The internet was great with a technician nearby but terrible without one?
The internet was great with a technician nearby but terrible without one?
The result isn't guaranteed—it depends on the tool being used. If it's Speedtest.net, that might not matter, but with their own internal tests they could optimize the connection for better performance. Virgin Media isn't known for handling interference well.
He started with a value of 2. Initially it was an unknown number, probably the speed test from virgin's own site. Later he checked speedtest.net and confirmed it wasn't manipulated.
I'm still figuring out where to begin with this conspiracy situation. It's unclear what connection he might have, but the only risk would be losing bandwidth to neighbors through a cable link. Cable connections typically offer speed limits and boost capabilities. You can't exceed those limits without engaging in questionable activities. These files store your maximum speeds and they won't let you alter them. So you're not gaining extra data transfer. The issue lies with some tests being too brief, causing you to start at a higher speed than your real usage. For instance, on a 200mbps line you might reach 240mbps for about 200MB, but after that you'll drop back down. These boost mechanisms are designed this way. Other ISPs adjust speeds based on network congestion levels. Increasing speed while the service is active doesn't make sense. Why would they implement such measures? It suggests they need to invest more in returning trips, especially if the issue stems from customer-side factors—meaning assets they didn't supply. In any case, they usually won't charge for a technician visit to verify line quality and modem health (unless they offer that service). If you need them to check, it will incur additional costs.
It's a cable link and the expert certainly had the freedom to work beyond standard rules. Street equipment might quickly adjust QoS settings to see how fast the engineer can push the line versus usual speeds. The outcome hinges on whether the test is meant for actual performance or just confirming basic functionality. Generally, it wouldn't be wise. However, I've seen councils send teams to check things they weren't asked about, which proves real problems do exist. Virgin Media is famous for hiding contention issues, so it's possible they'd send someone just to verify the link speed without testing real-world use. Taking bandwidth by force is common because it disrupts TCP/IP's sharing process, essentially taking others' bandwidth without fair distribution. DSLReports often pushes hard to show maximum speeds, not actual file transfers in a single thread. With a solid server and no interference, a single download should reach full capacity—unless it's too fast for your device. The need for multi-threaded downloads mainly comes from contention, especially over cable connections.
It doesn't matter if it is one download thread or 50 download threads. If you are capped at x amount of bits per second, then that is all you can pull. There is no way to CHEAT that system. It is something that is coded in to your modem and it cannot be tricked. Your modem doesn't care how many streams or threads are being used... it only cares about the maximum throughput and it will throttle those connections in order to keep you at or below your provision rate. If what you say is true that would mean bittorent would have killed off most of the cable providers because a single user could "steal" data from his neighbors. On top of that we haven't been as bandwidth capped on cable since we moved to docsis 3.0 and now 3.1 makes it even harder. So for people that aren't aware, cable isn't truly full cable now... it is all a hybrid system that runs cable to the hole back to a node or junction point and then shifts that to a fiber connection which will carry it back to their backbone. If this was a docsis 1.0 or docsis 2.0 then I would agree those speeds could really hurt the rest of the neighborhood, but that isn't the case now. I also don't think the technician is going to magically shift turn on higher bandwidth for just his visit. First he would need to push a different provision to the modem, which in most cases will require a restart of the modem... second I doubt he can do that from his handheld, in most cases that is handled via customer care. So he could call them up and have them re-provision for higher speeds, but that wouldn't fix your speed issue. I mean the OP is now saying he hard lined his laptop to his router and saw similar speeds, but I am a little skeptical of that since we didn't hear anything about it before hand. I mean for all we know this could be an issue on the ISP side, but with his current setup it Is hard to rule the lan portion out. If he runs a physical connection from his pc and see's the same problem then I would think that would be a logical conclusion to come to. Yet again though we need more information. We don't know what modem/router/gateway he is using, we don't have any solid information on his machine or his cell phone. I am pretty confident I know decently what his range extenders speed is... so that is a start. I mean for all we know his modem is dual band and the tech tested it on the 5ghz AC band, but the OP's phone and devices don't support that technology and are instead only able to connect to a 2.4ghz wireless band. Then we have this laptop, which plenty of them don't always disable the wireless and use the physical connection once they are already connected to the network. So he might have plugged in the wire, but the laptop never switched to using the Cat connection. If the OP will provide me with the model of laptop, phone, pc, modem and/or router/gateway, and lastly the model of his wifi extender... then I can start to actually pull some numbers and come up with a more solid answer.