Please help! Ethernet slower than WiFi

[DJ Corus]

I have been looking for an answer for this everywhere and from everyone I felt might know. I spent the majority of my 4 day Thanksgiving weekend setting up ethernet cables running to 3 rooms in my house. Just to give as much info as possible here is how I have it setup: in my closet I have my cable modem and my WiFi router (with 4 ethernet outputs). In the closet I have 3 female sockets going to the 3 different rooms I want hardlined. I made patch cords out of left over cable, tested those with a tester and they work 100%. I then tested the cables running thru the walls only to find my tester not picking up wire #4. I tested them connected to my router also but only to get approximately 80Mbps while my phone connect to the WiFi was able to get 114Mbps. That is a 25% decrease in speed! I double checked, maybe even triple checked that all wires were seated properly in the female socket. I feel like this decrease in speed is because of that wire #4 not being picked up. Is there something I could be missing causing that wire to no be connected? Please help! I appreciate any and all help! Thank you!

PS - This is happening with all 3 cables, not just one. I had feared that I had kinked and broke, a wire but i find it would be a slim chance that I broke the same wire in all 3 cables.

 

[Snipergod87]

What speed is your Ethernet NIC linking at 100Mbit? 10Mbit? (cant be 1Gbit as you don't have all 4 pairs working only 3)

 

[DJ Corus]

How can I find that out? I currently just have it plugged into my mobo port.

 

[Snipergod87]

Open the network and sharing center and click on something that should say Local Area Connection #. It will have a listing that says Speed: 1Gbps/100Mbps/10Mbps

 

[DJ Corus]

I don't seem to have anything like that to click. Here is a capture of my Network and Sharing Center screen: https://imgur.com/vxUPjkL

Update - According to my motherboard's specs, it's chip is 10/100/1000 Mbit

 

[Snipergod87]

Click on the "Ethernet" link where it says Connections: Ethernet.

 

[DJ Corus]

OMG, I'm sorry I must have totally overlooked that. It is 100 Mbps.

 

[Snipergod87]

Thats what I expected, just wanted to make sure, So your max you can hit is 100Mbps due to one of the cables in the wall being bad. 80Mbits from a 100Mbit link isn't unusual (I have encountered that some NIC's and routers need to use jumbo frames to hit higher rates on a 100Mbit link) and there is some overhead though it will still be faster than 114Mbps wifi due to WiFi being half duplex in nature.
If you got that 4th wire fixed you would be connecting to your router at 1000Mbps (assuming your router is gigabit which it should be)
Curious how are you testing your speed to your router?

OMG, I'm sorry I must have totally overlooked that. It is 100 Mbps.

That's fine when you get told to look for something specific I often find you overlook the other stuff

 

[DJ Corus]

The only way I was checking my speed was with the ookla speed test site on my PC and my 2 other cables with my PS4(I know it's not accurate). When I was just testing the cables themselves I was using a standard network cable tester. I had to use patch cables from the tester into the female ends of my ran cable. And I assume you know what I mean, but just in case, it sends a small electrical signal thru each wire lighting up an LED at each end of the tester. That's where I noticed, what the tester said, was wire #4 not lighting up. Hope that makes sense.

 

[Snipergod87]

I thought it would be Speedtest.net
Personally I would probably use the wired connection and see if I could fix the 4th wire to get a link that is 10x faster, 80Mbits on a 100Mbit link is somewhat common, and if you are gaming Wired will be much better than WiFi even is the Wifi is a little faster.
Even if you could get Ethernet to run at full 100Mbit speeds you will still be slower than WiFi as long as you have good signal

 

[DJ Corus]

Alright, thank you for taking the time to try to help me out. Maybe I will have to take a chunk of my left over cable and try different things to see if I can get it wired properly. And I guess if worse comes to worst, might have to run new cables thru the walls if something got damaged. Again, thanks for everything!

 

[DJ Corus]

So after our back and forth yesterday, I went into my router settings. I used it's built in setup wizard, just to see if that will detect the ethernet cable being used compared to all WiFi as I used to have it setup. I thought it seemed to work. I check what my NIC was linking at and it said 1Gbps. I was ecstatic! But then today I checked it again, only to find it went back down to 100 Mbps. Does that fluctuate with other people's use of the bandwidth?

 

[Snipergod87]

No it wouldn't. The only reason why it would drop the link speed is there is some issues with the cabling.