My Wi‑Fi was somehow faster than my wired connection, which set off alarm bells. After testing around the house, I traced the slowdown to a crusty Cat5 patch lead lurking in a messy patch panel that forced a 100 Mbps link. Swapped in new Cat6 cables, tidied everything up, and boom—proper gigabit speeds everywhere and a much faster internet. Moral: Ethernet is only as good as its weakest link.
Something is wrong with the world. My
internet connection is faster over Wi-Fi
than it is over my wired ethernet
connection. This really should not be
happening. What’s going on? So, we
recently replaced our broadband
connection and router, and the first
results looked great. Here’s a speed
test over the new Wi-Fi access point.
Not bad at all. But then, I tried the
same thing using the wired ethernet
connection directly to the router. And
this is not what I expected. These
numbers are suspiciously close to 100
megabits per second, which usually means
something in the network has negotiated
a slow 100 megabits per second link
instead of a gigabit per second link.
Question is, where? And I suspect this
might be part of the problem. This is
the patch panel for the house network,
and it’s clearly evolved over quite a
few years. Some of the patch leads are
ancient, and it’s not exactly what you’d
call tidy. Now, ethernet is only as good
as the weakest bit in the chain, and
there are quite a few bits in the chain.
And I’m wondering, is my house actually
even capable of gigabit ethernet? So, I
ran some tests between a couple of
laptops on my desk via the wall sockets,
through the patch panel, and through the
switch. And that looked good, around
gigabit speeds. So, the cabling between
these two points is definitely capable.
But then, I moved the second laptop over
to the router end, and the speed dropped
back to 100 megabits per second. So, I
bought some new Cat 6 patch cables and
tidied things up and rewired all the
bits. And it’s a much neater setup. And
even better, we now get this.
With the new cables in place, we’re
getting proper gigabit speeds all the
way back to the router.
And even better, the internet speed test
is now properly fast, too. So, not bad
for a half hour’s work and a few new
cables and a bit of tidying up. And
looking at the cables I pulled from both
the patch panel and the wall sockets,
here’s the problem, I think. We have a
Cat 5 cable that sneaked in amongst all
the Cat 5e cables. So, that’s probably
it. That was the one that was actually
connecting the router to the wall. So,
it’s all neat and tidy now, and it’s
much faster. So, job’s a good’un.