Cyberpower 1500va ups causing slow internet

sinister8102

Distinguished
Apr 9, 2012
67
0
18,630
I just purchased a Cyberpower 1500va ups and when I plug my Ethernet into it for surge protection it significantly slows my internet speeds. From the wall I get ~30mb/s up/down. Once i plug in though the ups is is around 0.6mb/s up/down. I have tried different cables but nothing. Any help?
 
You might want to have a look over there:
http://www.tomshardware.com/picturestory/700-cyberpower-lx1500gu-fc-ups-tear-down.html

Check your link speed in the network control panel and install your LAN adapter's diagnostic utilities. If you are a little lucky, there may be a tool in there to look at block error count.

If all Cyberpower units have similar network surge suppression, it may not take much ambient noise to cause transmission errors.
 
Solution


Do you think it just defective or is it that just a bad UPS?
 
It could be the ports in the cyberpower are defective.

It is mostly a marketing thing. All they are trying to do is protect from some form of power surge. Ethernet is extremely low voltage and the wire are so thin that they would likely melt before any signification power surge could get though them.

Still it is almost impossible anyway. All ethernet cables are magnetically isolated from the equipment the are connected to. This means every port on every device is acting as a surge protector because there is no direct connectivity between the port and the actual power.

Not sure where any surge would come from the UPS could even think to protect from. Maybe a lighting strike but since ethernet cable generally are far inside the house I would be more worried about the lighting burning the house down well before it messed up a ethernet cable.
 

#24 might sound thin but where microsecond scale surges are concerned, it is enough to pass hundreds of amps without warming up much, the same way house wiring can pass transients in the thousands of amps. If you look at PCBs for high pulse current with low duty cycle, the traces can be surprisingly thin when losses and efficiency are non-issues. It is all thanks to copper's high specific heat.

Not all Ethernet equipment is magnetically coupled. Some cheap NICs and routers use capacitive coupling instead and the capacitors they use are often only rated for 2-3kV instead of the 5-6kV from typical Ethernet transformers. Magnetically induced surges can go much higher than that, which is why you see some motherboards tooting 10-12kV of isolation on their Ethernet ports, the main goal of higher isolation rating being to let the induced voltage find somewhere else to jump to ground.
 


Yes sound all good in theory but it never happens this is the same straw man argument that the people making these devices make. Look at commercial data centers nobody uses any kind of surge protectors. There are many thousands of connection with huge amounts more power and massive air conditioning motors and everything works perfectly fine without some silly surge protectors.
 

In a datacenter, everything is grounded through structural steel, cable runs are usually in aluminum or steel raceways which are also grounded, so there isn't much of an open loop area between conductors and ground for common mode voltages to get induced into that doesn't get shunted to ground by nearby metal. Residential buildings are typically mostly wood.
 

Again you can nit pick all the technical details you want the risk is about as likely as you getting hit by lighting while you sleep in your bed. You can not look for some extremely abnormal failure in some device and then think everyone should buy a solution. Gee build a copper shield around your bed to avoid lightning. I could just as easily say the UPS itself could get a strange failure and introduce a surge into the cable.

Its been a very long time since I had access to the IEEE documents for the 802.3 ethernet standard but they clearly required magnetic isolation when I was working with them. It does not guarantee that some strange manufacturing defect does not happen but the intent was to provide isolation.