Rookie mistake

[Puer Aeternus]

Read the whole thing before jumping in w/ the obvious answers, there is a face palm at the end.

Since I work mainly from home these days, I need a good connection for all those zoom calls. I noticed my speeds were not as advertised, zoom calls drop from my end and wifi would cut out a lot. I increased my Internet speed from 10MB/s to 15MB/s ($2 increase so why not) and still only getting 9MB/s as slow as 3MB/s. Ugghhh....do I need to get a new router, maybe try a mesh set up? I asked my friend about his Mesh set up...something triggered me in his answer, and not in a SJW kinda way. He said he uses cat6 cables. As my router is very far from the office, I use a wifi extender and run a cat 5 cable from it to my pc. I did a little research and learned that Cat 5 has speed limits. So I checked my router/modem to see what the cable connecting the two was, sure enough. An old cat 5. I rummaged thru my tickle trunk and found:

• a cat 5 e

I plugged it in and guess what, my speed on wifi went up to 15MB/s as advertised.
I bought 5 cat 6 cables and redid all my connections.

I saved myself a few hundred dollars as I was about to go w/ a Mesh set up....and if I did, I likely would have used the same o cat 5 cables and kept the new cables in their respective packaging, as ive done for years. all the new tech that I got, router and Modem, I keep the cables in the box, pfffft.....ill use whats already connected, for the past 15 years!!!!!

The wifi has been stable and constant speed w/ no drops to 3MB/s. Rookie mistake !

 

[Robert17]

Don't feel bad. We all do it.

I was about to purchase an additional SSD to load up a dual boot with Linux this week. Then remembered a retired unit I had. After scrounging around I found an Intel 730 that was not in use. Did the install and it took me 15 minutes to figure out that the 100MB drive size wasn't right and that for whatever reason one of the partitions wasn't active -> 240GB total. Duh.....all I had to do was a couple of mouse clicks to fix it. Saved $60 bucks.

 

[EarthDog]

Cat5 I thought is good to 100 Mbps/12.5MB... I guess it is 'up to' that value.

Glad you found an easy fix!

 

[Super Nade]

I think your cable was probably broken/damaged somewhere. As ED said above, you should be okay with Cat5 for your speeds. It isn't quite accurate to test throughput and latency of a wired link through a wireless intermediary. You should test the throughput on the wired side with say a simple dslreports speedtest.

http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest

 

[Railgun]

Exactly as above. For the same reason I have no issues running 10Gb on 5e, you would have no issues running that throughput on what I assume is a 1Gb link between the devices you replaced the cable on.

I’d be curious to know whether the devices in play here have the ability to show errors, and if so, whether they’d logged any.

At the end of the day though, a win is a win.

 

[WhitehawkEQ]

Read the whole thing before jumping in w/ the obvious answers, there is a face palm at the end.

Since I work mainly from home these days, I need a good connection for all those zoom calls. I noticed my speeds were not as advertised, zoom calls drop from my end and wifi would cut out a lot. I increased my Internet speed from 10MB/s to 15MB/s ($2 increase so why not) and still only getting 9MB/s as slow as 3MB/s. Ugghhh....do I need to get a new router, maybe try a mesh set up? I asked my friend about his Mesh set up...something triggered me in his answer, and not in a SJW kinda way. He said he uses cat6 cables. As my router is very far from the office, I use a wifi extender and run a cat 5 cable from it to my pc. I did a little research and learned that Cat 5 has speed limits. So I checked my router/modem to see what the cable connecting the two was, sure enough. An old cat 5. I rummaged thru my tickle trunk and found:

• a cat 5 e

I plugged it in and guess what, my speed on wifi went up to 15MB/s as advertised.
I bought 5 cat 6 cables and redid all my connections.

I saved myself a few hundred dollars as I was about to go w/ a Mesh set up....and if I did, I likely would have used the same o cat 5 cables and kept the new cables in their respective packaging, as ive done for years. all the new tech that I got, router and Modem, I keep the cables in the box, pfffft.....ill use whats already connected, for the past 15 years!!!!!

The wifi has been stable and constant speed w/ no drops to 3MB/s. Rookie mistake !

When you say XMB/s are you talking about bits or bytes? Networks and the Internet transmits data in bits per second not bytes, so the proper term is 15"mb"/s. B is for bytes and b is for bits.
Sorry for nitpicking but it's a little confusing when reading your post.