6

hi how do I network

Submitted by voxpoplar in just_post

I should in theory be getting 500Mbps broadband. My networking setup is fibre broadband input port thing->router->ethernet over power 1->ethernet over power 2->desktop where each -> is an ethernet cable.

I was getting 80Mbps on speedtest until I double checked the cables and saw the one going from the router to EoP1 was a cat 5 cable and I replaced it with a cat 5e cable and now I'm getting 200Mbps.

Would it be worth replacing the other cables with cat 6 or something else to try and get the full speed? I don't really know much al this works. The ethernet over power links are advertised as being up to a Gbps so in theory they shouldn't be the limiting factor but they also seem like dark magic to me so maybe they are I don't know.

I can obvious spend a bit more time narrowing this down further by dragging a PC downstairs to the router and seeing what speeds I get if I plug it in directly to the router instead of the EoP but it's bolted to my desk and a pain to take down so I figured I'd ask people's opinions on this first to see what people thought was likely.

Comments

You must log in or register to comment.

5

emma wrote

ethernet cables are very cheap and you already had success in replacing one of them, so i think replacing more of them would be a good place to start.

i've only used the ethernet over power stuff once and it was dreadfully slow, so it sounds to me like you could be running into limitations with those. but it could also be that the cpu on your router is being saturated if you have a cheap and/or crappy one.

4

flabberghaster wrote

If you have a laptop with an Ethernet adapter I'd just use that.

2

flabberghaster wrote

Or actually are you able to log in to a shell on your router?

2

voxpoplar wrote

I am not

2

flabberghaster wrote

I guess you don't need to for my idea anyway which is to flood ping the router (ping it with an increased frequency and see if you get packet losses)

2

voxpoplar wrote

how would I do that in a way that measured bandwidth?

2

flabberghaster wrote

Well the original idea was to run something that accepts a TCP connection, and then run wireshark and see if you have a lot of retransmitted packets, which would mean the cable is probably bad and dropping packets.

You can probably still look at ping and see if there's packet drops but yeah, probably not as reliable doing it that way.