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Recently, I bought a TP-Link AC1750 Archer C7, which has four Gigabit Ethernet ports (800 Megabits each), 1300Mbps 5GHz WiFi and 450Mbps 2.4GHz WiFi. I have connected my PC to the router by an Ethernet cable, and the link is shown that it is 1.0Gbps in Windows network. I have a FileZilla file server running on my PC.
I tried downloading a 4GB file from the server with my Mac Book Pro 2015, which has 802.11AC, and connected to the 5GHz network of the router.
Surprisingly, I only get 37.0MBytes/s of download speed. Shouldn't I be getting around 100MBytes/s of download speed?
I have my file on an SSD, which has a read speed of 100MBps+.
As I know the router has 1.7Gbps of total wireless bandwidth, and each Ethernet port has 800Mbps of bandwidth, I don't see any way why I am getting around 37MBps. Is it the cables? Even though Windows recognizes the link as 1Gbps, can the cable reduce the speed? I am using the cable that came with the router (CAT5).
As far as I know, only CAT5e or higher is compatible with Gigabit Ethernet. But here, as Windows shows that it is a 1Gbps link, is it really the cable or something else?
Can somebody please explain me this?
Jumbo frames allow for increased layer-2 frames, but that doesn't necessarily increase packet sizes since packets are layer-3 constructs. If an upper-layer protocol can increase the packet size, you may be able to use the jumbo frames. For example, VoIP will not benefit at all from jumbo frames since the packet size will always be very small. – Ron Maupin – 2015-11-27T05:50:19.690
I largely agree @RonMaupin, hence why I said "hard to set up". I'm well aware of MTU issues and fragmentation (I found a 14 year old who became my lead tech for an ISP I was starting 20 years ago because of this) - While its true that a small number of VOIP connections will not benefit from this, VOIP does not get advantage from lots of bandwidth, so its a red herring. File transfers on the other hand do - and increasing the MTU decreases the affects of latency and also load on the router/switching fabric - which is often measured in packets per second, not bytes. – davidgo – 2015-11-27T05:55:43.123
My point is that your answer conflates frames and packets. They are two completely separate, independent OSI layers. The packet size may increase with the increased frame size, but not necessarily. You may want to make that distinction. – Ron Maupin – 2015-11-27T06:01:55.797