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I have AT&T Gigabit Fiber at home. When I connect my MacBook to the ATT Gateway via Ethernet (via a 5' CAT 7 cable), fast.com shows my upload and download speeds in the 800Mbps range, which is great! When using WiFi from my home office which is about 50' away (and several walls, obstructions) from the ATT gateway, the performance drops to ~100Mbps. I don't expect WiFi performance to match Ethernet performance but because my router can support it, I was hoping for 200-300Mbps range.
So during a recent basement renovation, I decided to run an Ethernet cable from the ATT Gateway to my home office. My contractor ran a 75' CAT 7 cable (that I supplied) from the AT&T Gateway to my office. When I connected my laptop to the wall plate via the same 5' CAT 7 cable, I'm seeing performance in the 50-100Mbps range, which was shocking. I'm trying to understand why the performance is so poor. Is it the length of the cable? Could my contractor have used a slower (CAT5) wall plate? Is there something else?
Sajee
Posted 2018-09-13T18:41:05.730
Reputation: 3 899
What WiFi standard were you using to connect to the AT&T gateway? What tool did you use to test the bandwidth? Did you try testing speeds locally as well as to the internet? What type of device did you use to test the wireless connectivity? Same questions go for testing max throughput on your network on your laptop.. For local area network testing, try moving around files of various sizes and types if you can. – Richie086 – 2018-09-13T19:03:01.597
1I'll bet there's either a twisted-pair termination problem in the contractor-installed cable, or your MacBook was still using Wi-Fi even though the Ethernet cable was plugged in. For gigabit Ethernet, you not only need the right Ethernet cable pinout, you need to make sure that certain pairs of pins are connected to wires that are twisted together as pairs: 1&2, 3&6, 4&5, 7&8. If you naively pair 3&4 and 5&6, your long cable run will be susceptible to noise that will probably keep gigabit signaling from working. Gigabit Ethernet was designed to go 100m (328 feet) over plain old Cat5. – Spiff – 2018-09-13T20:58:45.673
@Spiff I turned of my MacBook WiFi. I will check if the pairs are correct. Thanks. – Sajee – 2018-09-14T02:17:08.187
@Richie086 Since I was testing the Gigabit Fiber (not local LAN speed), I used a combination of http://speedtest.att.com,https://fast.com, http://www.speedtest.net to measure external bandwidth. I used my MacBook wired to the ATT Gateway and then wired to the extended Ethernet cable to my office.
– Sajee – 2018-09-14T02:22:07.320