What causes a switch to run slow?

[Hans Gruber]

My Cable router was fine. I get Gigabit speed over ethernet. I switched out my power supply to an aircraft carrier style. That means it supports a lot of outlets 12 outlets total and 6 slots are for very wide plugins.

I have a netgear metal box 8 port gigabit switch that runs directly into my Xfinity wifi router.

I was getting 30mbps down and 40mbps up after switching out the power supply.

My main computer is ethernet. I switched that computer directly into the Xfinity modem and my speeds were back to 940mbps down and 40-45mbps up. All of my devices were running slow including my powerline rig downstairs. I get 160mbps down and 40-45mbps up on my powerline machine.

Everything is back to normal. I didn't need to reset the switch. For a minute I thought the Cat5 cable was the problem going from the switch to the router.

Simply switching my ethernet computer to the Xfinity modem directly fixed the slow download speed.

Networking is one of my weak points.

Any clues or suggestions as to what would cause this temporary problem?

 

[VirtualLarry]

By "Power Supply", you really mean, "Surge Strip", right? Does it have a surge-protection for RJ45/ethernet LAN? Did you use it? Sometimes those "surge protection" features, on those expensive power strips that have them, are actually a negative for signal quality on coax cable lines or ethernet or phone lines.

My guess is, that plugging your cable line into the surge strip's surge protection for Coax, is what limited your download speeds. Other than that possibility, I'm not sure.

Edit: You references "XFinity Wifi Router", and "Xfinity Modem". Do you have a separate Wifi Router, and a separate Cable Modem? Are they both provided by XFinity? What are their models?

Chances are, possibly, that when you unplugged stuff, and then plugged them back into the new surge protector, that the cable modem simply didn't sync to multiple channels. (On Arris modems, they show Green for Down/Up, when in single-channel sync mode, and Blue, if they are in a DOCSIS 3.0 multi-channel sync mode.)

The 30 Mbit/sec down is telling, as that is the limit of bandwidth of a single DOCSIS 3.0 channel.

That could have been coincidence, in which case it would eventually self-correct, or with a reboot, or it was because you connected the coax cable through the surge protector.

 

[Hans Gruber]

It's complicated. So will simplify everything. I do not use the coaxial outlets in surge protectors. My cable modem is a cube DOCSIS 3.1 modem. It's got the phone built into the router with a wireless AC modem built in. I have to use the wifi on the modem for my Xfinity home security system. I have a netgear 6400 router. A Netgear 8 port gigabit switch (metal box). I had a UPS power supply running the routers and modem for power. It died. I switched out my power strip to a new larger power strip with wider plugins as well as more plugins over my last power strip.

I think powering everything down and back up may have caused a short term problem. I highly recommend using an external gigabit switch rather than using a router with gigabit switch built it. My setup has run much smoother and better than when I used the Netgear R6400 router as a switch as well.

My Xfinity modem router/voice is one of those cube models. It's DOSCIS 3.1 Compared to the last modem this one is bullet proof. Rarely goes down and keeps the speed up. It only has 2 gigabit ports to connect. I run the coaxial cable straight into the modem.

 

[VirtualLarry]

It's got the phone built into the router with a wireless AC modem built in.

It would be much easier to help you diagnose your issues, if you could perhaps learn to use the correct terminology.

There is no such thing as a "wireless AC modem". There is a wireless AC router, and a DOCSIS 3.0 or DOCSIS 3.1 cable modem, and together, they would be called a "wireless gateway" if they are one singular unit.

So, "Power Supply" (in your terminology) == "Power / Surge Strip".
And "Wireless AC modem" == "XFinity Gateway".

How do you have your R6400 Netgear router connected to your Gateway?

Is this issue repeatable, if you A/B them? If you re-connect things as you had them, does your download drop to 30Mbit/sec again?

 

[Hans Gruber]

It would be much easier to help you diagnose your issues, if you could perhaps learn to use the correct terminology.

There is no such thing as a "wireless AC modem". There is a wireless AC router, and a DOCSIS 3.0 or DOCSIS 3.1 cable modem, and together, they would be called a "wireless gateway" if they are one singular unit.

So, "Power Supply" (in your terminology) == "Power / Surge Strip".
And "Wireless AC modem" == "XFinity Gateway".

How do you have your R6400 Netgear router connected to your Gateway?

Is this issue repeatable, if you A/B them? If you re-connect things as you had them, does your download drop to 30Mbit/sec again?

I appreciate your thoughts and consideration. Larry, I am an expert and only ask for advice to humble my ego. If you want something done, do it yourself. Right? If you want to believe in someone, believe in yourself. If you cannot motivate yourself in life. Supplement your lack of energy, enthusiasm and vigor with stimulants.

How I connect my network is a closely guarded secret. Of course my issue is not repeatable. I solved the problem in less than a minute.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I have a feeling, if your experience was a one-off, that the ("Gateway"), get reset or otherwise powered-off, when you unplugged it to switch it to your new Power Strip, and that it initially locked-on to a single DOCSIS 3.0 channel (as they do), and failed to lock onto DOCSIS 3.0 multi-channel for whatever reason, or DOCSIS 3.1 OFDM.

 

[VirtualLarry]

*Shrug*. If you think that you are having issues with your switch, best way to test that is with two PCs connected by ethernet at the maximum line speed that the switch supports, and use IPERF. Take the router and cable modem (Gateway) out of the equation.

 

[Hans Gruber]

I think you were right with the power reset. The channel bonding of DOCSIS 3.1 wasn't working. I have the Xfi Advanced Gateway. It's the standard cube modem/router from Comcast. I believe they call it the XB6 as well but it's the Xfi Advanced Gateway. Supposedly it can do up to 1.5gigabits. I have run speed tests where it says that it is exceeding 1GB down.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Yeah, probably. That's decent hardware, so I understand, but with it, you have to pay a rental fee each month. Should give you tip-top speeds though, and it interfaces with Comcast Digital Voice (phone) service, and also Xfi Voice Remote, I believe.

 

[aigomorla]

what kind of switch do you have?
Unmanaged? Smart? Managed?

If its the later two, it could be QoS.... if its the first, then it could be failing hardware.
A Switch would not slow down or bottleneck anything, unless something is wrong with the switch.

 

[Hans Gruber]

That is my powerline result. I am down in the dungeon 3 floors down from the router. I

My switch is a Netgear GS308-100PAS unmanaged switch. It's excellent and much better than using my Netgear R6400 router. The Xfinity modem has two Gigabit ports. One goes to the R6400 that only does wireless and the other goes through the GS308.

My powerline is the top of the line TL-WPA8730 Kit. It has 3 ethernet ports and has built in wifi AC with 2.4ghz and 5ghz bands. I run another router in the garage through the powerline ethernet. The above speed is the max attainable download for AV1000. AV2000 speeds are identical to AV1000. In have seen 170mbps down before. The upload speed is roughly 35-40mbps up.

I am going to upgrade to a Mesh network soon which will replace the Netgear R6400 router. When I need to do power downloads of large files. I use a 50ft Cat5e cable directly through the switch upstairs.

 

[SamirD]

If you have a wire already going upstairs, why not use it all the time? Powerline and even mesh are just workarounds to a real ethernet cable.

 

[Hans Gruber]

If you have a wire already going upstairs, why not use it all the time? Powerline and even mesh are just workarounds to a real ethernet cable.

Because it's 3 floors down. Who runs an ethernet cable through stairs and on the floor? In theory I could cut open the drywall and cut through 2x4's all the way down to the basement. It would take a lot of work.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Honestly, Mesh (or Powerline, or both) sounds like your best bet here, if the home (3 stories, wow!) wasn't already pre-wired when it was built (I don't know the age).

Mesh has come a long way the last few years. Asus sells a mid-grade Mesh "AX" router twin-pack, might consider getting a pair of those twin-packs. Only problem with those is price, I think that they are like $400 per twin-pack, so you're looking at $800. That buys a good amount of Ubiquity gear too, but most of their stuff is designed for more-or-less pro installations, which use ethernet (POE) for back-haul, not mesh.

Or you could go the cheap route like me, and collect a whole bunch of refurb AC68U routers on sale for $80-100 ea., and then flash them with the newest Asus firmware with AiMesh support, and run those. I actually did that for a while, even though I only live in a small one-floor two-room (plus bathroom) apt., and a single wifi router would cover it, I have a lot of ethernet-based infrastructure, printers on the opposite side of the apt., from the ISP router, that use ethernet, NAS units that use ethernet, a cluster of desktop workstations that use ethernet (and wifi as a backup).

Unfortunately, the AiMesh kept dropping out, every hour or so, so my Macrium Reflect Free backups to my NAS units were constantly failing, it couldn't manage to backup properly over the wifi Mesh. So I re-jigged things, had to string some ethernet over door-frames, to meet safety code/lease requirements, and did it that way. I still run Mesh for the printer, that's pretty minor.

I only have experience with AiMesh as far as Mesh routers work, and with refurb routers at that. So the wifi drops could be due to auto channel assignment (my apt. complex has a lot of wifi around), or AiMesh firmware issues, or perhaps possibly just due to partially-failing hardware, as the main router I'm using sometimes drops wifi to my laptop, even when not using Mesh.

I probably should disassemble them, and put some heatsinks and new paste on the main SoC, but I'm both too lazy, and a little concerned I might screw things up on them.

Edit: I think that ISPs are getting in on the Mesh networking action, too. Verizon has both their Wifi / MOCA Extender, and a bunch of Wifi Mesh cubes (re-branded), and I think Comcast may offer a Mesh option now too. (I haven't used either of their solutions, but I assume that they would be more-or-less "supported" by your ISP contract, which could be a plus for the end-user, even if you have to pay monthly rental on the Mesh gear.)

https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16833320389
https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16833320373

 

[SamirD]

Because it's 3 floors down. Who runs an ethernet cable through stairs and on the floor? In theory I could cut open the drywall and cut through 2x4's all the way down to the basement. It would take a lot of work.

Oh I see, it's not concealed in any way and you just plug it in and bring it down--got it.

You'd be surprised where you can tuck a cable creatively though--I've actually run cables in various places along walls and whatnot and it's not the prettiest, but I forget about it pretty quickly when I enjoy the increased performance.

Do you have any type of wiring that gets you closer to the router? Phone lines, cable wire? Both of these can be used to get some decent speeds and less lag. Although you're getting solid speeds over powerline. Is that not your max Internet speed?

 

[Hans Gruber]

Here is my Ethernet speeds running through my Netgear switch straight to my Ryzen rig upstairs.

I did back to back tests of my powerline connection as well. Forget what you hear about powerline. The max download speed over the Internet is 150-170mbps on the gigabit port adapters. AV1000 and AV2000 both have the same performance. downloads from steam are always 18-20MB over powerline for me.

 

[mnewsham]

I always recommend MoCA when possible over Powerline, Powerline really is a crapshoot.

 

[Hans Gruber]

I always recommend MoCA when possible over Powerline, Powerline really is a crapshoot.

Typically the crap shoot is the result of incorrect polarity within the wiring in the walls of a house. They have polarity testers. If the wiring is correct, it runs flawlessly. My only complaint is that the true max internet speed is what you see above. The connection is not quite Ethernet but it's close minus the speed. The there is very little latency. Obviously Ethernet is what you would want ideally. Much better than wifi and if done correctly, far less difficult and complex than MoCA. It's literally plug and play. I have had several different powerline kits over the years. My current one is by far the fastest. IT has a built in 3 port router. I run ethernet through the walls to the garage. I have ethernet plugs on the walls to make it look professional. So the wireless router in the garage has 150-170mbps down and 30-40mbps up from the powerline.

I like the idea of the mesh wireless networks.


Here is the speed test result going from the powerline switch/router using Ethernet out to the garage and through a Trendnet TEW-692GR
wireless router to a i5 2400 desktop setup on my workbench in my garage. As you can see, no loss from the powerline through a router switch in the garage to the PC. My daisy chain is very unusual but it works.

 

[mnewsham]

Yeah, but with MoCA I have seen real world 850-900mbps throughput on 35 year old Coax.

It's a great alternative for LAN like throughput.

 

[Hans Gruber]

Yeah, but with MoCA I have seen real world 850-900mbps throughput on 35 year old Coax.

It's a great alternative for LAN like throughput.

When I need the speed, I have a 50ft and a 100ft Cat5e cable that I run from the switch two floors up from my garage and computers if I need a lot of speed direct from the switch. My gaming rig is in the laundry room. This computer I am typing on right now is in the garage on my bench. I have stacks of old laptops out here and a laser printer in the garage. I have three 6ft workbenches with a bunch of gear and junk on them.

The simplicity of Powerline removes running lines and cables throughout the house. The speed is more than enough. It you saw my setup you would think it was whole house Ethernet by looking at it.

Down in the basement there is no coaxial cable, only an old Cat5 phone jack. But my house doesn't have a home run for a network. Every room has a phone jack with Cat5 but no box in the house to connect it all.

 

[mnewsham]

When I need the speed, I have a 50ft and a 100ft Cat5e cable that I run from the switch two floors up from my garage and computers if I need a lot of speed direct from the switch. My gaming rig is in the laundry room. This computer I am typing on right now is in the garage on my bench. I have stacks of old laptops out here and a laser printer in the garage. I have three 6ft workbenches with a bunch of gear and junk on them.

The simplicity of Powerline removes running lines and cables throughout the house. The speed is more than enough. It you saw my setup you would think it was whole house Ethernet by looking at it.

Down in the basement there is no coaxial cable, only an old Cat5 phone jack. But my house doesn't have a home run for a network. Every room has a phone jack with Cat5 but no box in the house to connect it all.

Yeah, that's why I said I recommend MoCA "when possible", I obviously am not advocating anyone go out and run coax specifically to use MoCA, but it's great for existing construction that is pre-wired for coax to everyroom.

 

[SamirD]

The simplicity of Powerline removes running lines and cables throughout the house. The speed is more than enough. It you saw my setup you would think it was whole house Ethernet by looking at it.

Down in the basement there is no coaxial cable, only an old Cat5 phone jack. But my house doesn't have a home run for a network. Every room has a phone jack with Cat5 but no box in the house to connect it all.

Thank you for the additional details as it clears up a bunch of questions.

I agree that powerlines are very simple to get working. However, I recently worked with moca and found them to be just as simple to set up and 10x as fast, if not faster. Too bad you don't have a cable wire somewhere to bring the full speed wired connection closer.

Now that old cat5 phone jack is the key for you getting a wired connection downstairs without running wires. If every room in the house has a phone jack and they are connected together daisy-chain style, you have straight runs from one phone jack to another. This means you can terminate 2 ethernet jacks in each room, each jack going to another room. Then all you have to do is plug your upstairs connection to one of the jacks, and then connect various jacks to each other until you get signal down to the basement jack. You can even put switches and access points in the rooms if you wish to increase port count and wireless coverage.

And this should be fairly easy as most phone people don't terminate the other pairs (hopefully they left some wire coiled). You need to simply separate the wires from each other and any termination that has been done. Then re-punch down the two wires properly each to their own ethernet jack. Should cost a minimal amount and the time invested would be well worth it. In the end, you'll have 2 ethernet jacks in each old phone plate that go to another room.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I have a (late) friend, that was living in a multi-story house. We tried wifi at first, but the people on the first floor (modem was on second) had issues. So I bought a set of Powerline networking devices, fairly cheap (Not gigabit powerline). But they had interference, especially when someone was using the microwave oven (something that you see with 2.4Ghz wifi, but not so often with powerline). The wiring in that house was fairly poor, however, as I understand it. It had been upgraded/tweaked over the years, and had a mixture of electrical installations.

 

[JackMDS]

I have a (late) friend, that was living in a multi-story house. We tried wifi at first, but the people on the first floor (modem was on second) had issues. So I bought a set of Powerline networking devices, fairly cheap (Not gigabit powerline). But they had interference, especially when someone was using the microwave oven (something that you see with 2.4Ghz wifi, but not so often with powerline). The wiring in that house was fairly poor, however, as I understand it. It had been upgraded/tweaked over the years, and had a mixture of electrical installations.

That has nithing to do with WIFI, it means that the Power lines in te house (you thses wires thta goes in the walls to the outlet to offer 110 VAC) are "Bad" and "soil" the Ethernet over powerline signal.

 

[Hans Gruber]

Yeah, that's why I said I recommend MoCA "when possible", I obviously am not advocating anyone go out and run coax specifically to use MoCA, but it's great for existing construction that is pre-wired for coax to everyroom.

Do you have MoCA and if so. Can you confirm that speeds can go up to 1gbps

Thank you for the additional details as it clears up a bunch of questions.

I agree that powerlines are very simple to get working. However, I recently worked with moca and found them to be just as simple to set up and 10x as fast, if not faster. Too bad you don't have a cable wire somewhere to bring the full speed wired connection closer.

Now that old cat5 phone jack is the key for you getting a wired connection downstairs without running wires. If every room in the house has a phone jack and they are connected together daisy-chain style, you have straight runs from one phone jack to another. This means you can terminate 2 ethernet jacks in each room, each jack going to another room. Then all you have to do is plug your upstairs connection to one of the jacks, and then connect various jacks to each other until you get signal down to the basement jack. You can even put switches and access points in the rooms if you wish to increase port count and wireless coverage.

And this should be fairly easy as most phone people don't terminate the other pairs (hopefully they left some wire coiled). You need to simply separate the wires from each other and any termination that has been done. Then re-punch down the two wires properly each to their own ethernet jack. Should cost a minimal amount and the time invested would be well worth it. In the end, you'll have 2 ethernet jacks in each old phone plate that go to another room.

Years ago I did pull the phone wall plate and had someone look at it. It was Cat5 and I need to pull all the wires and thread them into a Ethernet adapter. I need a splicing kit. There are bundles of wire and it's a pretty long roll lead. Not short connections. Next to the router there is a phone jack. Every room has a phone jack including the laundry room which is my home base for gaming and using my main PC rig. I have monoprice wall plate pass through ethernet plate running from my laundry room to the garage.

I do think it's a worthwhile project to see if I can get a signal out of it.