Router is slowing my connection speed, Advice?

T

The-Tmann

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I have cable broadband

If I hook my cat5 from the cable modem direct to my PC I get about 15 mb / sec. speeds
If I hook the modem up to my router, and then router to my PC I get about 10 mb / sec. speeds

I tested these speeds on speedtest.net

Yes, I updated the router to the latest firmware, it's a Netgear from 2005
The last, latest firmware is only dated 2006, and it made no improvement

Do I need a newer, "fresher" router, or WTH?

Thanks in advance
 
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that netgear is a 10/100 router.. there may be other ones out there, but that one shouldnt be limiting your download speed. i would suspect noise on the cat5 line myself.. (or maybe bad contacts on the router)

are the lights on your router port amber or green?

go into the router and make sure its lines (wan and lan) are set to auto or 100/full (or 100/full duplex, depending on wording... this might take some digging in the router interface to find)
 
the speed of the LAN switch and the speed of the LAN to WAN router are different. just because you have a 100 megabit link to the router from your PC, doesnt mean it can handle 100mbits of traffic to the outside. cheap routers often dont have the cpu power to keep up with high throughputs between inter-network traffic. however most routers can handle 10-20mbit no problem.

online/web based network speed tests are to be taken with a grain of salt. there is way too many outside variables to say that you are definately loosing 1/3rd of your speed when going thru the router. if you want to test actual speeds, you need two computers. transfer a test file from PC1 to PC2 when both are connected to LAN ports on the router, then run the same test when PC1 is on the WAN port and PC2 is on LAN. the difference will tell you how much your router is the bottleneck.
 
ghost6303 said:
the speed of the LAN switch and the speed of the LAN to WAN router are different. just because you have a 100 megabit link to the router from your PC, doesnt mean it can handle 100mbits of traffic to the outside. cheap routers often dont have the cpu power to keep up with high throughputs between inter-network traffic. however most routers can handle 10-20mbit no problem.

online/web based network speed tests are to be taken with a grain of salt. there is way too many outside variables to say that you are definately loosing 1/3rd of your speed when going thru the router. if you want to test actual speeds, you need two computers. transfer a test file from PC1 to PC2 when both are connected to LAN ports on the router, then run the same test when PC1 is on the WAN port and PC2 is on LAN. the difference will tell you how much your router is the bottleneck.
Click to expand...

I agree with 100% of all this quote :)

Spending the money, and buying a good / decent / affordable router is key, buying a cheap one will leave you angry and perhaps in the mood to smash the new one.
 
Netgear has greatly improved the performance of their current generation of routers, the wndr3700 being a potent router. But I've experienced, and seen, many many many of their older routers just be...slow. That's an old model, I don't see it reviewed at smallnetbuilders router performance charts, but a quick Google of it shows other people complaining of slowness. I've personally seen many of their older models only muster about 3-5 megs of bidirectional throughput.

The 100 meg switch ports aren't your bottleneck, but the humble outdated processor in it just can't muster the throughput.

I'd get a current generation router.
 
FWIW, I've seen different results, in the same location, from two routers that are the same exact model and firmware revision.

when I worked as a DSL field tech, there could be as much as a 4Mbit variance between 2 routers of the same exact model and firmware. And this was testing done within the ISP network, not even talking about using speedtest.net or the like.
 
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