Hey OP, I’m a Telus tech in Southern Alberta. Like others have mentioned, try doing a speed test directly off of the ONT or Telus router first. If you’re getting less than full speed there then you’ve likely got a provisioning problem. If you do get full speed there then the issue lies between our router and your router. Either way, if you want to send me a DM I can look into this a bit more for you.
this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2023
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You’ve got too much stuff in the path to troubleshoot- is it the router? Is it the switch? What’s your demarc? A fiber ONT?
You need to hook your computer up as close to directly to the demarc as you can. If the speed gets better, try the router and then the switch on their own to see which slows things down.
Also, try fresh cables. Damaged cables might have your router sending things a couple times before they’re successful, and only the successful packets count (so gigabit router with 75% packet loss, or 3 failures for every success).
If you’re going to go down the rabbit hole and have a friendly network engineer to reach out to who can help troubleshoot, you can run Wireshark (free) during a speed test and find evidence of excessive packet retransmissions or FIN or RST packets (connections getting terminated abruptly).
The first thing I'd do is to confirm is the router is indeed the issue here. If you still have the original router from Telus, switch to that and do the speed test with a cable. You should get close to 900-950 Mbps (we have 1Gig but get 900-970 on speedtest).
If the Telus modem gives you better speeds, then your modem is the bottleneck.
Why don't you run a speedtest with the ISP modem before you bridge it and see what you get.
Check your ethernet cable.
Make sure you're using at least Cat6, and less than 100 feet
Cat5e is fine for gigabit.
router is unlikely the primary issue affecting your download speeds.
ISPs in Turkey will tell you a lie along the lines of "You will get 20% lower speeds on 3rd party routers" because they don't want to bother debugging issues on routers they don't control. I know that's not true since I get all the speed I pay for, but to connect at all I have to clone the ISP provided router's mac address because 3rd party routers aren't supported.
It's not impossible that your ISP could be doing something similar where they say they support 3rd party routers but throttle speeds based on your router's mac. If you do end up asking for an ISP router and get better speeds on it, you could try cloning the mac and see if that solves your issue for your own router.
It's absolutely possible. It's not that you're using a third-party router, but rather the one you'r using may be too slow. I ran into this personally -- I had a Netgear R7900 that wouldn't get anywhere near the gigabit speeds I was paying for. Connected directly to the ISP's fiber ONT, I got the full 940 up and down. Connected through my Netgear router, I'd get maybe 330 maximum using the same Ethernet cables.
Factory resetting it would fix it for a few hours, then it would slow down again. QoS was switched off. Finally, replacing the router with an Asus RT-AC86U completely solved the problem for me. That was a few years ago, so I'm sure there's better stuff out there now, but this one keeps right on trucking. (And I'm like you, I only use wireless when I have to. Everything that can be wired, is.)
One other thing that was slowing me down a bit: the little Anker Thunderbolt dock I use to connect my laptop couldn't really do the full gigabit. It'd top out at maybe 650 Mbit. Mostly adequate, but it was definitely slowing down my laptop. I doubt that's your issue as slow as you're seeing, but something else to check on.
I didn't realize it might be the specific router. I remember buying it after reading rave reviews on Reddit lol. I will try out the ISP router at the very least when it comes.
See it is usually difficult to troubleshoot customer owned devices, wait for their router and see how it goes, if you are getting around the same speeds, it's time for a service call.
Telus Fibre? I think you need to take a step back and tell us how you’ve got your network configured. Telus ONT to their gateway to your Archer? Is this a double NAT scenario? Have you tried taking their hardware out of the path and having your archer handle the authentication?
Telus ONT straight to the Archer, I took the telus router out of the equation years ago because it sucked.
Remove the 3rd party router and retest directly from WAN to PC? Easy answers here.
i was just dealing with similar situation yesterday. After i reset my modem with a paper clip it came back to normal speeds
I'm on gigabit Telus in Vancouver.
Full speed should be 940mbps or so. Use fast.com to test.
I think your C7 isn't going to be fast enough for gigabit, but I don't know for sure.
Ubiquiti has great gear. I'm not sure how long support will continue for but an EdgeRouter4 is what I use and good for around 4gbps routing. Then convert your C7 as a wifi access point.
I am of the opinion that you should either always use the best router you can get from the company to avoid them accusing the hardware, or if you use your own, you might as well build your own.
Take a good quality ethernet cable, remove anything behind the ISP modem, and do your test again.
Yeah, this sounds like a classic from the "total bullshit L1 tech support will say with absolute confidence" files.
There is an outside possibility that there is some specific config setting on their bundled router that they don't tell you about which causes traffic shaping to get applied to your connection if it's not present, but that would be insane and illogical. If the new ISP-issued router actually improves your performance, that'll probably be why. But like you, I bet it won't.
Not really.
It actually takes a not a complete pile of shit router to handle 1Gbps of routing/NAT traffic.
Archer C7 are pretty shit with only a single core CPU, probably barely any RAM, when you’re loading third party firmware on could well stress it way beyond its already limited capabilities.
A simple Google shows people with C7 struggling to get 2/300+, wired or wireless as not a LAN issue. I’d say it’s entirely possible the router is the problem in this scenario.
Just go get a better router from a store that allows returns. If it fixes your problem, great. If not, return it and harass your isp
I have some ideas. OK, first, do you have a baseball bat or a dangerous dog?
I had this issue with Comcast's Xfinity and my solution was to clone the Mac address of a desktop on the Router.
I tried several desktops/laptops and several routers. All the desktops/laptops got just about full speed. All the routers where pinned at 93.78 or 31.23 for several tests. Cloning the Mac address on the routers that could let the router and devices connected get the full plan speed.
It could be. I have no personal experience with your router, but I googled it and I saw quite a few mentions of it reducing download speeds with various configuration options enabled.
The best way to determine where the restriction might be would be to connect your pc directly to the ont and running the test. If it’s faster, it’s your router. If it’s not, replace the cable with a new cat6 cable. If that’s faster it was the cable. If it’s not, it’s an isp problem and their new modem probably isn’t going to help.
I worked support for an ISP before.
If we didn't provide the router, then we can't support it. There are way too many variables with third-party routers for us to actually do that. In those instances, we would provide one and if it still can't deliver the bandwidth, then we will continue to troubleshoot.
That said, to rule this out, plug your computer directly into their modem or handoff. That's the best way to rule out router problems.
Side note: as someone who loved dd-wrt, I stopped using it because it was slow. Third party firmware is awesome since they add a ton of functionality but you lose a lot in performance when you do that.
The tech should have told you to test by connecting directly to their modem/router.
As others said, do it. It may be your router.
Connect your computer directly to the modem or ONT as a test. If you get full speed, router is the culprit.
Make sure flow offloading is enabled on OpenWRT and any QoS is disabled. As a last resort, revert to stock firmware.
Update: I did this. I got marginally better speeds at the ONT (350-450mbps) but still not close to gigabit.
At least when the ISP router arrives I can point the finger back at them.
Noob question: is connecting a PC to the ONT safe? Or am I exposing my PC to the internet without a router in between?
The c7 has peitty slow nat performance but not 250mbps slow nat performance. (Unless you are running sqm)
https://www.reddit.com/r/openwrt/comments/oe43kb/tplink_archer_c7_v2_openwrt_nat_sqm_offloading/
I don't know where the 2 year term and $30 extra comes in to play. (Rental of new rotuer with package)
Ontario does have a law if you signed a contract in your home you have 15 days to cancel. No questions asked. Tellus is only a isp out west so i wonder if your province has a similar law.
I woud try enabled the flow offloading feature if you haven't.
Very unlikely to get close to 1gbs in real world situations with wifi ac. Newer wifi ax is more likely to get there. (Probably what he's talking about.) But we are talking about a hard wired connection here so pritty moot.
I believe if they don't have flow offloading enabled 250Mbps is exactly the speed they should expect. It's been a while since I've used the C7, but I believe that's precisely the limit of what I was able to get without offloading. Now it worked just fine for me as the connection was only 25/3Mbps but that's neither here nor there.
Good to know about the performance of the C7.
The part about the 2 year term and $30 more is because I upgraded from one of their lowest packages to gigabit, which was about $30/mo more and required a 2 year term if I didn't want a terabyte download limit.
I'm on gigabit Telus in Vancouver.
Full speed should be 940mbps or so. Use fast.com to test.
I think your C7 isn't going to be fast enough for gigabit, but I don't know for sure.
Ubiquiti has great gear. I'm not sure how long support will continue for but an EdgeRouter4 is what I use and good for around 4gbps routing. Then convert your C7 as a wifi access point.
There are a great number of reasons that you could be getting that speed. One of the prime ones being that you are using wifi instead of directly connected cables. You should also be checking that your gear can even hit those speeds with iperf tests internally.
Do you have QoS running on your TP-Link? that can lower your throughput, I wouldn't usually expect by that much but I do not know your router, and sometimes there are just bugs with some builds of OSS firmware that have given really low bandwidth for some people until they reported it and the firmware was fixed.
If QoS is off, check for newer firmware, and also try a factory reset, especially if you did not do that when you first swapped to OpenWRT.
Bypass the switch and test again
How are you running your speed test? I'd suggest when you run it to open your task manager and see what kind of throughput you are getting. Online speed tests are very unreliable
The answer is a definite no. The customer rep you're talking to is full of shit.