Bandwidth issues

[deadman90]

Ever since around Febuary, I've been having an issue with my bandwidth. For example, if I load up a youtube video, even if it's only on 360p quality, doing anything else is very slow. If I do that while I'm playing a game, my ping will shoot up to 1000ms. I'm using Verizon DSL, with the gt784wnv model. It never used to do this until a few months ago, where as my ping would only go up to about 200, as compared to 1000ms.

[smith6612]

What sort of speeds are you getting? Do you see any improvements early in the morning?

[deadman90]

I get about 1mb, it's always the same no matter what time

[smith6612]

It sounds like you're coming across the old Buffer Bloat problem.

Some reading materials on what Buffer Bloat is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bufferbloat

Verizon might be able to help fix this problem if your provisioning is set too high on one piece of equipment. Usually, this will be on the Juniper edge router contained within the Central Office. In my area, I often see circuits that are running at 1.5Mbps set to 3Mbps on the Juniper, and this causes a large amount of latency as data is buffered in the aggregate network. Most support agents will not be able to fix this issue, as higher up engineers will need to, if there is a provisioning issue.

I also see the same behavior on 50Mbps cable connections in my area, if you hit them with something like Steam or a well seeded Torrent.

To fix this, you might need to consider looking into bridging the ActionTec modem and setting up a router that can do FQ_CODEL for Quality of Service. DD-WRT's implementation along with Tomato's implementation are quite robust and should work well for you.

The other solution is to pay for more than 1Mbps from Verizon if you're able to get more in your area.