Router cutting WIRED speeds in half

ccollins76

Prominent
Sep 3, 2017
3
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510
Linksys e2500, wired download speeds tested several times go from 100Mbps (on modem alone), to about 50Mbps (with router).

Have already tried:
Different ethernet cables, different speed tests, factory resetting router, firmware updating router, disablling QoS on router, and different MTU sizes, ports are showing as 10/100 as well.

Anyone have any other ideas?
 
Solution
They can but its not likely. If you go to testing sites like smallnetbuilder you see just about every modern router can pass 900+mbps one wired connections. When they used to have data for the older devices almost all routers could run near the port speed. All these tables are now gone but they still have their review.
https://www.smallnetbuilder.com/wireless/wireless-reviews/31578-cisco-linksys-e2500-advanced-dual-band-n-router-reviewed?start=1

It says 91m up and 91 down.

Normally you can blame firmware but if you have tried a number of firmware versions I don't know. You could try dd-wrt or tomato I suppose. Be aware there are mulitple hardware version levels of that device.

Normally I do not recommend dd-wrt when you need...
It will to some extent be limited by the 100m ports but you should still get 90mbit or so. You could try testing the way the testing sites do. Put a PC on the wan side and manually configure ip addresses. You should be able to test file transfers from the wan pc to your lan pc. You can also load a old tool called iperf on both machines that will test network throughput.

If you had a gigabit internet and gigabit ports on the router then you can get into issue of not having enough cpu power on the router. Even older routers like you have should be able to run close to 100m. Not sure if that router has a display that shows you cpu usage.

The most common cause of this is a poor ethernet cable that is getting errors but you have replaced the cables so that rules that out.
 
I don't have access to a second PC at this time, but if I did, what am I looking for with the WAN/LAN test? Is it possible for an older router to simply degrade in performance? I thought they sort of either worked, or didn't.

And, yeah an ancient ethernet, or brand new CAT 6 cable performed the same, plus the amount of speed lost is very consistent.

 
They can but its not likely. If you go to testing sites like smallnetbuilder you see just about every modern router can pass 900+mbps one wired connections. When they used to have data for the older devices almost all routers could run near the port speed. All these tables are now gone but they still have their review.
https://www.smallnetbuilder.com/wireless/wireless-reviews/31578-cisco-linksys-e2500-advanced-dual-band-n-router-reviewed?start=1

It says 91m up and 91 down.

Normally you can blame firmware but if you have tried a number of firmware versions I don't know. You could try dd-wrt or tomato I suppose. Be aware there are mulitple hardware version levels of that device.

Normally I do not recommend dd-wrt when you need very high speed anymore. They can not use the hardware nat acceleration that many modern routers have so you get capped at 250mbps by the cpu even in fairly powerful routers. In your router I do not know if it even has the hardware nat acceleration feature in the first place.

 
Solution
Just following along here.....

Did you try reinstalling/updating the wired adapter's drivers?

You stated that you do not have access to a second PC so that implies, to me at least, that your computer is the only network device present.

Is that correct?

Or are there any wireless devices?

 


Yah, drivers have been updated, several wireless devices in the house, tested speeds with and without them involved (they obviously impacted the speed ratings a bit when on network).

Only new lead I have is this model of router leading someone to needing their ISP to "reprovision" their modem to get full speeds, but IDK what that means, and why it would only happen if the router was involved (though the modem is new, it activated out of the box with no probs, but I'm an amateur at all this so who knows).