Is AT&T Fscking With My Connection?

Yep, that's the way it works. They don't really throttle the download speed by increasing the ACK delays. They just time slice it, which is what you're seeing. Comcast does the same thing with their 1Mbit/sec service. You get a burst of traffic at about 8Mbits/sec, followed by a giant delay with no traffice, followed by another burst. It's not a problem if you have enough buffering, but a few apps (such as telnet) go totally nuts with the delays.

Why did you drop all the way from 3Mbits/sec to 768Kbits/sec? What's wrong with 1.5Mbits/sec?

Not really. Using the built in traffic monitor in Windoze XP and above might be more familiar to AT&T. The problem is not convincing them that something is wrong. The problem is finding someone at AT&T support that understands what's happening, followed by finding something that can actually do something about it.

Good DSL modem. Some WRT54G mutations do strange things, especially with alternative firmware. This is especially true if you use QoS and have your reserved bandwidth set too high. Try connecting the Win 7 machine directly to the modem, without the router, and see if anything changes. It probably won't but it's easy enough to do.

Hint: AT&T is evil. Find a different DSL provider.

You won't. There's about 15% overhead on DSL between the sync speed and the IP throughput, although you're seeing a greater difference than that.

I think there is something amiss here. I can understand only getting 560kbps when paying for 768kbps service, but surely pausing the traffic for 40% of the time effectively gives a rate of 330k, if he's peaking at 560kbps?

That's because the Win 7 widget that he's using is a "network meter" not a benchmark program. The network meter will show traffic as reported by the NDIS driver, probably using TCP, which requires ACK's. The benchmark program will probably use UDP which does not require ACK's. The lower figure for TCP versus UDP is caused by the dead time on the uplink between data bursts.

wikihow.com/Test-for-Bandwidth-Limiting-by-Your-ISP

I saw that before I posted. And i did try an XP machine over a wireless connenction. Same thing.

Yes, I used to get about 10% less, and that's what your figure shows too. I'm back up to 3 Mbps now and I get 2.8 or so.

My office

I use the later. I wouldn't trust the former :-)

To make a long story short, I opened up a case VIA phone and asked where I can email my reports and complaint to them so I didn't have to repeat my complaint to 5 different morons or have threm mis-word in the case notes.. About 2 hours after I sent the email my modem got a signal that said "3Mbps" and has been that way for 5-6 days now. I never received a response back about the support case and I have made no attempt to call or respond to them.

So I'm back to my original speed before I downgraded to 768K.

Interesting solution. I guess they can't turn off the errant throttling on a case by case basis.

What happens their hardware goes kaput? Will Xenix even run on semi-modern hardware?

Good luck with that! :-)

They don't offer 1.5K here. $20 for 768Kb and $38 for 3Mb. but now I'm getting 3.0 for the .768 price. I *think*

I will check my 4100B firmware version as well.

Thanks, Jeff.

-sw

I had 768 before I upgraded to 3.0 and it NEVER did that. I got

620-650K throughput then I previously had 768K and there were gaps and delays like that.

I'm wondering if they're somehow applying the throttling to my DSl connection that they notorious for applying to their cellphone network (that works roughly at the same speed, IIRC). That's probably far fetched but I care to know nothing further about cellular data and how the towers tie into the land based network.

-sw (SS3 support guy after I left SCO)

Yes, I should have said I know about that. But as you note... it was much lower than the 10-15% I'm used to.

I have no idea what you're talking about ;-) but it doesn't do that at

3.0Mbps in the least. And those are 5 second gaps there. The Windnows network activity meter shows the same thing. And most of all I CAN FEEL IT turn off and on as my web pages load.

-sw