[SOLVED] 900mbps glitches - 100mbps plays fine

[jsedit]

Hi all,

Looking for some guru knowledge. I've got a 1gbps FTTP connection. Which runs at the claimed speed. But I have an issue with editing TV footage remotely (I'm connecting to an edit suite 20 miles away via HP Remote Graphic Software).

If I cable directly into the Smart Hub 2 - when the connection speed across various test methods correlate that I'm getting around 800mbps - playback is glitchy.
If I go via a TP-link mains connection thing - which only gives me 100mbps - playback is stable.

It's not about speed, it's about the reliability of that speed. And I know I should just stick with the stable connection - as it's not like I need 800 for playback (I need 30) - but I'd rather like to know what the issue is.

I'm thinking

1. It's a 20 meter Cat 5 cable I'm running between the PC and the Hub - is this too long? Causing dropout?
2. Is the draw on the hub just too much? And it's throttling me to allow headroom for the rest of the items connected? (Incidentally, this still happens when I turn off wireless, and only have my PC connected.

I've jut ordered a new Archer AX10 hub, figuring it's something to do with the BT Hub being annoying. But since the TP-link 100mbps connection seems to have changed things, I'm wondering if it's the Hub - or just how it reacts to the bandwidth being asked of it.

Could anyone advise?

Thanks,
John

 

[bill001g]

Going to be hard to say. Sounds like you are either getting packet loss or latency spikes. Bandwidth measurement are less affected by that unless it is very large.

The length of the cable should not be a issue it can go 100meters at full gigbit speed. Most symptoms of bad cable are stuff like it refusing to connect at gigbit speeds. You should not use flat cable or or CCA cable but it appears your cable is ok since they generally have issues with speedtest.

Most routers have no issues passing 1 gbit of traffic wan/lan. Just to be sure reset the router to factory and only set the admin and wifi passwords. Some feature disable a cpu offload ability and the cpu can bottleneck your traffic. Since it happens on 2 different routers it is unlikely.

Not sure what to suggest. You could run ping tests to some ip like 8.8.8.8 and see if you get loss or spikes. It may not show if it is very random or is load related.

Depends on the application. If it runs TCP you should be able to see the actual latency and packet loss in the network tab of the resource monitor.

You could try wireshark and capture but it can get hard to use when you are capturing large amounts of data because you must build filters to only keep the headers. You can actually see the latency between every packet and any loss is very obvious. Again this only really works for TCP session and encryption of the data streams make it hard to tell sometime what is going on.

Strange 100m works. You could use the gigabit equipment but force your ethernet port to only run 100m just to see if there is any difference.

 

[jsedit]

Ah! I hadn’t thought of that. I’ll try capping it at 100 - if that works, then it’ll prove that it’s not the cable, and maybe it’s just scaring the router into throttling it.

If that does work - then I can just do this when remoting into work. And then switch back to 1gb when not.

 

[jsedit]

You could use the gigabit equipment but force your ethernet port to only run 100m just to see if there is any difference.

Well, just to close this off - that seems to have done the trick. I guess I could ask why - but I'm just happy that it works. Setting Speed and Duplex to 100mbps rather than 1gpbs has made the direct (rather than TP-link) connection work just fine.

I guess either 1) The hub panics with a 1gig connection, and starts to glitch - or it's to do with the Cisco AnyConnect VPN I have to go through - that IT doesn't like that amount of bandwidth.

Which I'm more inclined to think.

Thanks for the tip. If only there was an easy way to flick between the 100 and 1000 'profile' - rather than needing to go back into the Controller Properties / Configure / Advanced tab.

John,