I did the free upgrade to 300 on December 4 and nothing was ever consistent for me. When I upgraded to 150 with the Hitron about 1.5 years ago, a speed test consistently gave me about 170 when coupled with the Asus RT-AC68U router and I was happy. But power cycling the modem did not get me anything near 300 on my desktop PC.
My desktop was custom built about 5 years ago. Its Asus PZ77-V motherboard has an Intel 82579-V Gigabit Network Connection built onto it. I’ve also tested a Surface Pro 4 with a Marvell AVSTAR Wireless-AC Network Controller. Both run the latest updates of Windows 10 Pro using only Windows Defender for antivirus. There is no difference in the firewall. The startup apps of each are different but I don't think any would cause the speed issue unless there are some obvious gotchas that someone can suggest. The primary hard drives for both are 500 GB SSD and each system has 16 GB RAM.
The desktop is connected directly to the modem with a 5e cable. With the Hitron, I expected close to 300 but I barely got 130. With the XB6, I can get 160 to 180. The Surface gets 300+ with the XB6 (either wired or Wi-Fi) but I’ve had to remove the Asus router to get those speeds—with it in the mix, I could get only 180 max. I can also get 300+ from an older Acer laptop wired into the XB6 (I have a screenshot where fast.com reported 1.1 Gbps one time!)—I wasn’t expecting much in Wi-Fi because it has only a 100 Mbps adapter.
For the desktop, I’ve tried a cat 6 cable, a dedicated network adapter, different 5e cables, different ports on either modem and modem resets—all without success. Speed tests from speedtest.net and fast.com gave expected results on the Surface and Acer—wired or not. Strangely, all the machines now say it can’t connect to a server and to try again later from speedtest.shaw.ca.
No one from Shaw (multiple online chats or on the phone and one service call), Asus, or Intel could come up with a solution. I suspect this is software related in that the network settings on the desktop are different than that of the Surface or Acer. I have gone through the adapter properties and Network and Sharing but I don't know what could be changed to resolve this issue without potentially making it worse. On several occasions, suggested troubleshooters couldn't identify the problem which is of no help to me. My last resort is to do a clean reinstall of Windows 10 Pro x64 to see if that helps. I'll be faced with a 2-day task of a clean install (testing the speed as soon as I can after only the OS is installed) followed with dozens of apps and updates, but I will do this as an absolute last resort if I can be guaranteed the 300 Mbps from my existing PC hardware. I got 170 on the 150 plan with the Hitron, so I fail to see why I can’t get 300+ on the XB6 when none of the hardware has changed in years and yet the XB6 wired to other devices works perfectly fine.
