Doubled Network Speed - x2 speed posting?

Advertisements have been running all month from Comcast/Xfinity on our area media announcing a speed double-up for their broadband subscribers.

Dwight Silverman at the Chronicle’s TechBlog blog posted an announcement Thursday that he was seeing indications the switch had been flipped.

Comcast doubling speeds in Houston . . . again [Updated] - TechBlog

I saw the post Thursday at work but was too tired to check when I got home.

Friday night was the same; speed same but too tired to do anything about it.

This morning refreshed with good sleep, good coffee and fresh made streusel muffins, I rebooted our cable (DOCSIS) modem while Lavie was still sleeping and saw the speed jump.

Before we were averaging in the 35-45 Mbps range.

Today we are averaging in the 105- 120 Mbps range.

via - http://www.speedtest.net/

via - http://speedtest.comcast.net/

Note this is on the wired network connection, speed on our iPhones/iPad remained in the low 30 Mbps range due to WiFi type (802.11a/b/g/n) limitations. 

Because I typically work off my laptop in our study/laundry room where our router is located, I plug it into the wired connect for better network performance than WiFi alone.

So what I did was finally reconfigure our D-Link DL-655 router settings from using a mixed 802.11n and 802.11g mode to use 802.11n mode only. I also had to adjust the security mode to use AES only for the Cipher Type as it would not run “n” with the “TKIP & AES” setting I had been using. Lastly, I set the Channel Width from Auto 20/40 MHz to 40 MHz only. Firmware is current at 1.37 for our “A” Firmware type on this device’s hardware run. Alas, it only supports a 2.4 GHz band and no options for a 5GHz band usage.

While the DIR-655 isn’t the newest or most flexible WiFi router now out there in the market, it has delivered consistent performance to me and all of our friends & family who have picked one up on my recommendation. I’ve really not yet fully taken advantage of all the options and features it offers so we still have some room to grow before I have to consider maybe a 802.11ac level router. Of course, I would need to have the hardware to support that and right now our iDevices and laptops don’t so there isn’t any rush.

I’ll  have to see if that “broke” any of our WiFi devices, but I think likely not. I did have to reboot each of the wireless devices after saving my router changes and rebooting the router.

After all the router WiFi tweaks I’m now getting in the mid 40 Mbps download range on the iPhone so I guess that is some measure of improvement.

Cheers,

--Claus V.