Gigabit network

jammir · 11 Mar 2011 at 20:21

Should I expect steady speeds on home gigabit network? I've just moved into a new place well been here about 6 weeks now still getting work done on it atm.

I installed cat6 all round the house most rooms have 2 points but some have 4-6 all running to the loft over a cisco switch, a 3com managed switch via my pc based router (pfsense 2.0 on a atom setup) my fileserver is also in the loft, in my last place I just had a d-link switch next to my cable modem in the same room as my pc, and one cable running via a hole in the wall to another room where my fileserver sat. In my old place I was getting 130-135mb/s all the time but here it starts at 135mb/s then drops to 100-110mb/s my network graph looks like a heart rate monitor it never drops below 90mb/s but is this normal or did the installs not terminate cable well?

If it is a issue with the install id rather have it looked at while there is still work going on as the installers sill need to install the alarm, sat distro amp and hdmi matrix.

hellarda · 12 Mar 2011 at 01:08

when you say 130-135mb/s do you mean megaBITS or megaBYTES?

because if you mean megabytes, then thats impossible for gigabit ethernet. the theoretical maximum is 125megaBYTES per second (which equates to 1gigaBIT)

if you're now getting 110 megabytes then that is an incredibly good speed for gigabit.

i cant see anything wrong tbh, how long are the cat 6 cables?

bremen1874 · 12 Mar 2011 at 02:38

If you've had cat6 professionally installed the test results for the cabling should be available.

How are you measuring the network speed?

jammir · 12 Mar 2011 at 03:44

Its not the fact that im getting less speed but the fact it moves about so much all the way from 93mb to 120mb/s, as I said on my old setup it would start at 135mb/s and then just sit near 129mb/s movement was no more than one or two MB/s.

the cat6 runs at longest of about 50m and short of 18m.

Edit: The installers left there gear here and I have a lot of cat6 spare so made a few cat6 cables up to go from the wall socket to my pc and now seems to be getting between 115-120mb without much movement, the cat6 i was using was pre-made ones from the bay of e.

bremen1874 · 12 Mar 2011 at 04:01

I don’t think you’ve got anything to worry about.

If you want to test the available bandwidth you would probably be better off trying one of the tools that generate and measure dummy network traffic. Unfortunately I can't remember the names of any at the moment.