Virgin Media Community

[Ripp]

Not sure what's going on here:

550Mbps on Desktop PC - Rock solid, always fast, on the other side of the house to the router, connected via a cheap CCA (Copper Coated Aluminum) Cat6 cable that is about 70m long. Nothing strange here. (I do have a roll of pure copper Cat6 to replace the CCA with at some point to possibly reduce latency a little more)

60-550Mbps on 2x mobile phones and 2x tablets - connected wirelessly (5Ghz), the varying speeds across the house are not always related to how far away from the router the devices are but I've read the Hub3 can have super inconsistent WiFi so I guess that's what's causing the variation. Sometimes you get 550Mbps right next to router and sometimes you get 50Mbps right next to the router.

This is where it gets weird though:

1Mbps - 10Mbps on a 6 year old laptop (2.4GHz) - same results whether wireless (right next to router) or wired (using Virgins supplied Cat6 cable (yellow and white, about 2m long, are these cables known to be rubbish?)

2Mbps - 380Mbps on a brand new 1 week old laptop - connected wirelessly (5GHz right next to router), results vary massively between tests, no variables, just back to back tests.

1Mbps - 6Mbps on the same brand new laptop - connected with the Virgin supplied 2m Cat6 cable, results vary massively between tests, no variables, just back to back tests.

So, the Desktop PC is performing fine and the mobile devices are performing erratically because of the Hub3's flakey WiFi but generally fine but both laptops have extremely variable speeds both wired and wireless, I can explain the wireless away because of the Hub3's flakey WiFi but I have no idea why the wired connections vary so much on BOTH laptops. This is a problem as the brand new laptop is my Wife's NHS work laptop which is currently expected to be used for regular video calls.

Virgin are most likely not at fault here as the desktop PC proves that we have a fast stable connection entering the house so it must be a laptop specific thing? I build my own gaming PC's so I have a natural hate for slow laptops which is why I don't have one so I may be missing some kind of common knowledge that laptop have slow inconsistent internet speed for some reason. Either way I need to get it sorted for the Wife's work purposes. So, any ideas?

[Adduxi · Accepted solution]

Can you test the laptop wired in Safe Mode with Networking ? 

[Ripp]

Good idea, yes I'll do that. 

[Ripp]

Only have the older laptop with me today. 

Desktop PC (Wired Connection) = 550Mbps (12ms ping)

Laptop Safe Mode + Network (Wired connection) = 360-380Mbps (70-120ms ping)

Laptop Safe Mode + Network (Wireless, next to the router) = 15-70Mbps (21ms ping)

Laptop Normal Boot (Wired connection) = 25Mbps (12-35ms ping)

Laptop Normal Boot (Wireless, next to router) = 18-23Mbps (52-80ms ping)

So clearly normal Windows boots are slowing things down a lot (I'll look into that a bit more) but even in safe mode the wireless connection is still very slow and the wired connection has very high ping?!

[tehwolf]

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@Ripp wrote:

Only have the older laptop with me today. 

Desktop PC (Wired Connection) = 550Mbps (12ms ping)

Laptop Safe Mode + Network (Wired connection) = 360-380Mbps (70-120ms ping)

Laptop Safe Mode + Network (Wireless, next to the router) = 15-70Mbps (21ms ping)

Laptop Normal Boot (Wired connection) = 25Mbps (12-35ms ping)

Laptop Normal Boot (Wireless, next to router) = 18-23Mbps (52-80ms ping)

So clearly normal Windows boots are slowing things down a lot (I'll look into that a bit more) but even in safe mode the wireless connection is still very slow and the wired connection has very high ping?!

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sounds like you're connecting to teh 2.4ghz network on the laptop, rather than the 5 - can you check? if so - that's in the realms of "normal" (15 a bit on the low side, but /shrug who knows what interference you have...)

As for the wired speeds - yeah agree they seem a bit on the low side, and the latency should be the same as the desktop... is it a native 1gb network port on the laptop? i.e. built into the device, not a USB network port or anything like that?

[Ripp]

You are right about the laptop not having 5Ghz WiFi so I'm not too concerned about the wireles performance at the minute as I'll be connecting a better wireless router to the Hub3 soon anyway. 

The network port is a native built in one yes so I'm not sure why the connection is a fair bit slower and has higher latency than the desktop PC.

[tehwolf · Accepted solution]

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@Ripp wrote:

You are right about the laptop not having 5Ghz WiFi so I'm not too concerned about the wireles performance at the minute as I'll be connecting a better wireless router to the Hub3 soon anyway. 

The network port is a native built in one yes so I'm not sure why the connection is a fair bit slower and has higher latency than the desktop PC.

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you could test if it's a limitation of the laptop by copying a large file off your desktop PC to the Laptop when they're both wired into the hub, what speeds do you get? 

[Ripp]

I'd like to get to the bottom of it because I was planning on using the laptop for testing different network cable configurations when I swap out the Cat6 cable around the house, I want some reliable tests so I can figure out the cabling that gives me the lowest latency.

[tehwolf · Accepted solution]

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@Ripp wrote:

I'd like to get to the bottom of it because I was planning on using the laptop for testing different network cable configurations when I swap out the Cat6 cable around the house, I want some reliable tests so I can figure out the cabling that gives me the lowest latency.

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aside from stating the obvious around buy cheap buy twice etc.. your latency is going to be minimal within your LAN regardless of what cables you use.. it should all be <1ms. CAT5e/CAT6/CAT7 etc.. it's throughput not latency that they effect, and CAT5e is certified for 1gbps throughput, so unless you have 10gbps ports it should be fine 😛