is that you keep some bandwidth in reserve for high-priority traffic.  If no traffic ever goes into higher-priority queues, you won't realize the full benefits of QoS controls, you will (perhaps needlessly) consume excessive CPU and keep your device running hot, and you will decrease the number of packet buffers that are allocated for normal traffic, which can lead to packet loss.  You will, however, perform better in bufferbloat tests ...but if you do not suffer from bandwidth constraints or need to provide special support for extremely latency-sensitive applications, you will be better off just disabling Smart Queues.

[Feejai]

@-G- sorry for the delay in responding, I disabled smart queues altogether on the UDM Pro.