Determining R3's Optimal Bandwidth Entered

[PharmDawgg]

Do I enter the speeds that I pay for from my ISP or do I run the Speedtest on the R3 and allow the R3 to determine the speeds entered exactly.  And this leads to another question.  Do I enter the speeds exactly or can I round the values.  I know I am definitely overthinking this. LOL  

[Zippy]

How close are the speeds on the speed test on the R3 to what you pay for?  Does the R3 always show higher speeds then what your paying for or are the speeds lower then what you pay for?

Thanks!

Zippy.

[PharmDawgg]

8 minutes ago, Zippy said:

How close are the speeds on the speed test on the R3 to what you pay for?  Does the R3 always show higher speeds then what your paying for or are the speeds lower then what you pay for?

Thanks!

Zippy.

I pay for 1g up/down (AT&T fibre) but at the most the R3 says 900Mbps/900Mbps

[Netduma Fraser]

I'd suggest setting what you're actually receiving - for Congestion Control/SmartBOOST to be most effective it needs to know what bandwidth it has to play with. 

An extreme example but say you have 500Mbps speeds but you've entered you have 1000Mbps. You throttle to 70% it would theoretically throttle to 700Mbps but you have less than that so your connection can still be saturated and the router wouldn't be able to counteract it.

[Fuzy]

Yep, 1G RJ45 Ethernet is hardware limited to 950Mbps max but except locally, you will hardly be able to expect these speeds with a speed test. It is easier to manually set a max limit to 900/850 Mbps (in your case) to be sure that SmartBoost optimizes your speeds as best as possible! You should also keep in mind that consumer FTTH fiber lines are shared on a tree "32 to 64 customers sharing a max speed depending on the technology". So you can also suffer from congestion on this ISP sharing tree (speed shared between several customers), "if your neighbors like to do speed tests all the time or use peer clients H24" You can notice this by doing speed tests at different times of the day.