What's new

Expected wired speeds through wireless router?

  • SNBForums Code of Conduct

    SNBForums is a community for everyone, no matter what their level of experience.

    Please be tolerant and patient of others, especially newcomers. We are all here to share and learn!

    The rules are simple: Be patient, be nice, be helpful or be gone!

Tesseract

New Around Here
I apologize if this is the wrong forum but I wasn't sure where to ask this question.

I have a very typical small home network. I am using a Linksys WRT54GL V1.1 for my wireless router. My main PC is connected to that router by wire. I have Comcast as my Internet provider and they have been upping my speed over the years. I recently received their latest modem as a free upgrade. I did a speed test using Speedtest.net on my PC directly wired to the new modem. No router. I was averaging about 75 Mbps. The new modem was about 3 times faster than my old one.

So, I connected my PC to the router and performed the same test. But, I was only getting about 20 Mbps. Roughly the same as I was getting with the wireless connection.

So, my question is what wired speeds should I be expecting through a wireless router? I just assumed that port was a pass through but obviously something in the router is slowing the wired speed down. Would a newer router help in regards to the wired speeds?

Thanks for any help!
 
Needless to ask if you did the test toward the same server no...?

How many times did you repeat the test? Traffic on the network is always changing, therefore said measure is a stochastic variable, and a correct estimation of its value requires multiple measurements to have some meaning.

In my case the variance for the same server is rather large also with respect to the time of the day I measure.
 
Yes the test was to the same server. I repeated the test probably 4 or 5 times. These tests and the ones with the PC connected to the router were all done in a 2 hour period on a weekend morning. I doubt the traffic changed much.

Is there a limit to the speed you would expect on that router?
 
Yes, routers can limit the Internet speed to/from wired connections as well as wireless.

The WRT54GL is quite old and my tests found it had problems supporting high simultaneous up and downlink traffic.

Go get yourself a more current router and you will probably find the problem solved. Check the Router Charts and make sure you get a router with at least 75 Mbps WAN to LAN throughput.

Go buy another router
 
My WRT54G was found to be limiting the WAN side speeds (packets per second) when my ISP increased to 10-20Mbps (bursting). I replaced that many years ago and speeds improved noticeably. No doubt, the packets/sec rate is affected by how much packet inspection is needed based on your QoS and similar settings.
 

Similar threads

Latest threads

Sign Up For SNBForums Daily Digest

Get an update of what's new every day delivered to your mailbox. Sign up here!
Top