Changed router, Shaw internet speed took a crap. Ideas?
 

Hey guys,

A friend recently upgraded his Linksys WRT54GX2 router to a Linksys WRT120N. He noticed that his Shaw internet was acting sluggish after the upgrade, so he ran a speed test. His resultant download speed with the WRT120N was 0.4Mb/s :eek:.

He plugged the WRT54GX2 back in, ran the speed test, and the result was around 8Mb/s.

That's when he called me for help. I checked over all his settings on the WRT120N but nothing jumped out at me that should be affecting his download speed so dramatically.

Just out of curiosity, I plugged in a DLink EBR-2310 non-wireless router that I had kicking around and ran the speed test. Again, his download speed was a shitty 0.5Mb/s.

Any ideas why his speeds would be so slow with the WRT120N and the EBR-2310, but fast with the old WRT54GX2? I have never seen this problem before on home quality routers, so I am at a bit of a loss.

Manually reset the modem after installing the new router.

Is he using the new router via wireless or wired connection?

I tried power cycling the modem and it did not make a difference

He's using it via wired.

could just be an odd coincidence...
Posted via RS Mobile

full power cycle as in disconnect absolutely everything from the modem, leave it for a minute or two, plug it all back in?

Are all your tests done in wired mode?

Correct.

The only time I've ever seen a problem similar to this was back in my former life as a Net Admin, when I had to disable NIC autonegotiation and manually set port speeds & duplex modes to get the E10 connection to run at full speed.

But I mean, you don't even get the ability to hard set interface port speeds with consumer grade routers, and the shaw modem should work fine with autonegotiation.

I guess the next step is to give shaw a call and see if there's something funny going on with their end.

^ If using the old router gets you like 8 Mb/s and changing it to another one gets you 0.4 Mb/s, it is a problem on your end. Not Shaw's problem. They will just be asking you to take out the router and run a test, you will find everything will be working at the proper speeds, they are in charge of internet, not the router you use.

I've phoned plenty of times about speeds. And all times they would tell me to unplug the router and run a test without the router. In the end everything seems fine, they keep telling me to call up Linksys since when the router is plugged in, the speeds drop. Over a period of a couple months it got a bit better when I was tweaking some settings, but it crapped out again.

I called them up once again and they said "You have reported the same problem before, did you call Linksys?" and i said "No, cause it got a bit better, and then crapped out". The guy just said phone Linksys, and hung up on me. LOL At the time of phoning him I wasnt even connected via router. =(

Most routers have some sort of logging. Have you checked the logs to see if there's any errors/warnings that could perhaps be the source of the problem?

Have you tried performing a traceroute to see if you can find out if there's latency somewhere else? (although it doesn't seem like it's a Shaw network issue if you say connecting it right to the modem gives you the normal speeds)

Any special rules or QoS applied on the old router? Maybe update to the latest firmware revision for the router to see if you get any better performance?

just a thought. Change the new router's mac address to the address of the old one. It might work, and it's simple enough to do that it's worth a try.