Question Do I need to upgrade my LAN card ?

[Lv 88 Mog]

Ok, so I live in Tokyo and I just upgraded my internet plan from a 1GB to 10Gb, but once connecting it by ethernet cable, I am seeing virtually no change in my speeds (Download is about 500mbps and upload is almost 800mbps). This is what I was getting with the 1GB plan. Is it possibly because my LAN card is not compatible with 10GB?

I bought my PC about 10 years ago - I've upgraded almost all of the internal components over the years except for the motherboard and some of the components attached to it like the LAN card and the wi-fi. And if this is likely the issue, then can I just swap out the LAN card for a 10GB one? By the way, I'm using the Dell XPS8500 stock motherboard and the LAN card that came installed with it.

I am connected via CAT6. Also, by the way, I am getting around 100mbps for both upload and download on my iPhone 16.

One more question, somewhat related. My new router that came with the 10GB plan has 4 SSIDs for wi-fi. My last one only had two - one for 5ghz and one for 2ghz. The new one doesn't seem to list any differences, it just has it listed as SSID1, SSID2, and so on. What is the purpose of 4 different SSIDs? Should I be spreading my devices across the 4? I am in a family of 6, with around 20 or so devices connecting by wi-fi (everyone's smart phones, ipads, game consoles, etc). Should I just evenly spread devices across the SSIDs or just put them on the 1st one?

Please forgive my ignorance. Any help greatly appreciated!!!

 

[Lutfij]

Yes, you will need to upgrade your NIC to something better though if you look at a card like this;
https://www.gigabyte.com/bd/Motherboard/VISION-10G-LAN-Card#kf
you're going to need a PCIe3.0 x4 slot on your motherboard which it doesn't have;
https://www.dell.com/community/en/c.../xps-8500-pcie-slots/647f2aa0f4ccf8a8def7a846

Just curious, what is the make and model of your router? if the router can't manage 10GB off the Ethernet, then there's no point in getting a 10G LAN card.

 

[Lv 88 Mog]

Ah, I see. So I guess I will need to upgrade my whole PC - I am planning to build a new PC sometime this year, so that is in the works.

The router is the one that my provider sent me with the 10GB plan, so it should definitely be capable of handling 10GB. Japanese people are tech savvy enough and all their customers would be complaining if they packaged an incompatible router with their 10GB plan.

Fortunately, I actually don't need 10GB at the moment, my provider had me upgrade when I upgraded to iPhone 16 and I actually get a discount by upgrading both my phone and internet together, so going from 1GB to 10GB is actually no additional cost. I'll take advantage of it when I build my new PC I guess!

Thanks so much for the response!!!

 

[bill001g]

If there is no difference in the cost between 1gbit and 10gbit then I guess there is no real downside.

Key here is the reason the ISP can do this is people don't really even need 1gbit. If everyone could actually use 10gbit their infrastructure would not actually support it. Its all marketing to make them more money.

100mbs in general would be good enough for most family use. The vast majority of application only use a fixed amount of bandwidth and having more does not make it run better or faster. For example netflix 4k uses about 30mbs. It will not use more even if you have it. Thing like web surfing use almost nothing and online games when you play them use maybe 1mbps.

The key exception is downloading large files. It does help for example when you download something like 100gbyte microsoft flight simulator. It all depends on how many times you do this in a month. In most cases you would have to do very large downloads on a daily basis to justify spending more on a fast internet.

Where I am going from 1gbit to 5gbit...I think that is the max rate now.... cost a extra $80/month. Hard to justify that extra cost to save a total of a couple minutes of download time over the month. This of course ignores that companies like steam/riot/etc have artificial limitation on their download speeds to prevent a single user with a large connection from using up all their bandwidth.

Just think about do you really need more bandwidth or is it the marketing guys just trying to get money out of your pocket.