Switch or not to switch at home

Steve_155

Commendable
Oct 19, 2016
3
0
1,510
My current setup is Xfinity modem (250 blast internet) as pass through and directly connected to an Orbi router, computer and Xbox. Before I got the Orbi my set up was from the modem to a Netgear GS105E switch and then direct to the Netgear AC1900 wifi router, computer and Xbox. My speedtests shot up 4x (200-290mbps on Ookla speedtest) on those directly connected but it can vary quite a bit on the laptops (20-80 mbps). Wondering if the switch would make it more efficient even if it meant lower direct connect speeds.
 
It should make no difference. Anything connected to the switch should be able to run at 1gbit. The switch in can run all 5 ports 1gbit up and 1gbit down all at the same time...10gbit total. It should never bottleneck your network.

So...something else is causing the slowness. It is highly likely you have a bad cable, I would suspect the one between the router and the switch since anything plugged into the switch is affected.

It would be nice if a cable just did not work at all when it is bad. What they many times do is work at 100mbps but not at 1gbit. They they will work on some devices and not others. All you can really do is try other cables. Any working cat5e cable should easily pass 1gbit of traffic.

 
The cable I had from the modem to the switch now is connecting the modem to the computer and went from around 60 to 290+. The xbox cable changed from the switch to direct to modem and went from around 50 to 200+. I believe it's a managed switch. Would that affect anything? Guess I'm just curious to the speed differences. Thank you
 
Even a managed switch can run all ports at maximum speed. They just do not put any feature in the device that can not be done by asic chips to avoid a general purpose cpu slowing things down.

Unless you set the ports to 100m it still has to be a cable issue. You could factory reset the switch since the default is to run like a unmanaged switch with all port set to auto.