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Wired ethernet very inconsistent

  • 04-12-2011 7:16pm
    #1
    Neil3030
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 17,154 ✭✭✭✭


    Living in student accommodation with 20 people in the building. There's wired internet in each room. There's also Wifi, but the signal isn't great where my room is located. Initially I thought the wired internet was pretty decent, but lately it's proven to be hugely inconsistent.

    I run the speedtest at speedtest.net and the performance fluctuates between a best case scenario: 24ms ping; 5mbps DL; 2mbps UL and a worst of 1000+ms ping; 0.05Mbps DL; 0.01 Mbps UL. Sorry, scratch that, sometimes it's so weak, the test can't even load.

    I was thinking this could be a bottleneck issue, but there are times when I'd imagine that the Internet is getting a fair bit of usage and the speed remains OK. Likewise, there are times when I'm fairly certain that I'm alone in the house and the speed is dire, though people could have left things downloading. Is there any way to test this?

    I was also thinking that I may just have a dodgey ethernet wall port or maybe even a dodgey cable. Again, is there any way I can test this?

    Any other suggestions? Interestingly, the WiFi's performance doesn't seem to correlate at all with the wired performance. Would I be right in expecting this not to be the case were both connections coming from the same source?


Comments

  • #2
    gerryk
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 1,726 ✭✭✭gerryk


    Unfortunately, it's difficult to test the physical characteristics of the cabling without expensive equipment. Have you tried pinging the local gateway at the same time as you are experiencing high latency out to the internet? This might indicate whether the issue is local, or external to the router.
    Your thought that wifi and cabled connection should show similar responses is possibly not completely accurate. One scenario that might be counter to this assumption is where all switch ports are used, and perhaps only one wifi connection is used. Depending on the switching rate of the hardware, and the data hitting the switch ports, it is possible that the cabled connections might experience congestion while the wireless might not.


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