After jumping through many hoops with Comcast, I recently upgraded to the Extreme 50 package, claiming to offer 50 Mbps download speeds. First step was to purchase a new modem supporting DOCSIS 3.0. I got a great deal on the Motorola SB6120 from BestBuy thanks to some price matching. Looks like Amazon would’ve been the best bet otherwise. Step two was to take back my Cisco Small Business RVS4000 from a friend. I get everything back home, hooked up and immediately start testing at http://speedtest.net and http://broadband.gov
The best I can get is around 20 Mbps out of Atlanta. Definitely not the 50 I was hoping and paying for. Several days go by of me chalking it up to Comcast’s over-hype of their ability. A friend/coworker (Shameless plug for his website – BuildEgg) suggests the router is probably the bottleneck. My friend’s solution to his underpowered networking hardware was to build his own router using pfSense. Trying to explore cheaper options first I do a quick Google search and find a suggestion to disable the IPS.
Disabling the IPS and a quick reboot immediately yield results around 60 Mbps. Woohoo.
Speed Test Results
Simply disabling the IPS feature nearly tripled my throughput. I honestly have no idea if there are any other ramifications for doing this, but at this point I don’t care. I’m also only getting around 4 Mbps upload speeds versus the advertised 10, but I’ll save that one for another day. In any case I felt I can’t be the only other poor sap who’s getting horrible speeds, just because of their poorly performing router.
