I have had for a while a problem with my upload speed with my AT&T DSL. I have been a happy customer with SBC for 5 years now and wasn’t about to just change. I also have DirectTV instead of cable and I’m very content with DirectTV.
My upload speeds for the last 4 months have been shaky and very frustrating. I was testing it often with speakeasy.com and I knew that the upload was slow and that reported it around 50-70 kpbs on average. Sometimes it got up to 200 kbps upload speed but I knew that something was wrong. I have the Pro package at $30 from AT&T which guarantees around 3 mb download and 512 upload speeds. I’ve been pretty busy working so never really did anything about it. Tonight I finally looked into it after several support tickets and I believe I solved the problem. First, let me say that I “think” it’s solved. We will see over the course of the next week(s) if this remains the case.
What I found out was that I recently upgraded my entire PC. Well I guess rebuilt it really. I installed a nice new shiny ASUS P5E motherboard about 4 months ago and I’ve been running Vista 64-bit. Ever since then I didn’t really think to link anything with ASUS but I think I ended up linking it to its
Marvell Yukon 88E8056 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller card. ASUS boards are so good, I don’t usually second guess it. But I believe the problem ended up being that in the Ethernet device properties, by default the Speed & Duplex was set to “Auto-Negotiation”:
I changed it to 10 Mbps Full Duplex and I swear that both upload and download speeds have improved a ton:
I now get a solid 2.5 mb on average download (whereas before it ranged and changed intermittently between 1.5 – 2.5 Mbps download and was again around only 70 mbps upload).
I hope this helps someone who has had the same issues with either download or upload speeds. Check your Ethernet card, you’d be surprised.
Please kick/dzone/digg if this post if it was helpful.
Print | posted on Saturday, November 22, 2008 10:25 PM
