Connected at 100Mbps

[Nocturnal]

In Windows, if you have the network connection in your system tray it often times says connected at x Mbit. Is it due to being connected to a router that has 100Mbps throughput or is it directly related to some other thing? I had a hard time trying to explain this to someone. Thanks.

 

[Cooky]

It means your physical link is running 100Mbps.
It has nothing to do w/ the actual throughput of the device you connect to.

 

[jlazzaro]

your computers network interface card and the switchport it is connected to has negotiation and agreed to send data at 100Mbps.

this number has no effect or correlation to anything beyond the switchport you are plugged into. hell, you could connect at 1000Mbps to a router with a throughput of 56k...

 

[JackMDS]

Numbers that are quoted for Network Cards are the Rate that the chipset on the card is capable to.

Jack?s Car analogy😉 - Two cars rated at the same Horse Power (Horse Power = Network Card chipset's ?Speed?) would not necessarily perform the same on the same road , and for sure would perform differently on other roads (Roads are the other components on the Network, whether inside, or in between computers).

What to expect in reality, http://www.ezlan.net/net_speed.html

 

[Madwand1]

It's useful as an upper limit. Sometimes the link speed isn't as high as a local system is capable of, and the link speed indicator tells you the best you'll be able to do.

A lot of modern hardware is gigabit for example, but not as many routers and switches are. So your gigabit NIC will connect at 100 Mb/s to the router/switch, and the 100 Mb/s link speed will indicate the best performance you could ever get out of that connection. You could in fact approach that limit for local transfers if you had another system connected directly to the same router/switch at 100 Mb/s. Going further, if that second system was only connected at 10 Mb/s (which would be the case for example for another computer that you're talking to through a 10 Mb/s Internet link or a really old NIC), then the best transfer speed you could have through the entire system would be 10 Mb/s.