LCWA Internet Speed Truths
We often get questions about internet speeds on the LCWA network. This article will hopefully answer those questions for you.
What Speed Level should I Use?
Here are our recommendations for what LCWA speed levels to subscribe to:
- Basic (15 Mbps): simple web browsing and email
- Moderate (25 Mbps): same as above plus moderate streaming video one TV; or VOIP (Skype), or FaceTime or Zoom
- Advanced (50 Mbps): heavy streaming video such as on multiple TV’s or 4K streaming video on one TV
Should I Upgrade?
At the Basic or Moderate levels, if you are seeing any sort of buffering or stuttering when watching movies, it’s probably time to move up to the next level.
If you want to upgrade your LCWA speed subscription level, send an email to tech.support@lcwireless.net.
But if you are already at our highest speed level and still seeing buffering or stuttering when watching movies, or your are consistently measuring slow speeds, then there may be reasons the speed at your movie watching device is limited, which brings us to the next typical question:
Doesn’t LCWA promise I will Always get Full Speed at all my Devices?
Well, no, we don’t. As with nearly every ISP in the country, the LCWA speed levels are “up to” values—you will get *up-to* 15, 25, and 50 Mbps. While we hope that you will usually be at or near the full speed, a lot of the time, maybe even most of the time, you won’t at any specific device in your home. No ISP will guarantee speed levels.
Why not?
Because there are a number of factors that affect perceived or actual delivered speed; some will decrease it a little, and some can decrease it a lot.
16 Factors that Influence Internet Speed
1. Use Ethernet when you Test
I have seen this so many times, a member says they have done a speed test and gotten slow speeds—but they did it with Wi-Fi. The moment they plug an Ethernet cable directly into the router and run the test, they find it’s at or near full speed. So use Ethernet in your speed tests and it will reveal to you the true speed limits of your Wi-Fi. If you don’t have a way to connect to your computer via Ethernet, see this article on how to enable it. https://lcwireless.net/you-should-consider-buying-an-add-on-ethernet-adapter-for-your-laptop-or-tablet/. Don’t contact LCWA about slow speeds until you test your speed using Ethernet.
To read more about how to run a speed test accurately, read this article https://lcwireless.net/how-to-run-an-internet-speed-test-correctly/
2. Your In-House Traffic
If you are downloading or streaming video or music files or downloading operating system upgrade files for a smartphone or computer during the speed test, this will slow down your other internet activities significantly. Often these downloads will occur without your knowledge. This is especially noticeable right after buying a new phone or computer when system updates are likely. Same with large files—if you upload or download lots of videos or music, expect some slowdowns. One member complained about speed and we found an ongoing, multi-day, music collection download going on in one of their devices.
3. Lots of Streaming in House or 4K Streaming
If you have lots of internet streaming consumers in your house (people streaming videos or games in multiple rooms simultaneously) be sure to upgrade to our highest speed level. And watch out for 4K video streaming; a single 4K video can consume 80% of our highest speed level (50 Mbps). While our speed offerings are excellent compared to other rural Santa Fe County providers, we cannot be compared to metropolitan areas where 100 Mbps suppliers are common. (Welcome to rural NM!).
4. Source Server Capacity, Slow Zoom Meetings
If your access to remote sites seems to be slow, often it has nothing to do with our network. Rather, the server or other party you are contacting could be slow. If you are in a Zoom meeting, keep in mind that the Zoom meeting server may be running slow (Zoom is incredibly overloaded due to COVID-19). Or the other person’s network may be slow. If you are downloading or uploading file, the speed limit is almost never due to our network, but rather due to limits in the file server you are working with. This often happens with operating system upgrades, music downloads, and more when the remote source server is overloaded or throttled down.
5. Old Router
This is a common one. As your router ages and the firmware gets more and more out of date, your internet speed can decrease or stutter. If you have an old router, contact us and we will prep a good new router for you with all your settings already installed. We’ll do this for a nominal cost: about $33 including the router. Contact us if you are interested.
6. Router Model, Number of Devices
Not all Wi-Fi routers and systems are the same. Most consumer-grade routers can get overloaded with many devices, and you will be surprised at how many devices you have on your network. I thought I had maybe 8 devices in my house, but then I used a tool to do a Wi-Fi/Ethernet scan and I was stunned to see that I had 32 devices hooked up! Smart TVs, streaming music, Amazon Echo, smartphones, thermostats, computers, printers, and more all add up. If you have a ton of devices connected to your network, you might need a new router. The airCube router we recommend can handle many connections.
Also, if you are using a Wi-Fi extender, expect to achieve less than half your service speed. Wi-Fi extenders are notorious for causing slow downs. See next point for more information related to that.
7. Size of your Home
If you have a large home or a home with outbuildings, you’ll lose Wi-Fi speed or connection at the edges. Wireless Wi-Fi extenders can help, but they have major limitations including slow speeds. Better is to upgrade your Wi-Fi system to a campus system. Without that your speeds can suffer. Some campus systems are easy for a home owner to self-install. But some are hard. Note, designing and installing these is beyond the scope of our volunteer support; we can put you in touch with people who can design and prep such a system for you for a fee. Also, be careful when buying some brands of mesh router systems for large houses because their radio frequency will interfere with the LCWA rooftop radio. See point 9 below.
8. Location of Router
Place your router in the most central location possible. Also, make sure it is not blocked by walls with a lot of metal in them (adobe and stucco walls often have wire mesh embedded). And don’t place other devices that transmit Wi-Fi right next to your router—that can block the signal.
9. Common 5 GHz Radio Interference
We cannot say this enough, turn off any and all 5GHz radios in your home. Such radios are built into many Wi-Fi routers and into many Wi-Fi extenders, and if you do not turn them off, they can interfere with your LCWA rooftop radio and slow down your internet speed significantly. See this article for more information.
Now that said, turning off 5GHz radios is often not easy—the settings are usually buried deep in the router web-based configuration interface. And even after you turn it off many things can turn it back on like a nearby lightning strike or pressing the reset button on your router. And finally, in most mesh-based routers you cannot turn off the 5Ghz radios built in.
Because of this, we recommend you get a router that in known to have no 5Ghz radio built in (or one of the few that use a safe segment of the 5Ghz band). Avoid any router that is “dual band” or claims to be “high-speed.” Both of these are code words for using a 5GHz radio. This is one reason we recommend the $33 airCube ISP router, it has no 5 GHz Radio built in, and it’s still speedy. If you must use a mesh system due to a large house, read this article for a safe one you can self-install. Or if you already have a mesh system, contact us; we can get you in touch with (paid) professionals who can fine-tune your mesh-system frequency to avoid interfering with our rooftop radio.
10. Wi-Fi vs. Wired Connection
Your in-house Wi-Fi is often your choke point on internet speed. Wi-Fi is nearly always slower than a wired Ethernet connection, even with the fastest Wi-Fi router you can buy. And if your smartphone or computer is far from your Wi-Fi router, speeds can drop dramatically. If you have a lot of Wi-Fi devices sharing your Wi-Fi signal, this can also decrease speed. Using Ethernet wired connections is always better. So, if you can connect your computer or smart TV to your router with an Ethernet wire, do it! Here is an article about why Wi-Fi can be so slow. And here is an article about how to set up Ethernet for your whole house.
10 b. Weak Wi-Fi Users Affecting Other Users
Here is an interesting one that we discovered recently. If you have a Wi-Fi user in the house who has a weak Wi-Fi signal but does a lot of web/video/game surfing anyway, that can bring the rest of your Wi-Fi users down to their knees speedwise—even users with good Wi-Fi signals. It’s a long story why (tech folks look at this article), but here is the net-net: strengthen the Wi-Fi signal for everyone in your house, or use Ethernet. If you can’t use Ethernet, you might need to install a mesh system to solve the problem (see point 7 above, and follow this link for a good solution).
11. Certain Devices Can be Slow
The network card in some computers or devices in your home can get stuck be slow. Reboot the device and see if that helps. And some devices just have slow Wi-Fi, so try various computers in your house when testing the speed. For example, we’ve discovered recently that many older Macs have slower Wi-Fi than a comparable PC: a member will have both an older Mac and a PC in their house, and the PC will get full speed but the Mac will read 50% slower in a speed test. This is confirmed by recent articles in the computer press; see this article for some fixes.
And we’ve seen the opposite where a PC was taking an absurdly long time to load pages compared to other devices in the home, and compared to what the speed test itself reflected. Tech folks consider this: you might clear it up if you run Winsock Reset/DNS Flush command set and the restart the machine.
Again though, if a device seems to have slow Wi-Fi the first thing to do is to reboot it; that often fixes things. Even smart TV’s need a reboot sometimes (fully pull the plug out of wall to get it out of standby mode). And again, use a direct Ethernet connection whenever you can.
12. Busy Streaming Periods
You may notice that in the evenings, especially weekend evenings, your internet speed can decrease. That’s because so many people are streaming movies these days that our core network can be affected. Internet-based movie and TV streaming demand is increasing faster than we can respond with infrastructure upgrades. This is true of LCWA, of Comcast, and of all other ISPs. The good news is that we are investing in network monitoring software that can locate the choke points. And we are upgrading backbone radios that we see are running slow. We just finished one major upgrade. But more is needed to catch up with the very rapid increase in video traffic we are seeing recently. It may take some months, and we hope to be there this year. By the way, don’t schedule heavy-consumption activities like online backups for that time of day.
13. Poorly Aligned Rooftop Radio
If your rooftop radio has blown out of alignment, you will get poor speeds. See this article for more information. If you suspect this has happened, contact support and we can do a remote check on its alignment.
14. Which Speed Test Site You Are Using
Different speed test sites can give very different results. We recommend the site at http://lcwireless.speedtestcustom.com/. See more tips at this article: https://lcwireless.net/how-to-run-an-internet-speed-test-correctly/
Other speed test sites are very inaccurate due to the technology behind our radio internet. For example, if you type Speed Test into Google search, it will send you to an M-Labs speed test engine that always measures very low on our network, so avoid it and most other test sites or software.
15. Atmospheric Conditions
Remember, the LCWA network is a radio network, not a cable network. So signal strength and internet speed will be influenced by atmospheric conditions. For example, in a heavy rainstorm your internet feed will be decreased greatly and occasionally even dropped completely; that’s because rain and snow can block our radio signal. Windy conditions can twist or wobble your rooftop radio and cause it to lose speed or even disconnect. Lightening can knock out the electronics in entire radio towers requiring up to several days for us to fix it.
16. Don’t try to compare LCWA to metropolitan internet
Sometimes we get a new member who just moved from a metropolitan area and they are shocked when they can’t watch multiple 4K movies in 3 rooms in the house at the same time. We cannot be compared to metropolitan areas where 100 Mbps suppliers are common. Look, we are a rural internet cooperative trying to reach people located in places where cable will never go. Radio-based internet is amazing but it is speed-limited. Keep in mind you may need to be attentive to your internet consumption loads in the house, per the notes above.
For All These Reasons, We Don’t Guarantee Speeds on the LCWA Network
As you can see, there are a ton of factors that can affect your true and measured internet speeds, and this is why we don’t guarantee them. We are doing the best we can keeping our infrastructure up to date and increasing in capacity. If there is an issue is in our backbone, we try to fix it as fast as we can. But as you can see, much of what affects speed is beyond our control—it’s actually up to you!
