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I have a fairly old (maybe ~8 years) Linksys Etherfast BEFSR81 V3 10/100 wired 8-port router. Under my old cable internet plan, I would get about 15Mbps on any device using the router, which I figured was pretty good for a 20Mbps plan (I figured Time Warner Cable was advertising the peak speeds or something like that). However, I just upgraded to a 50Mbps internet plan and devices connected to the router usually only are getting Mbps speeds in the low 20s (though a couple times I got in the high 20s, and in one outlying instance I got 37 Mbps -- I should clarify that these speeds are all download speeds from speedtest.net). This seemed a bit outrageous, so I retested with the computer directly wired to the modem, and I got a fabulous 51Mbps connection.
That meant to me that the problem was with the router. Here are some of the things I've done trying to boost the speed:
- I disconnected every device from the router except the computer I was testing with (and of course the cable modem)
- Per some Linksys instruction guide I found, I had the router clone the MAC address of my PC, then release and renew its public IP (this made my public IP change at last, and it seemed to help the speed test numbers a little, but not much)
- I manually set the MTU to 1500.
- I verified that all the cables I'm using are CAT5 cables with all the pins included.
- I verified that QoS was disabled.
- I noticed that the router didn't support IPv6 like the modem did, so I only had IPv4 using the router. This didn't seem like it would matter but perhaps it would??
So, is there anything else I should be doing to make my router faster? Or is it time to get a replacement? (and if so, what should I look for in a new router?) Thanks a ton in advance.
Cat5 with all the pins makes no difference on a 100Mbit connection, which only uses 4 wires (two pairs.) In the old days when gigabit was just a dream, we used to run two 100Mbit connections on one chunk of Cat5. If you have an old computer sitting around you might try one of the freebsd or linux router packages from a LiveCD on it. – Ecnerwal – 2013-10-23T00:58:20.260