WAN Speed Issue

ben_b

Yesterday I upgraded from 50 Mbps service to 150 Mbps service on Cox. If I connect a laptop directly to the to the modem I can get 150 Mbps +, but when I connect the modem to my pfSense router the most that I can get is 50 Mbps. Also the IP from the modem to the laptop direct connection is in the 90.xxx.xxx.xxx range, but the when pfSense is connected it is 68.xxx.xxx.xxx. I have restarted the router and the cable modem several times and it always picks up the address starting at 68 and not the 90. Dose anybody have any suggestions?

w0w

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r28248379-ALL-Does-Cox-register-the-MAC-addr-of-pc-connected-to-modem
It can be related to your settings. When you have connected pfSense, was modem in bridge mode or not?

ben_b

I am not using a bridge on the cable modem that I am aware of. I wonder if I should clone the MAC address of the laptop NIC to see if that will fix the problem. It seems that this is a MAC issue since it is always getting the wrong IP address from COX even when I do a modem reset through my COX account.

marvosa

Yesterday I upgraded from 50 Mbps service to 150 Mbps service on Cox. If I connect a laptop directly to the to the modem I can get 150 Mbps +, but when I connect the modem to my pfSense router the most that I can get is 50 Mbps.

Where you using the traffic shaper when you were on 50 Mbit? If so, that would be your culprit. Beyond that, you're probably looking at hardware. What are your hardware specs? Are you running cheap NIC's with a software based chipset? If so, that's one factor. If you're CPU is maxing out during your speed test, that's another factor.

Per the Hardware Requirements page (https://www.pfsense.org/hardware/#requirements), for 150 Mbit you should be running:

"No less than a modern Intel or AMD CPU clocked at 2.0 GHz. Server class hardware with PCI-e network adapters, or newer desktop hardware with PCI-e network adapters."

Are you anywhere close to that?

Here's another snippet from the same page regarding network card selection:

"Selection of network cards (NICs) is often the single most important performance factor in your setup. Inexpensive NICs can saturate your CPU with interrupt handling, causing missed packets and your CPU to be the bottleneck. A quality NIC can substantially increase system throughput. When using pfSense software to protect your wireless network or segment multiple LAN segments, throughput between interfaces becomes more important than throughput to the WAN interface(s).

NICs based on Intel chipsets tend to be the best performing and most reliable when used with pfSense software. We therefore strongly recommend purchasing Intel cards, or systems with built-in Intel NICs up to 1Gbps. Above 1Gbps, other factors, and other NIC vendors dominate performance."

Barring a duplex issue, bad cables or something of that nature, the first thing I would do is grab a couple Intel PCIe NIC's and verify your other hardware meets the vendor's minimum requirements for pushing 150 Mbit.

Also, the fact that you're getting stuck on different subnets from your ISP depending on which device is plugged in is normal. I have Charter and I get the same thing when plugging in different devices. I suspect it's some sort of load balancing, but shouldn't have anything to do with your bandwidth issues as long as the modem is provisioned correctly by your ISP.

ben_b

It's not the hardware. I have Pentium processor (Skylake family) on a B150 chipset and 3 Intel NIC cards. But your advice in checking to see if some limiter was running was the cause. I don't ever recall setting a limiter up, but I might have inadvertently set one up playing with the settings. Anyway I deleted the limiter in pfSense and now I am getting 150+ Mbps. Last test was 197 Mbps! ;D

Thanks for your suggestion marvosa!