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Recent Ethernet speed issues - RBR850
My wife and I both work from home and do several video calls per day, often at the same time. I previously had an RBR50 system (wifi 5) that I had used for years and had zero issues with for wired/et...
I see, that had reared it's ugly head again. Ya, there is a very LONG post thread over on DSLReports that was started many years ago about a Intel vulnerability with PUMA chip sets, one SB6190 was at the forefront of this discussion. There were other brands as well effected.
See if Spectrum supports any of the NETGEAR CM series of modems or maybe try a Motorola branded model. Not a fan of Arris or Hitron though I have one however it's only for phone services with the ISP.
Thanks FURRYe38! Quick answers:
Firmware - currently on latest, 7.2.6.31 though tried the last 2 older firmwares for testing
House - 3500 sqft, 2 story, satellite is roughly 25-30 ft away. Again though, no wifi issues (in fact wifi 6 devices are actually faster than wired, both on main (front of house) and satellite (back of house, outside/backyard). Is your thought that the backhaul could be struggling and somehow taking bandwidth, or more likely processing power, away from ethernet on the router? I've toyed with wiring the backhaul but given how strong the wifi performance is it didn't seem worth it.
RBS off - just checked, no change
Wireless/Wired - Wifi is rock solid, only issues are with wired. Note that I could use wifi for video calls on my laptop or buy a wifi 6 adapter for my desktop but given this worked for years previously, I'm still convinced there is ethernet issues to be solved.
Armor, IPv6, Traffic meter - We do use Armor and I disabled that, same ethernet results. We don't currently have IPv6 of traffic meter enabled.
I have not yet done a full factory reset but will try tonight when work is over. I have some port forwarding stuff and static IPs which I assume would be better to setup manually than reload a cfg file?
Thanks again!
Yes.
OK, did a full reset, tested at default settings - It was a bit faster at ~450Mbs down 40Mbs up but still half of what I was getting previously.
Re-setup all previous settings (static IPs, port forwards, etc.) - same as above.
So small improvement but I see that same odd behavior of the speed spiking high in the first second or two of the test then tapering off down to the 200's-400's. Super frustrating. We'll see if video calls are better tomorrow. Sigh.
The speed drop off is seen on both wired PC using Ooklas installable speed test app and the RBRs internal speed test app?
And to check, you do get the 1Gb speeds with a wired PC directly connected to the ISP modem?
Wondering if there is something going on in between the ISP modem and the RBR. Thought last time I had my 850 series online, I got 1Gb always, however that was with v.21 FW loaded and connected to a CAX80 gateway in modem mode and tested a CM3000 as well.
It's hard to tell on the RBR's internal ookla test as it doesn't show me any progress. But I get a much higher download result there (1100-1150Mbs) there vs. pretty much any way I run the same ookla test on my pc through ethernet meaning browser, installed app, etc. I did try cloudfare's speedtest which gives a lot more detail (https://speed.cloudflare.com/) which showed some interesting results. Down speeds were anywhere from 200-500Mbs but Packet Loss varied greatly. I've run the test 20ish times and seen packet loss as high as 1%. I can't test directly connected to the modem yet as my wife is on calls but will do so shortly. And yes, I did get much faster speeds connecting directly to the modem from my pc with the ookla test though I think the cloudfare test will give me a much better picture.
I did do some research more specific to the modem itself (Hitron Docsis 3.1 with Spectrum firmware) and it seems several folks have issues with that particular model which some attribute to the chipset (Puma 6 or 7? Not familiar). One user even said he specifically had issues with an Orbi with that modem, though it was the RBRE960. He had tested an eero and an Asus router and neither had the same speed drop. There was some data around sustained download speeds which seems to match what I'm seeing on speed tests run through devices connected through the Orbi. I'm going to try to see if I can swap the modem out for one with a different chipset or maybe even find a used modem on ebay or something to see if that helps. I'm so happy with the wifi performance on this Orbi that I'm not ready to give up on it yet without trying another thing or two.