Speed Problems

[Bahamut_Launch]

Hi, I'm a new member, and I think this website might have saved me months of trouble.

Anyway, my office recently upgraded our internet connection to 100 mb fiber line from cogent. We can't seem to take advantage of most of that speed, and I think the reason why is that we have a RVS4000 router.

Reading though your review, it seems like that router really isn't going to work for us. So my question is what should I buy?

We have about 30 Macs (all macs, not a pc in the place). The set up is simple, media converter (which I guess is what a fiber modem is called) to router, to two cisco switches. One is a 20 port Gigabit switch, and the other is a 20 port 100 Mb switch. We have an Air Port Extreme N set up for office wireless.

I'd like to spend less than $500 if I can, but I need to be getting close to the full speed of the connection.

 

[thiggins]

Go to the Router Charts and look at WAN to LAN throughput. Lots of routers that support > 100 Mbps and are under $150, with many under $100.

Don't worry that they are wireless. You can just shut it off.

 

[Bahamut_Launch]

Sad Update

Ok, so I bought a D-Link DIR-655, and hooked it up, but I'm still getting the same problems. I get very slow speed results, but I have a 100 Mb up/down connection.

I only get 7 Mb/s down and 10 Mb/s up when I test my speed with speedtest. When I'm connect my laptop directly to my media converter (which I guess is what a fiber modem is called) and put in the static IP info, I get speeds over 80 Mb/'s sometimes. But this is the THRID router I've used and I can't get anything past 15 Mbs. These speeds stayed the same if I connected a laptop directly to the router, or tried with a computer on the other side of my switches.

I have the DIr-655 "hard-set" for 100 Mb connection under Advanced ---> advanced network. This is all my ISP will tell me to do. QOS is disabled, and UNpN is enabled. I turned the Wireless functions off.

I'm going crazy here, I have been dealing with this problem for about 3 and a half months now, maybe longer. Anyone have a clue what could be going on?

on speedtest, I'm getting like 12 Mb/s down and 12 Mb/s up.

Here are the results of a Stanford University NDT test:


*
click START to re-test

** Starting test 1 of 1 **
Connected to: netspeed.stanford.edu -- Using IPv4 address
Checking for Middleboxes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Done
checking for firewalls . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Done
running 10s outbound test (client-to-server [C2S]) . . . . . 11.07Mb/s
running 10s inbound test (server-to-client [S2C]) . . . . . . 1.65Mb/s
The slowest link in the end-to-end path is a 45 Mbps T3/DS3 subnet
Information: Other network traffic is congesting the link

For some reason I get slower speed with this Stanford test, and when I ran this test I was the only one in the office, so I don't know why there would be other network traffic.

 

[thiggins]

Have you tried the test with more than one computer, connected via Ethernet?

What does your ISP say? What do they recommend for supporting multiple computers?

 

[Bahamut_Launch]

To answer your first question, yes, these tests have been run with at least 4 diffrent computers, either with my laptop pluged directly into a lan port of the router, or on other desktops behind the switches.

We have a fiber line from Cogent Co. I drop the name as a warning to others.

I know this is crazy, but they won't recommend anything lan side. They are very helpful on the wan side, they know there stuff on the wan side (sort of, they don't know anything about mac) but after they confirm that I can get full speed to one computer from the modem, they say (after I beat it out of them) that their responsibility ends at the end of the media converter. We can opt out of the contract in a year, which is quickly approaching.

So I've asked them over and over to tell me what router they suggest, and they won't. I got someone to say cisco is good once, but that's as much as I can get them to say.

 

[thiggins]

I have done a bit of research over on DSLReports. Looks like there can be an issue with the Fiber media converter negotiating a half-duplex connection when connected to a gigabit switch.

Try a router with a 10/100 WAN port or just throw a 10/100 switch between the
fiber converter and router WAN port.

 

[Bahamut_Launch]

Yeah, it won't let me set full or half duplex. I was trying to use a patch cable between the media converter and the dir-655, but that didn't seem to work.

I just used put a switch (pretty sure it's a 10/100 switch, although it doesn't say so on the box, or have a model number) between the two devices and it doesn't seem to be helping either.

Might be the switch though. I got it pretty cheap about 7 months ago, and the only thing written on it is Asound, and Petit switch. I can't seem to find anything about it on Asound's website. Is there any simple way to tell if this is a 10/100 switch or maybe just a 10 switch?

thanks!

Edit: I just found something on the switch.

http://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/article/20000601/melco.htm

That looks a lot like the switch, only it says Asound, not buffalo, and there isn't as much info displayed in the lights. It would be the 8-port one on the left. it does say 10/100

 

[thiggins]

What you are trying to do is to connect something to the fiber converter that will guarantee a 100 Mbps full-duplex connection. A 100 Mbps switch should do that.
But there is still the possibility that the fiber converter is very picky about what it negotiates with.

If you have a gigabit switch, there should be some way that the indicators indicate gigabit speed.

Easiest way to tell is to plug in a computer that has a gigabit Ethernet adapter into a switch port. If the switch supports gigabit, the computer should auto-negotiate a gigabit connection.

 

[Bahamut_Launch]

Would a duplex mis-match show up on
http://netspeed.stanford.edu/

it says it can detect a mis-match, but and I've seen the error before but I'm not getting it currently.

I'll go run that test now though.

Thank you for helping me though this btw, it's been a very annoying few months with this issue. Before I started all this, the most complicated network thing I have ever done was unblocking ports for torrents. I've learned so much in the last few months, but I still halted by this problem.

Edit: Ran the test, my laptop auto neg to 100Mb full duplex with the switch between the media converter, and the router.

I should point out there is a strange button on the media converter. http://www.telco.com/int/index/en/prodbycat/prod/94

That button that has lines that are either parallel or crossed, which I figure is a selector for crossover cable or straight though. However that switch has never seemed to change anything, I generally try all setups with it either pressed in or not.

 

[thiggins]

I don't know anything about the stanford test, sorry.

It's a real pain working with black box devices that you can't query for basic things like the actual port setup. But that's the reality of dealing with consumer networking products.

Another experiment to try is to take one of your gigabit routers, shut off the DHCP server. This basically makes it act as a switch. Now plug the fiber converter and your gigabit router's WAN port into the LAN switch ports.

Yet another experiment is to connect one of the computers that you get the proper speeds with directly into the fiber converter and verify the proper speed. Then force it to half duplex and see what you get for speed. This will confirm the half-duplex theory.

 

[Bahamut_Launch]

Problem solved, sort of...

So I solved the problem, though I did it with a Sonic Wall NSA 240. That allowed me to set the port speed on both the Wan and the Lan ports. I set the Wan port (coming from the router) to 100 Mbps full duplex, and the Lan (going to our switches) to Gigabit speed. This increased our speed to what we should be getting, and I have to say it's awsome.

Of course the problem is that the Sonic Wall is much more closed off than the other routers I've delt with. Video Confercing has stoped working, and I can't seem to get it going again. I've followed the steps in the Sonic Wall knowledge base but things don't seem to be working still

I can't even figure out how to set up a DMZ, but I have another idea. I only need one airport to provide video conferring, and it doesn't need to be that fast. Do you think I could use a switch from the media converter, and have my older, slower router create a separate network that will allow video conferring which plugs directly into that airport? So I would have two networks coming from one media converter, using two different routers. Any idea if that would work?

Thanks!