Slooooow!

Considering customer service, when my first cable modem (Toshiba from cable company, Cox at the time) was failing I called customer service and (surprisingly) got a woman who understood what I was saying (about getting 75% packet loss or worse).

Probably DOCSIS 3, 4X. According to wikepedia, that modem should be able to handle 152 Mbps downstream and 108 Mbps upstream.

This is often used to claim that DSL is better. the rest of the internet uses shared connections too.

Certainly the whole internet is a shared resource but when internet speeds to the node were fairly slow, you could tell when the kids got home from school because your cable feed dropped to a crawl. I haven't been on cable for quite a while but based on how often my cable subscriber neighbors want to skim my wifi, it is still not that reliable. I keep my DMZ router turned off unless someone asks me to turn it on or the kids are here. It sits in the front window with clear line of sight to the 3 neighbors who want to skim.

It is a Surfboard 6121. A DOCSIS 3.0 from the docs. Should be able to do

It must be something between the modem, router, and computer. I just got a Win 10 computer and it will show 50 mbps downlink while another 2 computers will only give 10 to 25 mbps plugged into the same eithernet cable. The old and new computers both have a 3 Ghz processor and are almost identical in most things such as memory and processor.

I'd like to see the actual claim.

A claim that DSL is "better" because you don't share your connection means nothing unless you back that up with some numbers.

If I take an isolated back road to Grandma's house, I don't have to share the road with anyone. However, if I take a shared highway, I can get there in half the time. Is the back road "better" merely because I didn't have to share it?

The claim made sense when cable speeds were very close to DSL speeds. If DSL was 3 mb and cable was 5 mb sharing would cut it back quite a bit at peak times. Potentially it could be slower than DSL

Now that DSL is 6 mb and cable is 60 mb or more, sharing cuts it down just a tiny be that you'd not notice or care about.

My point exactly. Without numbers to back it up, the "unshared is better" claim is accurate but holds no real world advantage.

I use DSL because a 10 meg connection that is working beats the hell out of a 50 meg connection that is down. I understand Comcast may be OK in other places but they suck here and that is the only other wired option.

DSL has speeded up here too. I am getting a real 10mb over copper and it can be 20 if you are close enough to the fiber front end. FiOS is really speedy when it is working.

I tried my ISP's speed test. My browser timed out before the test was complete. There is a message in there some where.

The ISP test really doesn't much if you are not hitting sites out of that ISP building. That is just a wrap test.

Test at

The same model I have. The wikipedia article actually has both numbers (152 and 172). Apparently, the higher number includes overhead.

I used to have one laptop that wouldn't ever get full download speed (IIRC it got 38M instead of the 50M the others got). The problem was with WiFi. It was getting a 72.2M (802.11n) WiFi connection. I found a way to double that and now get the full 50M.

My ISP's speed test doesn't seem to be working. A good one is

BTW, I just got 52.9/5.1 (good for 50/5 service).