XR500 Slow speeds with AT&T Fiber 1000 Internet

Just to bring this into the light, I have AT&T's Fiber 1000 U-Verse Internet, with the Netgear RX500 router. I did my research a year ago on how to configure AT&T's Arris BGW210 Gatewy/Modem to passthrough all internet traffic to my router, and it worked well for a while.

Recently, I have been experiencing extreme network slow downs. So extreme that streaming services were getting the priority of a given bandwidtharound 5 to 15 Mbps. Everything else was limited to 0.1Mbps or less, with an average best being 0.05Mbps or less. This makes most console games, and chat connectivities nearly to absolutely unavailable. Just about any connectivity for a PC becomes gut-wrenchingly difficult, or impossible.

In resaerching solutions, and calling the ISP I just happened to find a setting that might help. My ISP gave me a response, that in short blames Netgear for your internet problems. They will instruct you to re-connect all of your devices  directly to their modem to improve your service, for most that would be True! However, console gaming does not exist on their modem, which is a reason if not the primary one for getting a gaming router, mine being for multiple XBOX'es! UPnP is not availalbe on the Arris Modems, which from experience XBOX is reliant upon for connectivity.

Now to the real reason for this POST! To get, and keep our abilty to play online games with our friends and family.

1. Do Not be afraid to file a report with the FTC against your provider. According to the FTC.gov website, ISP are not allowed to change your network speeds to accomadate other traffic. They are not allowed to prioritize your traffic in a way that interferes with your use. Keep in mind that adjusting speed for 'Network Congestion' is considered acceptable, but many would agree that does not seem consistant to 50% or more, in and OUT of peak times. The more reports are made against the ISP's, the more consistencies we may have with our internet traffic. 

Contacting your State level Politicians could help ensure that a Net Neutrality remains in some states, and be inducted to the States that do not currently have their own in place.

2. With the recent update to the Duma OS 3.0, new features have been added to the router. One of them being the Connection Benchmark, and updating some more game settings into the QoS module of the router. The QoS module now has an option to auto detect what your ISP is providing your router at that moment. Some of my checks reported download speeds on average as low as 240 Mbps, while upload speeds were remaining above 400 Mbps.

The Connection Benchmark will check and grade/score your connection, based on what the QoS service has set. If your internet connection has experienced slower speeds at the time of the Connection Benchmark, it will grade the connection speeds poorly!

The QoS module, and the Connection Benchmark can be used to adjust the QoS speed at a rate that can allow reliable connections that are not throttled into oblivion. 

In another post while researching, it was suggested that your ISP will maintain 80% your plans speed to the modem in your home. They will use Network Congestion as their reason to adjust it further. Keep in mind that some adjustment for Network Congestion is considered reasonable. But what is reasonable? Is adjusting speeds below 60% reasonable, when not in Peak Times? Those are arguments that may continue to go unanswered!

To wrap this up!

Use QoS, and Connection Benchmark to find a network speed that is stable to all of your connected devices.

Make your complaint with the FTC, and follow the process through.