Hey all – I was about to ask Verizon why my “jetpack” BYOD line was only acheiving 4Mbps with the TRANSIT CAT 18, when I switched from using fast.com to speedtest.net. I’m getting 105Mbps! thats crazy good, and essentially what I was expecting to see with the CAT 18 – but why does fast.com report only 4Mbps? Anyone else see such a discrepancy?
As best I can tell, fast.com reports accurate results with my home ISP but really falls over when I connect to the local LTE. speedtest.net is consistent across my (centurylink fiber) wired ISP and the local LTE tower
Pardon the silly question, but does the CAT 18 firmware provide a speed test?
Bingo - Fast.com intentionally presents its traffic to the network as netflix, so that it reports whatever speed the carrier is providing(denying) to that application.
It is quite common for the cellular carriers to restrict this so that someone with a small screen isn’t streaming at 4k resolution and needlessly consuming shared airtime. Practically speaking 4Mbps can give you a great netflix experience on almost any screen, so this isn’t generally something a user even notices.
Some times you have the ability to override, some times you dont. On AT&T I can disable streamsaver which gives me full speeds on netflix etc. But I shape it any way as I dont want TV streaming eating up more bandwidth than necessary.
A tricky part about speed-tests is that you are at the mercy of the links between you and the server, and the reported bandwidth does not necessarily reflect the first hop (which is the one you’re likely most interested in).
A second tricky part if the testing software (as you saw with your fast.com v. speedtest.net experience).
Having said all that - there are two built-in speed-test mechanisms available on Peplink routers.
One is the quality test of SpeedFusion connections available at Status > SpeedFusion. E…g., establish a tunnel to a local SpeedFusion Cloud and then test the bandwidth for that tunnel.
Another is to have two peplink units and then test the connection bandwidth available between the two (one a test server, the other the unit you’re interested in). You find that at System > WAN Analysis. The server may be a FusionHub (e.g., a free FusionHub solo on an UpCloud or Vultr server farm near you). This method allows for an easy test of multiple WANs concurrently, or any subset (such as one at a time), as well as testing against multiple servers. Here’s what a test of a Transit Duo CAT-12 against two different servers (one for the Verizon line, the other for the T-Mobile line) look like.
dude that is so helpful thank-you. yea for sure the chain is only as strong as its weakest link and the likes of speedtest and fast.com don’t tell you what the weakest link is. My primary interest is to test celluar quality in State and National parks, where coverage isn’t the best - and in the next few weeks test the poddle antennas against an external antenna such as the 42G. So all I need is a quick meaure of connection quality and (now that I understand them) a test from the likes of speedtest.net or fast.com will probably be sufficient.
The other datapoint important to me is the total amount of data xfered. Guesing this can be tricky as well - and Verizon may offer “good enough” tools here as well – but for metered connections are there not some threshholds or alarms that can be set to help monitor data usage at the device level?
I use a more accurate site which actually send and receives a file also it never undergoes throttling by most isp and provides a more reliable speed of what your connection is:
I had a fairly long phone conversation with a Verizon that resulted in absolutly nothing, as you might imagine. I even got as far up as 2nd level technical support, who couldn’t get passed the factors of network management and total aggregate data as explanations for the 4Mbps throttle. So either this is hidden from the technical suppport agents or they aren’t allowed to say it, but they simply won’t address the throttling of netflix. but @travis is right – the 4Mbps throttle is really not a bad thing. it doesn’t take much to chew through 50GB of data!
ATT post-paid is a better service for streaming versus Verizon.
ATT has truly unlimited-premium-data plans.
In my campervan I have ATT+VZ. My smart-tv is set to use ATT as priority.
When I am in spotty areas trying to watch ‘the big game’ live-sports I will send TV streaming out Speedfusion over both ATT+VZ. I know certain services will block those IP’s so YMMV. Netflix doesnt block SFC they just reduce the content availability. YoutubeTV and Sling work fine over SFC.
I would expect that if you ran fast.com speedtest through a speedfusion tunnel over Verizon they would have no way of throttling it, because it would all appear as VPN traffic to some uncategorized destination.
I suspect for full-timers that is probably true. I carry my media library with me anyway so don’t have any interest in streaming media, but even in that case I don’t think a 4Mbps throttle is a bad thing. I’ts hard to beat 50GB for $20/mo. and it would be hard for me to chew up 100GB in a month for part time RVing, but that level of service is available for $40/month. I actually think the netflix affiliation of fast.com makes is a useful tool
