New house, wired cat6, new issues.

Hey guys, I'm somewhat stuck, and looking for a second opinion.

I just took possession of my new house last Friday. When I called to move my internet (or cancel it and go with the local competitor), Bell offered to bump my speed from 50 / 5 mbps to 100 / 15, for the same price, with 50% off for the first 6 months. So, I went with it.

My new house is completely wired with cat6 (as of this weekend), into a patch panel in the basement that connects to a switch -> TP-Link Archer C7 V2 (Canadian version, most up-to-date firmware) -> Bell's 'Home Hub 3000' Gateway device, which I have in bridge mode currently. Here's where the problem comes in...

Connected in this fashion, any speed test I run to any ethernet-wired system tops out at 60mbps down, but gives the full 15mbps up. If I take the TP-link out of the equation, and use the Home Hub directly, I get the full 100 down (actually, 108mbps or so), with the same 15 up. Obviously, something is up with the router, but I cannot figure out what for the life of me. No QoS or bandwidth control is enabled. I did toggle it on briefly with 'limits' at the top end of my connection (per random internet searches), to no avail.

Anyone else have any problems with this router running inexplicably slow over a wired connection?

I have the HomeHub 3000 myself, but in my case I plug in the cable from my pfSense VM's WAN NIC directly into it.

My HomeHub 3000 doesn't actually have bridge mode, to make it act as a pure modem you have to program the MAC address of your router's WAN connection into the DMZ.

With my setup I'm getting 500mbps up/down.

My pfSense VM is actually about 20% faster than the HomeHub 3000's built-in router at these speeds - the Bell tech was stunned when I showed him the results. The tech didn't know how to put the HomeHub 3000 into bridge mode, had to look it up and do it myself. He insisted there is no such thing as double-NAT'ing, had to prove to him what happens when you do it.

What IP is the Archer getting on the WAN port? The DMZ gives whatever is on it an external IP, not an internal one. If you are getting an internal one the HomeHub 3000 isn't set up right.

rtangwai said:

I have the HomeHub 3000 myself, but in my case I plug in the cable from my pfSense VM's WAN NIC directly into it.

My HomeHub 3000 doesn't actually have bridge mode, to make it act as a pure modem you have to program the MAC address of your router's WAN connection into the DMZ.

With my setup I'm getting 500mbps up/down.

My pfSense VM is actually about 20% faster than the HomeHub 3000's built-in router at these speeds - the Bell tech was stunned when I showed him the results. The tech didn't know how to put the HomeHub 3000 into bridge mode, had to look it up and do it myself. He insisted there is no such thing as double-NAT'ing, had to prove to him what happens when you do it.

What IP is the Archer getting on the WAN port? The DMZ gives whatever is on it an external IP, not an internal one. If you are getting an internal one the HomeHub 3000 isn't set up right.

Click to expand...

The Archer gets the external IP via the WAN port. I suppose I could just spin up another VM on my NAS box to act as my 'router', but then there's wireless (plus, delving into setting up a router-like distro from scratch wasn't high on my priority list, since the Archer worked just fine with the slower connection).

If nothing else setting up a VM would help eliminate who is at fault, the Archer or the HomeHub 3000.

Having said that, your testing tells me that in all likelihood it's the Archer as you can't reproduce the issue when you take the Archer out of the network.

Did you by any chance do a factory reset of the Archer? I wonder if there is some leftover setting that isn't obvious (because it is buried in 5 layers of menus) that is slowing things down eg. forced half-duplex of the WAN or LAN ports.

Sure did, it was one of the last things I tried.

I had nothing else really going on this coming weekend anyway, doing the router could be fun.

You can conduct many experiments. First, LAN-to-LAN speeds between two LAN-connected machines.
Then you can test to connect one local machine to WAN, another to LAN to simulate LAN-WAN throughput. You can see if the default MTU is alright. Check also the CPU load on the Archer while transferring data, there has to be a CPU meter in the dashboard.
Then sometimes the power supply of the (a) router can be faulty and cause the router to fail when under heavy load.