{"id":511,"date":"2011-03-27T17:54:46","date_gmt":"2011-03-27T21:54:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/niftyc\/?p=511"},"modified":"2011-07-29T22:58:14","modified_gmt":"2011-07-30T02:58:14","slug":"slow-home-network-check-the-router","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/niftyc\/archives\/511","title":{"rendered":"Slow home network? Check the router."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>(or, <strong><em>A geeky interlude from our regular blogging<\/em><\/strong>.)<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m trying to <strong>improve my Internet connection speed<\/strong> and home and my home network generally. \u00a0(That partly explains <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/niftyc\/archives\/498\">my last post<\/a>, too.)<\/p>\n<p>After a series of tests last week, I was astonished to discover that <strong>one of the key bottlenecks was my router<\/strong>. \u00a0I bought a router that says 10\/100 Ethernet on the box, meaning it supports both <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/10BASE-T\">10Base-T<\/a> and\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/100BASE-TX#100BASE-TX\">100Base-TX<\/a>. I was assuming that if I connected Fast Ethernet devices to it with an ordinary Category 5 cable I would get\u00a0100 Mbit\/s of throughput in each direction. \u00a0But I was getting about 12.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"http:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/commons\/thumb\/b\/ba\/Cat_5.jpg\/300px-Cat_5.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" \/><br \/>\n<em>(Cat 5 cable. Image credit: Wikimedia commons.)<\/em><\/p>\n<p>The Eureka moment came when I found <a href=\"http:\/\/www.smallnetbuilder.com\/component\/option,com_chart\/Itemid,189\/\">this chart<\/a> over at smallnetbuilder.com. <strong>My router came in 63rd out of 64 routers<\/strong> tested on total throughput. \u00a0On WAN to LAN download speed, a key metric, it came in 59th out of 64 routers tested.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Although it said 100 Mbit\/s on the box, it actually maxes out at 20 <\/strong>according to these tests. \u00a0(Like I said, I was getting about 12.)<\/p>\n<p>The offender was a <strong>PepLink Balance 30<\/strong> &#8212; actually a load balancing switch. \u00a0Maybe it is the load balancing that makes it so terrible? I don&#8217;t know. At one time I was so desperate for throughput I had multiple ISPs at the same time and I was\u00a0aggregating\u00a0them.\u00a0I have abandoned the idea of load balancing, so there&#8217;s no point to it now.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Time to treat myself<\/strong> to an ASUS Black Diamond Dual-Band Gigabit Wireless-N Router. I&#8217;m worth it. I deserve it. Tested maximum throughput 1,268 Mbit\/s. \u00a0We should notice a difference between that and 12. Damn it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>(or, A geeky interlude from our regular blogging.) I&#8217;m trying to improve my Internet connection speed and home and my home network generally. \u00a0(That partly explains my last post, too.) After a series of tests last week, I was astonished to discover that one of the key bottlenecks was my router. \u00a0I bought a router [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2132,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[48405],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-511","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geeking"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4M7Bm-8f","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/niftyc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/511","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/niftyc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/niftyc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/niftyc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2132"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/niftyc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=511"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/niftyc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/511\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":515,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/niftyc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/511\/revisions\/515"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/niftyc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/niftyc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/niftyc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}