Question Setting up a TP-LINK TL-SL2218 smart switch in conjunction with a Ubee EVW32C modem ?

[vrozman]

Hello! We are an apartment building with a cable broadband ISP that provided us with the Ubee modem, model EVW32C-0N-010. In order to divide traffic between apartments, we purchased a TP-LINK smart switch, model TP-SL2218, which has 16 100 Mbps ports and 2 1000 Mbps ports. The switch is connected to the modem via a 1000 Mbps port. We have LAN cables plugged in for 6 apartments via 100 Mbps ports. All ports have Speed and Duplex set to Auto and Flow Control to Disable. If I measure the connection speed via the LAN cable using the speedtest.net page on my iMac computer (27-inch, mid 2010), I have a download of only 8 Mbps and an upload of 69 Mbps. But if I plug the LAN cable from my iMac directly into the modem, I get a download of 490 Mbps and an upload of 112 Mbps. I wonder why the download speed via the switch decreases so much and I am asking for advice on how to increase it. Is it possible that the reason for the lower dowload is an IP conflict between some of the routers in the apartments connected to the switch?

It is also interesting that if I connect to my iMac with a LAN cable via the AirPort Extreme 802.11n (4th Generation) router, directly to the modem, the download is 94 Mbps and the upload is 71 Mbps. If, however, with such a configuration I connect to the Internet via the AirPort Extreme WiFi network on my MacBook Pro computer (13-inch, 2017), I get a download of 127 Mbps and an upload of 67 Mbps. So, how is it possible that WiFi speed is faster than via cable, because usually WiFi speed is a bit slower than cable?

 

[bill001g]

Your second problem is likely due to a defective cable or maybe the port on the router or computer is set to 100mbps.
94mbps is a very common number to see when the port is running at 100mbps because of the overhead in the protocols.

Not sure about your first issue. It could be as you say conflict between devices. Unplug everything else from the switch and see if it gets better.

It is a very poor design to use a switch like you are doing. It is a cheap way to provide internet but you are now putting all your tenants traffic on the same network. They can intentionally or unintentionally impact other machines similar to what you suspect your problem is now. Something like a virus can move between apartments. The largest risk to you though is if one of your tenants does something illegal the police will come and blame you since you pay the bill. In many cases the ISP will just block your account. You will have no way to tell who is doing it.

 

[vrozman]

Your second problem is likely due to a defective cable or maybe the port on the router or computer is set to 100mbps.
94mbps is a very common number to see when the port is running at 100mbps because of the overhead in the protocols.

Not sure about your first issue. It could be as you say conflict between devices. Unplug everything else from the switch and see if it gets better.

It is a very poor design to use a switch like you are doing. It is a cheap way to provide internet but you are now putting all your tenants traffic on the same network. They can intentionally or unintentionally impact other machines similar to what you suspect your problem is now. Something like a virus can move between apartments. The largest risk to you though is if one of your tenants does something illegal the police will come and blame you since you pay the bill. In many cases the ISP will just block your account. You will have no way to tell who is doing it.

A week ago we started to experience internet issues. After the internet was down completely for 3 days, and modem reset and ISP synchronization did not help, the ISP came and replaced the modem with the sam model. So the internet on the modem is now high enough again however I am not able to figure out how to get sufficient speed out of the switch. Now I reverted to default factory settings which is all ports have Speed and Duplex set to Auto and Flow Control to Disable. I am one of the tenants and I trying to fix this issue since the landlord is not very responsive.

 

[bill001g]

Bad cable are extremely common so that is likely the cause of the 94mbps test. Bad cables work on some machine and not others. There are massive amounts of fake cable on market, mostly this flat cables, that make this issue even worse.

Not sure about it only running at 8mbps issue. It is not likely the switch so that leaves other users.. The switch is fairly fancy compared to simpler unmanaged switches. It still is very unlikely it is some configuration option but if you can factory reset the switch that would clear that issue. But you best first test is to unplug all but one cable going to the switch and see if it still has issues. If not add back cable one at a time.

 

[vrozman]

Cables are verified and ok. I am just not sure how to configure the switch so that 6 clients/computers that are connected to 100Mbps ports on the switch will have qually distributed as fastest internet speed possible while the the ISP server router with 600Mbps upload and 100Mbps upload speed is connected to the switch on 1000Mbps port.

 

[bill001g]

Running the ports at 100mbps on the switch will more or less divide the bandwidth. It is a kinda brute force way to accomplish it but it does work. The risk is more that the machine all share the same network.

You REALLY want the cable to be the problem. When you connect directly to the modem/router you should get 1000mbps. When it shows 100mbps this means there is some kind of physical problem. If it is not the cable then it is a bad port and you can not really fix a bad port in a machine.

Now of course if you connect it to a 100mbps port then 100mbps connection is what is expected.

 

[Ralston18]

Are the 6 apartments involved the only apartments in the building?

Could be that someone else in another apartment or maybe even one of "your 6" is trying to do much the same thing.

Someone with additional routers/switches etc. that no one else knows about.

Maybe there is a network loop (loopback) being created somewhere.

If you do not have immediate visibility into every cable, connection, and device in the building then there may be little that you can do.

You also (as mentioned above) run the risk of being held responsible if someone is indeed doing something illegal on the network.

Good chance that the ISP and/or landlord may find something that will not end well for one or more of the tenants involved.

Just thinking out loud.....

 

[vrozman]

We are now in communication with the landlord to replace the current switch with the TP-LINK TL-SG1016D 16-port gigabit rack unmanaged switch that should work plug-and play without the need of the configuration by specialised technician.

 

[bill001g]

We are now in communication with the landlord to replace the current switch with the TP-LINK TL-SG1016D 16-port gigabit rack unmanaged switch that should work plug-and play without the need of the configuration by specialised technician.

May actually make your problems worse. Now a single person can hog all your bandwidth from the ISP because they are now connected to a 1gbit port rather than 100mbps.

 

[BFG-9000]

Well it would be a simple matter to wire up some 10/100-only patch cords to limit speeds to 100mbit for the other 5 tenants if desired

Maybe there is a network loop (loopback) being created somewhere.

The TL-SL2218 may not be fully managed but it is a "Smart" switch with loopback detection. Its replacement TL-SG1016D isn't, so any tenant improperly plugging a cable somewhere to create a loop will immediately crash the entire network, plus the unmanaged switch won't be able to tell you which port it is (with only 6 ports in use though you could simply unplug one cable at a time to isolate the problem).

 

[vrozman]

I unplugged all the cables and tried to connect to the switch with just one cable and the speed was still slow, so there seems to be no loopback. And since none of us tenants is a heavy internet user I also do not expect the bandwidth problems with the new switch.

 

[bill001g]

It would be extremely rare to have a defective switch but I guess it is possible.

What do you mean you do not have a heavy internet users. Do any use steam or epic or any other game site. I am sure everyone uses windows update. By default any form of download will attempt to use 100% of the bandwidth unless you have it set to use less or somehow restrict it. Some user installing some new game can make the connection slow for everyone else for say 20 minutes or even more on some of those games that are over 100gbytes. Even a windows update will cause a couple minutes of 100% usage once for every machine that takes a update.

 

[vrozman]

It would be extremely rare to have a defective switch but I guess it is possible.

What do you mean you do not have a heavy internet users. Do any use steam or epic or any other game site. I am sure everyone uses windows update. By default any form of download will attempt to use 100% of the bandwidth unless you have it set to use less or somehow restrict it. Some user installing some new game can make the connection slow for everyone else for say 20 minutes or even more on some of those games that are over 100gbytes. Even a windows update will cause a couple minutes of 100% usage once for every machine that takes a update.

I am Apple user, one tenant has Unix computer, one has Windows, and the rest just use WiFi to connect to internet via Android devices. So even if Windows update act as described, that should not be a big concer.