Eventually, I traced the problem back to what seemed like an unlikely source (but that we later learned was actually a common point of failure): the Ethernet pass-through port in our Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) unit. RELATED: How to Troubleshoot Your Internet Connection, Layer-By-Layerįor example, earlier this year I was troubleshooting my internet connection problems, layer-by-hair-pulling-layer, to figure out why my connection speed was 5% of what it should have been. While sometimes hardware fails catastrophically (the power transformer gives up the ghost, a piece on the circuit board pops and releases all the magic smoke, etc.) many times network hardware dies a slow death that isn’t so much as snap, crackle, and pop but a protracted whimper. Speaking of old hardware, failures happen even with quality equipment. If your internet connection is faster than 100 Mbit/s, you’ll want to upgrade your hardware (and potentially cabling) to take full advantage of it. While 100 Mbit/s, despite being an older standard, is still plenty fast for most broadband connections, if your broadband connection is a screaming fast shiny new fiber connection then you don’t want to hinder your throughput with an old switch. Check your switch’s model number and the cables you’re using (the type, Cat5/5e/6 will be printed right on the cable sheathing). So if your connection is slow, you might have an older, slower piece of hardware somewhere in the chain. The type of cables you use matter too: older Cat5 cabling can’t handle gigabit speeds, but newer Cat5e and Cat6 can. Some very old switches are only capable of 10 Mbit/s, switches built from the mid-1990s forward are capable of 100 Mbit/s, and modern switches capable of 1000 Mbit/s (or “gigabit” speeds). Your Switch Is Old, But Your Connection Isn’tĮthernet connection speeds are dependent on the quality of the cabling and the capabilities of the network hardware. If you fished your “switch” out of an old box in the corner of your basement or bought it dirt cheap at a surplus sale, look up the model number online and confirm that its not a hub. Historically, switches were expensive and hubs were cheap, but advances in technology have made switches so cheap that they don’t even bother making hubs anymore. If you purchased the device in question within the last few years, the chance is almost zero that it’s a hub. It actively manages the connections between the input port and the output ports, so you won’t run into the collision problem or any of the other issues that plague hubs. If you have a hub set up between your router and the rest of your network, you’re setting yourself up for a huge headache.Ī switch, on the other hand, is much smarter. This leads to collisions between data packets and a general degrading of network quality. A hub is a “dumb” device in that it broadcasts whatever it hears on the input port to all the output ports.
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