Wireless Laptop dowload speeds

I have a New HP G60-120US laptop (purchased Oct 08) with Vista Home Premium and Netgear router RangeMax Wireless-N Model WNR834B. My internet connection is through BridgeMaxx –2Mbps download. 768 Kbps upload. Using Speedtest.net the wired computer gets 999kbps download/434kbps upload/276ms Ping. The wireless laptop is approximately 20 feet from the access point and is getting 892kbps dowload/398kbps upload/230ms ping. Dowload speed according to the computer Wireless Network Connection Status is 54Mbps. The problem is that I still cannot get movies to run smoothly without getting slowdowns and bufferings continuously. Can anyone tell me if there is anything out there that can help me get a good download for movies and video's? I have already contacted HP, Bridgemaxx and Netgear and they say everything is working fine from their side of things. I need to find out why I am constantly getting these skips and buffering. I am currently using PC Tools Spyware Doctor, PC Tools Firewall Plus and Threatfire. Can anyone offer any suggestions of how to fix this problem. Thanks

Hi sbidaho. It appears that your download and upload speed should be sufficient for pulling streaming media.

However, your ping times are really "through the roof" relatively speaking. For reference, my ping time is around 50ms at the same site.

I notice that your internet provider is a wireless broadband provider. They can say it is working well all they want but it appears you are having very slow response time somewhere on their network.

Try this link:

http://myspeed.visualware.com/voip/

It will do a VoIP speedtest that gives you much more "useful" detail about your connection quality. When the test is done it will take you to the "summary" screen showing you a basic overview of your connection's quality with red, yellow, green indicators. You need to click "Click here for detailed analysis" to get the specific numbers.

You are very interested in jitter and upstream/downstream packet loss as well as roundtrip time. A quality internet connection will have 0% packet loss, and almost no jitter. I suspect you'll find that your connection is dropping a ton of packets or they are discarded for being out of order. For a reference, my results are 47ms roundtrip time, upstream jitter .2ms, downstream jitter 3.8ms, packet loss upstream/downstream 0%, discarded packets 0%, packet order 100%.

This type of test utilizes protocols which are more similar to what streaming media uses. Therefore packet order, packet discards, packet loss, and packet jitter are very important determinations of how good of a quality of stream you are going to get. If you don't have this quality than voice over IP calls would be choppy and intermittent much like your media streams are. From my research packet jitter is the largest determining factor in a quality media stream utilizing the most popular streaming media protocol.

http://www.rankingtoday.com/net/videoip-test.php

My tests here show a much worse jitter time of around 80ms and still 0% packet discards for your reference. My video streams work fine at this rating.

Good luck getting your ISP to actually do anything about the bad numbers. They think that if the connection is on and you can browse the internet then their job is done.

EDIT: You are only getting half the rated speed of your connection by the way. I'm not sure if the 2Mbs down, 768KBps up is a guaranteed rate, or just an "up to this rate" plan. Most providers tell you that you can get "up to" 1.5Mbps, or 3.0MBps, etc..

These are the test speeds from MyConnection PC, this is from the Chicago Illinois test site. If I use the California site they are much worse. So Speed test statistics ——————— Download speed: 310120 bps Upload speed: 479976 bps Quality of service: 31 % Download test type: socket Upload test type: socket Maximum download pause: 456 ms Average download pause: 116 ms Minimum round trip time to server: 133 ms Average round trip time to server: 142 ms VoIP test statistics ——————– Jitter: you –> server: 6.9 ms Jitter: server –> you: 2.7 ms Packet loss: you –> server: 0.0 % Packet loss: server –> you: 2.0 % Packet discards: 0.0 % Packets out of order: 0.0 % Number of supported VoIP lines: 1 Estimated MOS score: 3.7 I ran the RankingToday test and these are the results Your video jitter is 505.4 ms Your audio jitter is 497.6 ms Vudeo packet loss: 7% Audio packet loss : 7% Video pacjet discards: 0% Audio Packet discards: 0% Test result #10819 I'm not sure what all this means so if you have any suggestions please let me know. Thanks, Sbidaho PS I downloaded "VisualRoute" but was not sure what I was looking for…not sure what address I need to put in it to find out any pertinent information.

Yes, your roundtrip times are high as previously stated. Your first test isn't so bad, but you still should be getting no packet loss except on rare occasions. On the second test the numbers are horrible. This is a true test of streaming media and your results are horrible. If you can verify that there is no issues with the router by plugging directly into your broadband connection, I would take these numbers to your ISP and ask them what you are paying for their service for. I don't have much doubt that your bad experience with videa is a direct result of a poor quality broadband connection. Which, if you think about it, everything pretty much pointed at that already. Your second test is especially horrible like I said. It uses a TCP connection which means it can recover from "packet loss." But your connection is so bad that you still dropped 7% of the packets even after. Your jitter is outrageous.