The speed will be limited to the lowest of:
- Hard drive speed, compensated for seeking and caching
- Any part of your network between your locations, including switches, hubs, and network cards.
- In extreme cases, bus and cpu speeds of the connected devices.
Only in very rare cases would the cable quality or length be any real issue, in that case you would not observe reduced speed but increased lost/damaged data. (You could check that by continuously pinging your server while copying a large file from it.)
I suggest you first check that all your network components (computer, router and server) support Gigabit speeds (or whatever your think you should have). Secondly, I would suspect the router not actually offering the speeds it claims (seen that more than I should have). You could then connect a computer directly to the server to see if speeds increase.
Another likely possibility is low speeds on the wireless connection to you computer, likely due to poor reception.
2Moving files to and from what? It's not clear what you're actually doing. If you're talking about speed talking to wireless nodes or nodes over the Internet, the Ethernet is irrelevant. – David Schwartz – 2011-12-11T04:13:24.237