I have FiOS in my vacation house. This morning was the first time that I’ve been here in a bit so I figured I’d fire off a quick speedtest just to make sure that everything was working properly. Imagine my surprise to find speeds of 200 / 300 on my 1Gb symmetric connection. The important message here is don’t panic. after investigation, I found that the issue was my ethernet adapter. With that less learned I’m amending my rules for testing internet speed:
- Always expect the highest speed to come from wired ethernet.
- Do check speeds on WiFi if you don’t get what expect on ethernet.
- If possible, use multiple ethernet adapters when you don’t get what you expect.
- Eliminate your network as a problem source by testing with ethernet directly at the internet’s source. Again, the multiple adapters rule applies here.
- Know what’s reasonable for your system.
My point here is that I was in a bit of tizzy after the initial result speedtesting this morning. My thoughts went to: “does Verizon throttle your connection if you overuse your bandwidth…”. And, I rebooted my router before I either checked WiFi or checked with a different adapter. I was quite close to engaging the Verizon tech support people on chat and that would have been a mistake.
Under “Know what’s reasonable…” I find the following:
- 100Mbit/s ethernet maxes out at 90/90 Mbit/s. If a speedtest says 90/90 and it should be higher, the first place I look is the ethernet adapter and the cable. A bad cable shows up as 100Mbit/s speed it negotiated.
- 1Gbit ethernet maxes out around 940/940Mbit/s.
- WiFi 5 can hit around 500/500 Mbit/s in my experience. That’s a negotiated rate of 867Mbit/s so there’s a lot of throughput lost to the media on WiFi.
- WiFi 6E can get above 800/800 Mbit in my house in real world use, e.g. farther than 6ft from the access point.
Normally, I would not mention testing with WiFi. I have WiFi 6E up here. I’m pretty certain that testing with WiFi would have narrowed the problem to the ethernet adapter that I was using.
– Chris