I’ve got a strange problem. In order to get the best performance in my mancave, I ran a cable from my router down into the basement to my gaming PC. It seemed fine when I first ran it, but recently I’ve started noticing that the wired connection seems slow - I pay for 100 Mbps and using the speedtest (at fast.com) I measure < 1 Mbps (it varies, and I do sometimes get up to 20 but never higher than that, and only rarely). I have Verizon Fios and am using the stock router they give you for wired and WiFi access.
I decided to do something about it, so over the weekend I got on the phone to complain. While on hold, I decided to use my iPad to test the WiFi connection while sitting in front of the computer. And the iPad gives me readings in excess of 50 Mbps… I test on the PC and I get 2. On the iPad, 40. On the PC, 800 Kbps. And so forth. So I hung up the phone.
The ethernet connection is plugged into the back of the router and is snaked down through a hole used by some ductwork. I then have a Cat 5 connector into another cable, which runs through some ceiling. That cable is plugged into a wall receptacle. I then plug a wire into that and connect that wire to the Ethernet port on my PC. Total length of wire is maybe…60 to 100 feet?
I ran two other cables to the router (using the same connector to join them) and noticed a small but possibly insignificant improvement.
I’m scratching my head trying to figure out what could be going on. Anyone have ideas? Could it be drivers? Crappy router? Should I just capitulate and buy a USB WiFi dongle and use that connection? It’s driving me batty.
Do you have a laptop or console or something you could plug in with the same ethernet run to do a speed test and rule out a hardware problem on the PC? I’d see what speed you get copying a file just from one device to another on the local network to rule out a routing issue with your internet->wired setup.
After that, using the same laptop, I’d try a short cable (<3m) plugged directly into the router. Reading this I’d bet on a cabling issue, either on the connector or interference with the cable. A USB wifi option may be cheaper and a lot less hassle than buying shielded CAT6.
I’m guessing your jack is terminated poorly. I have one of those that I need to repunch at some point. If I accidentally plug something into it, it’s very very slow.
Get a dual band wireless network card for your desktop. I mulled over running cables for ages until I tried it, works great. 6ms ping and download speed that matches my plan. I even use the ISP supplied router which is decent (Rogers, Canada).
Double agreed, probably the cable but the local laptop idea is your best place to start as a sanity check.
Length, wrapping, termination, internal twisting, etc are all things that affect your speed. In my house my cables are so long and just CAT5 (not even 5e) that I get only 10MB/s to my office. I was getting 3 but I found where a nail had pierced a cable run in my attic and while it miraculously didn’t break any of the wires it did separate one of the twisted pairs apart and thus ruin my speed. I just pulled it off the nail and pushed it back in the plenum casing and I was back to 10.
I believe I may have sussed out what was going on.
As suggested, I took my laptop to the basement and plugged it in - got some nice speeds (approaching 100 Mbps). Plugged the cable back into the PC - slow speeds. Then I started testing the laptop Wifi against the PC wire. At one point I decided to switch to using speedtest.net instead of the test at fast.com. And you know how speedtest shows your origin point? Well the laptop had a reasonable origin (Verizon and my IP address) but the PC was showing some unknown origin in New Jersey.
So I started looking at all the stuff I had installed on my PC, and aside from some VPN stuff (which I wasn’t running at the time) I recalled I had installed VirtualBox a while ago when doing some fiddling around with Vagrant and the like. And I vaguely recalled that Virtual Box does some sort of shenanigans with your network adapter. So I uninstalled VB, and rebooted (remembering I hadn’t rebooted in like forever). And after that the PC speedtest shows it’s origin as Verizon, with the same IP as my laptop, and the speeds are back to normal.
So I think the issue was one of some sort of weird network driver issue, maybe combined with some Virtual Box strangeness. Whatever the cause, I do believe I fixed it!
Virtualbox has it’s own implementation of NIC drivers if I recall correctly. You can select what to implement from a drop down or similar. I’m assuming this is so you could mimic certain driver sets for dev/test. I’m betting if you reload it, you could select a different one that would resolve the issue, within Virtualbox itself.
