After seeing that my wireless speeds were much faster than the speeds I was getting over Ethernet, I decided to invest in some new cables. I didn’t know it before, but I saw while I was changing them out that my current cables were Cat 5e. While putting my network together, I had just been grabbing whatever cables I could find in my scrap drawers. Now I have Cat 8 cables and my speeds jumped from 7MB/s to an average of over 40MB/s. It’s a much bigger improvement than I expected, especially for such a small investment.
Also learned this the hard way, when i was starting my “homelab” , I bought a box of (not knowingly that its bad) cheap CCA(copper clad alum) cat6 cables and im wondering why are my access points not negotiating to gigabit, turns out cca are trash and shouldn’t be used on POE or even on high speed trunks, learned my lesson now and swapped my cables to pure copper, they are more expensive like 100$ more expensive but at least they do the job.
CCA shouldn’t be used anywhere ever. It’s garbage cable for garbage people who will pinch a penny and end up spending ten times that in dealing with the issues and the eventual replacement.
You’ve been using cheap cables.
Next step up is a JCAT: https://audiobacon.net/2019/11/02/the-jcat-signature-lan-a-1000-ethernet-cable/amp/
/s if not obvious.
I have stable ~950 MBit/s to the NAS with Cat5e. That’s ~115 MB/s. If that 40 is to a machine on the LAN, either there is some bottle neck at one of the ends, or there’s some problem with the cable to the RJ-45 jacks.
Cat5e works fine for gigabit. If it’s not connecting at 1G, then the cable has been damaged and is probably connecting at 100M.
You should be seeing about 118MB/s in an iperf test on gigabit ethernet.
This. I’ve had issues at work while imaging classroom computers where some would finish in ~30 minutes and a few would need hours. All of the computers used Cat6 cables. This being a classroom, and students being absolute wankbags, they kept yanking the computers and kicking the cables, so the wires came loose from the plugs. I later used ethtool to debug the slow computers – the switch would only allow 10baseT link modes.
For later reference, the link light on most network cards is a different colour depending on link speed. Usually orange for 1G, green for 100M and off for 10M (with data light still blinking).
Cat8 is pointless with gigabit equipment as far as speed goes. Cat6 will do 10gig, you just had bad cables.
Cat8 is not the benefit here. It’s all twisted pairs as any other CAT cable. You probably just had a shitty quality cable.
Cat 5e
The fact that your old cable was cat5e has no bearing whatsoever on you getting shit speeds before changing cables. The gigabit spec was codified and products were on the market before the cat5e spec was ratified. Gigabit ethernet was literally made for standard cat5. I bet your previous cable was terminated incorrectly, and was only using two of the four pairs, limiting you to 100mbit.
Bingo!
Proper termination can be a bitch.
Orange white, orange
Green white, blue
Blue white, green
Brown white, brown
Learned it 20 years ago, never used it. how did I do?
