Scott Shepherd
07-29-2011, 8:10 PM
I have a task at hand that I'm stumped on. I have family that has internet over satellite. They have no other choice, nothing else is available. It has a 300MB per day limit on downloaded data. Once you hit that peak, it slows down to a crawl until the next day.
They have a Linksys router plugged into their unit provided by the company. It's a .g router I think. At the time that was bought, I told them it was no need for the .n because they didn't own any computers that had .n cards in them.
So fast forward to now. They have 3 laptops in the family, an iPad, and several iPods. I keep hearing "our internet is SOOOOO slow we can't use it". I drive there within a couple of days of hearing that, I run speediest.net and it all looks good to me. It's running around 1.2Mbps. I plug directly into the router and check it, then I plug directly into the box from the satellite company and there is virtually no speed difference between the two. The open their computers and say "Yeah, well, it's fast now".
I leave, get a call a week later "Our internet is horrible, it's so slow we can't use it for anything".
I repeat, and it repeats. I'm not sure what to check or how to check it.
They are all gone during the day, so the use is from 5:00pm on, and they don't watch movies or download songs. They are using it for websites and email mostly. I know for certain they aren't actively downloading things that push it over the limit. I have a suspicion that it's actually downloading program updates, where the files can easily be huge, but that's just a guess. I have disabled the automatic update downloading on 2 of the 3 laptops, and I haven't caught up with the 3rd laptop yet.
Any ideas on how to track down this problem? Any tools that will show me exactly the amount of data being downloaded in real time by all computers? Or something that will help me trace this issue down.
At this point, I'm lost. It works every time I check it but they keep telling me it doesn't work later. They don't live close enough for them to call me when they have a problem and me pop over and check it. I'm always there after the fact.
Any ideas?
They have a Linksys router plugged into their unit provided by the company. It's a .g router I think. At the time that was bought, I told them it was no need for the .n because they didn't own any computers that had .n cards in them.
So fast forward to now. They have 3 laptops in the family, an iPad, and several iPods. I keep hearing "our internet is SOOOOO slow we can't use it". I drive there within a couple of days of hearing that, I run speediest.net and it all looks good to me. It's running around 1.2Mbps. I plug directly into the router and check it, then I plug directly into the box from the satellite company and there is virtually no speed difference between the two. The open their computers and say "Yeah, well, it's fast now".
I leave, get a call a week later "Our internet is horrible, it's so slow we can't use it for anything".
I repeat, and it repeats. I'm not sure what to check or how to check it.
They are all gone during the day, so the use is from 5:00pm on, and they don't watch movies or download songs. They are using it for websites and email mostly. I know for certain they aren't actively downloading things that push it over the limit. I have a suspicion that it's actually downloading program updates, where the files can easily be huge, but that's just a guess. I have disabled the automatic update downloading on 2 of the 3 laptops, and I haven't caught up with the 3rd laptop yet.
Any ideas on how to track down this problem? Any tools that will show me exactly the amount of data being downloaded in real time by all computers? Or something that will help me trace this issue down.
At this point, I'm lost. It works every time I check it but they keep telling me it doesn't work later. They don't live close enough for them to call me when they have a problem and me pop over and check it. I'm always there after the fact.
Any ideas?