Speed drops behind Router

You know, you guys that visit the computer help section are better than folks on actual tech support forums. I hope to be able to help out in the future as apposed to just asking for it.

Anyway. Just got hooked up to a fiber optic internet service, which is amazing. Hooking up directly to a computer via ethernet with their modem gives me the exact speeds I'm paying for. 50 down 20 up. When I connect their modem to my router, I get 35 down and 20 up. Any idea what could be going on here?

I'm using a wrt54g linksys router, which I know is old, but as far as I can tell it should be able to handle that speed.

Thanks in advance.

reply to post by Morgenstern89


Are you running the router with its native OS? There are actually better homebrew OS's for those. Things you might want to check are duplex settings and access lists. Make sure it's not ramped down for some reason. You can do a factory reset on your router and try that out. Firmware upgrade. Personally, I'd pop for a new router if you can at all afford it.

Hope that helps.

/TOA

Want to go overkill OP?

Make sure cat6e is running out from the modem into the router, and out from the router into the computer(s).

You will notice a bandwith drop over wireless, regardless.

Upgrade your router to a 100/1000 D-Link router, your speed will be awesome. Then throw DD-WRT on the router.

Otherwise, try seeing if DD-WRT or OpenWRT is available on your current router. Plenty of tutorials on how to flash it.

reply to post by The Old American

Yep, I would agree with you. They should get a 1000baseT Netgear or Giga or another Linksys but something that will run native at 1gbits. The WRT54G is only good to 100BaseT (100mbits) on the RJ-45 side and only 54mbps on the Wifi. I have two of them plus a Netgear. All three routers are upgraded to dd-wrt or Tomato firmware and they work like a charm, but not for fiber. You bottleneck in the router because the processor just isn't fast enough. Could try turning off the NAT and running as a repeater bridge, might get the speeds up that way, but I think there will be problems. I ran a bunch of them MLPPP to get 98mbits but it was distributed amongst 18 routers and 18 DSL hard lines.

Best bet, get a proper router for the job... 1000baseT on front end.

Cheers - Dave

That is standard for your router. This is a wireless G router which is capable of 54mbps in either direction. You'll never see those speeds in real life.

I would advise upgrading to a wireless N router if you require wireless, this will require a compatible card. With a single frequency card you will get 150mbps - with a dual frequency router and NIC you'll get around 300mbps. These cards can have issues using adjacent frequencies in congested areas, so if you have a lot of people nearby using wireless duel frequency might not be an option for you.

Or, as others stated, you can get 100mbps with ethernet from the router you already have.

ETA: A firmware upgrade will help you squeeze a little more juice out of this thing, but you can get a good wireless N router for about $30 on amazon.com. (or less, or more)

Thanks folks. Just to clarify, the speed drop isn't just with the wireless, it drops even when connected directly. I can connect the modem directly to my computer and go to speedtest.net and get the advertised speeds. But as soon as I put a router between the modem and the PC it drops. Is that what you guys are talking about? Or are you only referring to wireless? I totally expected a drop in speed with wireless because it's G, but I didn't expect my wired connections to drop as well.

Problem may be in QoS (Quality of Service) settings. Check if your router firmware is capable of QoS and if it is switched on. If so, switch it off.
As mentioned earlier maybe routers CPU is not capable to handle all that data. Try NAT/bridge experiment - it will be good indicator of such situation. Installing DD/Open-WRT may help a bit, for me it is first thing I do with new routers .

As I see wrt54g uses Broadcom CPUs from 125MHz to 240MHz. I had similar problem with 200MHz Broadcom CPU on Asus router. I was forced to change it for 800MHz Geode router. For me Geode have advantage of x86 architecture as I compile lot of stuff for "routers" (router is role - "hardware routers" are in fact mini PCs) as control units in various applications.

Originally posted by Morgenstern89
Thanks folks. Just to clarify, the speed drop isn't just with the wireless, it drops even when connected directly. I can connect the modem directly to my computer and go to speedtest.net and get the advertised speeds. But as soon as I put a router between the modem and the PC it drops. Is that what you guys are talking about? Or are you only referring to wireless? I totally expected a drop in speed with wireless because it's G, but I didn't expect my wired connections to drop as well.

My daily job is as a backbone network engineer. I work on a $2 billion backbone network that stretches from the Pacific to the Atlantic that pushes about 500 gigs of traffic across it every second. We also have hundreds of fiber customers ranging from 5 Mb speeds to gigabit customers. If I had even a Deutschmark from the Weimar Republic for every customer that screamed that they weren't getting their proper speeds because of this or that speedtest, I'd STILL be rolling in cash .

To truly test your speeds, find a free download test file on the net, hosted by one of the many throughput testers. They have a large dummy file that one can download that will test your throughput over a more accurate length of time. Below are a couple to get you started.

Hosthop.com
thinkbroadband.com

Got a new router today to test, and speedtest.net shows what it should. The test files from those sites gave deceptively low speeds, but I started saving a bunch of videos and the speeds seemed to be where they should have been. Stars for all you folks. I may tinker with the old linksys too.