Is your upload faster than your download with your Internet connection? This is a fairly obscure problem that seems to have started happening again. Here’s how to test to see if you’re actually having a problem, and how to fix it.

1. Why Is My Upload Speed So Much Higher Than My Download Speed
2. Why Is My Upload Higher Than My Download Mp3
3. Why Is My Upload Higher Than My Download Speed
4. Why Is My Upload Higher Than My Download Files

Surely normal surfing would have a higher download usage than upload usage? My router is password protected and I'm the only person who knows it. I have tried a usage meter but I really don't. Mbps is a good indicator of how much bandwidth your home Wi-Fi connection has. The more internet bandwidth you have, the higher your volume of data that can be downloaded at a reasonable pace. 6th grade elawelcome to mrs. bryans learning cafe. And you can increase the speed at which the data travels because more of it can flow. So what kind of bandwidth do you need? Since then my speed has dropped to 6mb, then 3Mb, yesterday it barely reached 1Mb and today, using BTs own speed checker I am achieving a download of 0.57 (My upload speed is rated at 0.96!). Their graphic indicates this is from exchange to modem and have successfully ruled out the PC as being the problem due to my iPad giving the same results.

If your upload speed is slightly faster than your download speed, it’s not worth worrying about. On a symmetric Internet connection where the two are supposed to be the same, I expect to see them within about 10 percent of one another, and if download slightly outpaces upload, it’s not hurting anything. But if upload is faster when it’s supposed to be slower, something weird is going on.

Check your benchmark

If you have a high-speed connection, such as a fiber-based Gigabit connection, most of the web-based speed tests will benchmark upload speed much higher than download. The browser-based tests are extremely demanding on your CPU. Unless you have a top of the line system, it’s affecting your scores. I also find the tests are overly sensitive to the type of network card you have.

For best results, install the native Speedtest app for your operating system and test with that, rather than using their web site. You’ll find the results are much more consistent, and I find they much more closely match what I experience online with my high-speed connection. This is something I’ve covered before. But in my case, even though my system was benchmarking poorly, I wasn’t experiencing slow download speeds that matched my benchmarks.

Don’t use wireless

Airline tycoon download. Wireless connections have a great deal of overhead, and on high-speed connections, it shows. Plug your system straight into your router with a CAT5e or CAT6 Ethernet cable to run your tests. Back when 25 megabits was a fast connection you could get away with testing over wireless. But that’s not the case today.

Plugging into a switch that’s plugged into your router can affect your results. The effect could be positive or negative, depending on how good your switch is. My $40 Ebay switch actually seems to help. You might want to try it both ways and see if it makes a difference. But I wouldn’t expect your switch to be causing fast uploads and slow downloads. I would expect a switch problem to affect speeds in both directions.

Upload faster than download after all that? Try this

If you can still upload faster than download at this point, there are two possibilities. It will depend on your network hardware.

Try turning off QoS

If you have your own router, try disabling QoS on your router. QoS can cause lots of odd speed issues, and frankly, in my experience QoS tends to cause more problems than it solves. In the hands of someone who really knows what they’re doing, QoS may be able to do a lot of good. But that describes exactly one person I’ve ever met. It’s not me and it’s probably not you.

If you don’t see anything in your router’s user interface regarding QoS, try a Google search to see where the setting is and how to disable it. Sometimes it’s buried.

It might be your residential gateway

In the case of AT&T Fiber, where AT&T provides a black box that you can’t really configure much, sometimes a defective residential gateway can cause weird issues with download speeds faster than upload. If you’ve tried using the native app plugged straight into the gateway and you still see slow downloads, contact AT&T. They can test your gateway, and if it’s defective, they’ll replace it for you and won’t charge you for it.

If you find that your wireless download speeds are abysmal while youruploads speeds are pretty solid, especially with Apple devices, I’ve got apossible solution for you. I struggled with this issue for a while and decidedto write down my findings in a blog post in case I, or anyone else, runs intothis in the future.

tldr: disable WMM QoS in your router settings.

Symptoms

At home, I have the following setup:

1. Macbook Air: OS X 10.7.1, Intel Core i71.8Ghz, 4GB RAM
2. iPhone 4S: iOS 5.0
3. Custom desktop: Windows 7, Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 3.0Ghz, 2GB RAM
4. ISP: Comcast xfinity

Whenever I used my laptop or phone, the Wi-Fi connection felt incrediblyslow. Youtube videos took forever to load, Google Maps tiles filled in slowly,and even gmail felt unresponsive. On the other hand, my desktop, which wasconnected to the router via an ethernet cable, worked just fine.

Numbers

To confirm my observations, I decided to take some bandwidth measurementsusing bandwidthplace.com,speakeasy.net, andspeedtest.net for the laptop and the SpeedTestapp for the iPhone. The results were pretty consistent across all app anddevice pairs and looked something like this:

Desktop

1. Download: 24 Mbps
2. Upload: 4.5 Mbps

Laptop

1. Download: 0.65 Mbps
2. Upload: 4.5 Mbps

iPhone

1. Download: 0.58 Mbps
2. Upload: 4.4 Mbps

Yikes! My laptop and iPhone download speed were more than 30 timesslower than my desktop’s download speed! On the other hand, the upload speedwas roughly the same on all devices. What the hell was going on?

Failed attempts

Why Is My Upload Speed So Much Higher Than My Download Speed

After googling for solutions, I tried a number of tweaks commonlysuggested around the web:

1. Change DNS hosts
2. Change wireless channel
3. Change the wireless channel width
4. Use a different security mode (WPA2 personal)
5. Shut off firewalls
6. Enable or disable IPv6 settings
7. Reboot the router

None of these worked.

The solution

Out of desperation, I started tweaking random settings on my router andstumbled across one that finally worked. The directions for other routersmay be a little different, but here’s what I did:

1. Go to http://192.168.1.1 and login to your router. If you’venever done this, look for instructions that came with your router or do agoogle search to find the default username and password.
2. Find a page that has QoS settings. For the E1200, you need to click on“Applications & Gaming” and select the “QoS” sub-menu.
3. Disable WMM Support.
4. Click save.

Why Is My Upload Higher Than My Download Mp3

That’s it. The second I disabled WMM support, the download speeds for mylaptop and iPhone both jumped to 24 Mbps, perfectly matching my desktop.

What the hell is WMM?

WMM isapparently an 802.11e feature that provides higher priority for“time-dependent” traffic, such as video or voice. In theory, this should makethings like VoIP calls and video chat (e.g. Skype) perform better. Inpractice, having it enabled destroyed my Wi-Fi download speeds. Since Idisabled it, my Wi-Fi is blazing fast and I’ve seen no negativeside-effects.

If anyone has more information as to why this would be the case, pleaseshare it here.

Update (April, 2014): firmware upgrades

A couple years after writing this blog post, I hit the inverse of the originalproblem: I suddenly had fast download but slow upload speeds. While lookingfor a fix, I found out that the WMM/QoS issue mentioned above may have beenfixed in newer firmware versions for my router! I once again wrote a blog postto capture all the details: Got fast download but slow upload speeds? Here’safix.

Update (Sept, 2013): some nitty-gritty details

In the last year, this post has had over 100k views and helped many people fixtheir download speeds. I’m happy I was able to help people. Other folks havebeen eager to share advice too: I got an email from a Russ Washington inAtlanta who did some impressive investigative work to uncover a potentialunderlying cause. In case it helps others, here is his email:

Yevgeniy: I ran into your blog post 'Got slow download but fastupload speeds over wireless? Here's a fix.' I have some info you may finduseful.

This happened to me too when I moved toComcast - but I had DSL running in parallel. The Comcast traffic had thisproblem but the DSL did not. Also, it affected my Linksys router when it hadstock firmware *and* after switching to DD-WRT. Clearly the traffic itself wasat issue, so I broke out the packet sniffer.

*All* inbound Comcast traffic (Internet --> client) was tagged with a DSCP valueof 8 (Class Selector 1). The DSL traffic had a DSCP value of 0. So Comcast istagging all traffic to be treated a certain way by QoS: 'Priority,' whichsounds good but is actually the second-*lowest* possible.

WMM, itself a QoS technique, apparentlyde-prioritizes (drops?) based on the Comcast-supplied value. Turning off WMMworked around it - but since WMM is part of the 802.11n spec, I wanted rootcause. Judiciously replacing that set-by-Comcast DSCP value does the trick.

So between my Linksys router and both ISPs, I had aNetscreen firewall. It lets me set DSCP values by policy - so I told it tomatch the DSL (DSCP 0). This yielded great improvement. However, I was stillnot getting full speed so even a zero value was not the best for > DSLrates. I set the DSCP value to 46 (Expedited Forwarding) and bingo, up to20Mbps, almost full provisioned speed (25Mbps).

Why only download issues? Because the only Comcast-tagged packets are the inboundones: Internet --> you, including those big data packets. When uploading,yes, you get sent ACK packets and such - but they are tiny connection-controlpackets. I imagine WWM weirds out on them too, but you (usually) wouldn'tnotice when doing multi-Mbps speed tests.

I am still trying to udnerstand WMM, but this was a big find, and I was lucky to have afirewall that let me packet-tweak. Hope you find the info useful.

Why Is My Upload Higher Than My Download Speed

Russ Washington, Atlanta, GA

Update (Sept, 2014): more nitty-gritty details

Why Is My Upload Higher Than My Download Files

Russ has found even more info about this issue: it turns out it’s not just aComcast DSCP bug, but also poor handling of this bug by the firmware of manyrouters. More details here: Critical DSCP bug Affecting WiFi Download Speedson Comcast.