Look to modem if Shaw's High-Speed Internet slows to a crawl

By Peter Vogel

Recently my home Internet feed began to perform poorly. It wasn't sudden, and the drop in performance was subtle enough that at first I didn't notice.

Around the middle of July I asked one of my sons if he was noticing a general slowdown in web downloads. His affirmative response coupled with my own experience suggested that indeed over a period of a couple of weeks typical web page downloads were taking longer and longer.

We decided to perform a few measurements so we could at least document our situation before calling our Internet service provider.

Now I've been a home Internet user since 1982, and my school has had some form of feed since 1986. You might say I've seen it all, and certainly my family, in pre-broadband days, had to put up with hours of interrupted phone service.

For almost a decade now my home Internet feed has been supplied by a cable company, initially through a trial offered local technology writers by the Rogers @home service, and subsequently through Shaw Communications.

I have to say that under Shaw management my service has been very reliable, with only a couple of extended outages over a period of a half-dozen years, and one of those was due to a utility pole taken out in a car accident.

There are numerous online sites where it is possible to run so-called speed tests that measure an end-user's Internet performance. Generally speaking there can be a wide variance in such test results, but a reasonable baseline and subsequent comparisons can be made by sticking with one such site and a specific server location from that service.

Shaw Communications has its lower mainland customers use www.speakeasy.net (click on Speed Test) and a Seattle server. You might also like to try www.speedtest.net, which maintains your results over an extended period.

My test results in mid-July could only be described as disappointing. Download speeds were averaging in the mid to low hundreds of kbps (kilobits per second, a common performance measurement), and upload speeds a little lower. For most Internet use it is the download speed that determines a user's browsing experience.

When I called Shaw's customer service I confirmed that indeed something was amiss. Download speed, I was told, should be in the 3 to 5 thousand range for my High-Speed plan. My situation was a 10th of that. My agent performed a few additional tests before pronouncing the verdict: time for a new cable modem.

I had been promised a new modem a couple of years earlier but nothing had materialized. This time I could either wait a few weeks for a house call to have the unit replaced or I could go directly to the nearest office and swap it myself. The agent explained that the Terayon modem I had should have been replaced "long ago" with a Motorola SurfBoard 5000 series unit.

A quick drive over the bridge into Surrey and I had my new modem. Five minutes to install it and it was if my computers had gone into overdrive. Downloads speeds were averaging in the 4 to 5 thousand range, just where they should be, and upload speeds were back where they belonged as well.

In fact, I was so happy to be back to what I'd been used to that I decided to give Shaw's Xtreme-I service a test for a few months. At a $10-a-month premium I'm now promised up to 10,000 kbps for downloads and just under 1,000 kbps for uploads.

On the old computer I use to write these columns I'm getting up to 6500/950. Other computers in the house are hitting the 10 k mark. I'm more than happy with the download speeds, and the more than double standard upload speed helps tremendously when I'm managing my school's network from home.

A few weeks after the modem replacement my colleague, Mike Cooke, happened to mention that his Shaw Internet performance had been quite poor recently. Wouldn't you know it, he had the same old Terayon modem that had caused me grief.

I asked him to perform some speed tests and to phone the Shaw customer service office so he might swap the unit the next day.

Look at his download/upload numbers:

Old Terayon modem:

• Fri. 6 p.m.: 1588/482
• Fri. 10 p.m.: 438/472
• Sat. 10 a.m.: 2514/485

New Motorola modem:

• Sat 3 p.m. 4891/492

Variation in download speeds is expected with cable Internet service because of the way in which neighborhoods are wired, but clearly my colleague was not getting "high-speed" Internet service.

Eventually our discussion of Internet service spread to other colleagues.

Angela, who lives in the south Vancouver area, also has a Terayon modem. Her results look depressingly like mine from back in July:

• 10 p.m.: 419/466
• 4 p.m.: 427/470

Several other colleagues have the new Motorola modems. Consider their data.

Chris, in Queensborough:

• 8 p.m.: 3437/483
• 6 p.m.: 4364/485
• 5 a.m.: 4468/330
• 5 p.m.: 4717/85

Jessica, in the Hastings and Boundary area:

• 11 p.m.: 4826/490

Clearly none of the Motorola modem owners have a speed problem, ranging from a low value of just over 3400 to just under 5000.

Another colleague, Frank, uses Shaw's "High-Speed Lite" service. It has lower performance limits in return for a lower cost. Frank notes that he mainly uses his computer for e-mail, word processing, and information purposes, and rarely downloads files.

He reports that the speed is sufficient for his purposes, but he does add that video clips are painfully slow to download. He uses a Terayon modem, and is located in the Joyce and Boundary area. His performance on a Sunday afternoon at 4 p.m.: 211/112.

Three colleagues with Telus ADSL service also offered to provide measurements.

Ed, in Richmond:  

• 6 p.m.: 1293/485
• 9 p.m.: 1311/522  

Linda, in Surrey:

• 6 p.m.: 855/328

Andrew, in Vancouver:

• 6 p.m.: 2093/35

Yes, he repeated, 35 for an upload speed, the lowest figure I have seen.

If you are paying for broadband Internet access you might want to check what sort of performance you are getting. The most reliable data can only come from a direct, wired connection to your cable or ADSL modem. A wireless feed, because of noise, interference, and possible encryption, will provide a lower throughput.

Shaw Communications, it seems to me, should have notified its customers with older Terayon modems to have them replaced. In fact, they should be required to do so. Can you say "class action?" Our informal testing suggests that either these Terayons are failing or their performance is being otherwise degraded. Customers with such modems are clearly not getting what they pay for.

Peter Vogel is a Physics and Computer Sciences teacher at Notre Dame Regional Secondary School (www.ndrs.org). Suggestions and comments may be sent via e-mail to peterv@portal.ca.