Att 2gig service weird speedtests

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Joshh

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Feb 28, 2017
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I am going to toss this under networking as I think it is mostly networking....

I recently upgraded from ATT gigabit fiber to the 2gig service. With the old 1 gig service I used to use the whole dumb switch bypass to bypass the router gateway and just shoot everything to PFsense. With the new service, the the router gateway has the ONT baked into the device itself, afaik it is no longer possible to bypass it. They provided me a BGW-320-500 which has a single 5gbe port. From that port I go into my R210ii with an intel x550-t2. On the lan side I go out to my Mikrotik CRS305-1G-4S+IN which has a 10g baseT transceiver and each of my servers has a 10gb connection into that switch.

I am having some weirdness with speedtests that I have never noticed before switching to this setup. The issue is with windows I cannot for the life of me get higher than 1gbps speed.

Virtualized Windows 10 on ESXI on R720xd connected to the same switch at 10gbps I get 4-500mbps down and about 2gbps up via the desktop app.
Virtualized Ubuntu server on ESXI on R720xd with speedtest CLI gets 2.2gbps up and down all day long, consistently.
Both instances on the same vswitch, same server, same virtual hardware.

It is obviously not a hardware issue as one OS can do it with no issues and it seems to be pretty close to accurate as PFsense shows the traffic hitting about 2-3gbps. The other weird thing is all the desktops in my house now also seemed to be only getting 4-500mbps downloads via speedtest yet 940ish up every time. Prior to making this change they were always in the 940ish up and down ballpark. The desktops on the network are all only 1gig machines and I have no intention of upgrading them any time soon, all I wanted was faster speeds to my servers. I know speedtest is not the most accurate app and it varies by the server it hits, it just seems bizarre that windows machines all seem to exhibit the same behavior.

Here is the last weird bit... If I run speedtest cli in WSL in that same Windows instance I get the same 4-500mbps speed down but it seems to cap at about 500 up. None of the 2gbps that the desktop app had.

Obviously these are 1st world problems, but it seems so odd that there is such a big difference in tests between Windows and Linux, Linux on Windows, even on desktops the speed is not consistent anymore.
 
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Joshh

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Feb 28, 2017
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Update... I saw that the x550 in particular out of the box did not support 2.5, and 5gbps speeds on 1 and 10gbe. It required a bios update to 'properly' support those speeds. Apparently if you do not have that update, Pfsense will show 'unknown' from a link speed standpoint. That is exactly what it is doing here. Pfsense does not recognize or allow me the ability to manually set the port speed to 2.5 or 5gbps it only shows 1 or 10. Yet if I go to the rg and look at the connection from the other side, it shows linked at 5gbps. I think I might try and pull out the nic and flash it in Windows and see if that help. Still bothers me that a virtualized Ubuntu instance can do 2.2 gbps up and down all day long. This might be one of those if it aint broke don't fix it type of situations... this just bothers me as it does not really make sense.
 

ServerSemi

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Jan 12, 2017
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I bought a Intel X710-T4L to avoid this same issue you are experiencing with pfsense. I can't wait for when AT&T decides to offer higher than 1gbps on my location.
 

Joshh

Member
Feb 28, 2017
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I bought a Intel X710-T4L to avoid this same issue you are experiencing with pfsense. I can't wait for when AT&T decides to offer higher than 1gbps on my location.
Yeah, I was thinking of going that route as well... They are just so expensive right now. As far as I can tell those are all in the $600 range give or take. Are there any offbrand/OEM versions I should be looking for?