Really Temperamental Internet Connection

**Dan the Man** · September 04, 2012, 02:54 PM

The internet connection on my computer has been incredibly shoddy lately, to put things simply. In certain areas of the house I get terrible reception that won't allow me to watch even the shortest Youtube videos or really load much more than my homepage without having to wait a few minutes. My own bedroom, for example, gets the worst reception of any room in the house, unless I open my door and sit with the computer a few feet away from the doorway. Because I don't want to do that, I've moved the computer to a different room downstairs. I had it set on the floor again earlier because it was easier for me to play a game with a friend of mine that way, but I found that, once again, my connection was beginning to slip even though it's still showing four bars. So I picked the computer up, put it on a table in front of our couch literally five feet away and, lo and behold, we're up to five bars again and everything is loading as fast as it normally should.

Does this sound to anybody like it might be a problem with my computer, or my internet provider? We've been on AT&T U-verse for a little more than a year now, and my dad has complained about not getting fast enough internet on his computer as well, but this is the first time it's ever been a problem for me. In fact, recently he has been having no trouble at all while my signal has only steadily gotten worse. We have a spare signal booster somewhere in our basement and I have considered using it, but I don't want to do that if I find that the computer is the problem rather than the service provider. On the other hand, we're planning on switching service providers pretty soon (U-verse is also our cable provider, and we've been having trouble with them for other reasons besides connectivity), so maybe I should just wait until then? I'm really not sure what to do here.

I'm using a Gateway ZX-4800 All-in-One (yeah, I know, kinda bad for hardcore gaming but fortunately I'm no hardcore gamer

) with Windows 7 and my primary browser is Firefox. According to Windows, my connection speed is 54.0 mbps. According to Speedtest.net, my ping is 57 ms, my download speed is around 10.8 mbps, and my upload speed is around 1.4 mbps.

EDIT: Don't know what just happened, but as soon as I posted this I dropped to two bars. Wtf?

**irishron** · September 04, 2012, 03:05 PM

I gave up on ATT DSL last year when they throttled the Hell out of my download speed to about 60% of what it was before. It went from what I see on my computer doing downloads, not Speedtest, from 150kb/s to 90kb/s and sometimes my old 56kb landline could outrun it.

**Bolkonsky** · September 04, 2012, 03:42 PM

That's a problem with your router, if anything.

**Dan the Man** · September 04, 2012, 04:35 PM

Originally Posted by irishron

I gave up on ATT DSL last year when they throttled the Hell out of my download speed to about 60% of what it was before. It went from what I see on my computer doing downloads, not Speedtest, from 150kb/s to 90kb/s and sometimes my old 56kb landline could outrun it.

Yeah, we found pretty quickly that we were getting a fair bit less than what they should be. Remember how I said that I was getting around 10.8 mps? That's supposed to be around 12 or 13 mps. We should be done with ATT before too long, since they also messed around with the channel lineup for our cable package.

Originally Posted by Bolkonsky

That's a problem with your router, if anything.

Good thought. I'll try restarting it later today.