Why Does My Network Switch Keep Dropping Gigabit Speed?
While I feel like I‘m dancing with myself , this week’s Tech 911 column – you ask technical questions, we give technical answers – is going to be a little flipped. Rather than answering a question that you emailed me, left in the comments, or tweeted me (via GIF), I’m going to ask you to help me with a little problem I ran into. Trust me, it’s fun.
Do you have technical issues that are keeping you awake at night? Tired of searching and troubleshooting Windows or Mac issues? Looking for advice on applications, browser extensions, or utilities that you can use to accomplish a specific task? Let us know! Let us know in the comments below, or better yet, write to david.murphy@lifehacker.com .
Pledge
I rent a room in a house-ah, Bay Area life nd one of my overlords is a former network engineer for one of these companies here in the area. In other words, he knows his stuff. But I ran into a puzzling network setup issue in my room that we haven’t figured out yet. And we’d rather find a simple solution before we have to run a new Ethernet cable through the wall or anything like that.
The basics are this: Comcast’s ( aka Comcastic! ) Business-class home internet service runs through its server, which handles all of the routing. A multiport Gigabit switch is connected to it, and all home Gigabit Ethernet connections go through the switch. Light.
We recently upgraded our Comcast service from 50 Mbps to 150 Mbps. This is an important detail because when I tested the service on my Ethernet-connected desktop computer, I noticed that I was only getting 80-90 Mbps and not the 150-160 Mbps that the landlord said I found in your tests. We repeated these tests over several days and times to make sure that there weren’t any strange network congestion issues affecting the speed results, and I constantly found that I could never go over 100 Mbps, whereas he could in almost all tests. he ran.
HM.
A little about my room design: I have two Ethernet connectors in the wall, both of which are connected to the master switch at home with separate Cat 5e or Cat 6 Ethernet cables (I believe two Cat 6 cables, but I’m not sure, and my neighbors the Westworld season finale is being watched around the room , so I’m not going to run out and ask right now.) I plug a 16-port gigabit switch into one wall outlet, and all the devices in my room are plugged into the switch – all with Category 5e cables, each length does not exceed ten feet.
Turn
This is where it gets even weirder. Every other gigabit device I plug into the switch maintains its gigabit connection seamlessly – the LEDs on the front of the switch clearly show this. And no matter which port I use on the switch, when I plug it into an Ethernet jack on the wall, I get Gigabit Ethernet … first. And I can verify this by running a quick test on fast.com on my desktop PC: typically 150-160 Mbps.
After a maximum of a few hours or a day, the connection will drop to Fast Ethernet speed – maximum 100 Mbps. The “You gigabit’in” indicator on the front of the switch goes off, my fast.com tests slow down to around 80Mbps, and I sigh.
It gets even weirder. When I plug the hotspot directly into the same outlet – a Google Wifi device running in bridge mode – the gigabit connection never drops. If I disconnect the Ethernet cable from the switch and reconnect it to that port, or any port on the switch, I get the gigabit connection back up immediately (until it goes down, but after many hours). If I restart the switch, the deal is the same. If I use another brand new gigabit switch from a completely different manufacturer, I still lose my precious 1000Mbps connection. If I use a different outlet in any of the circumstances I mentioned, the deal is the same.
Prestige?
I still have some troubleshooting to do – maybe try a different port on the main switch at home that has two Ethernet ports in my room connected. In the worst case, it is possible that something went wrong with the Ethernet cables running through the house. It is strange though that any problem can affect two ports (or two cables) when any other wired connection in the house seems normal.
I suppose I could try plugging my access point to the wall and connecting the switch to that, but now we’re just getting stupid. I could also just use a timer to reset my switch every day at 3am or something, but that is also a bit annoying – and still no guarantee that I will have gigabit Ethernet when I wake up. I could replace the sockets themselves as well, but again, it seems odd that two can cause the same problem.
What do you think? Am I missing anything obvious? Help the doctor out.