OFB Community Mailing Lists

[Stephen J. McCracken]

Timothy Butler wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> I purchased a new cable modem after observing that the speed on the old
> modem (a Linksys one) would never reach what my plan was now supplying
> (10 meg). Stupidly, I did not try connecting the modem straight to the
> computer. But, I had been told the modem couldn't do a 10 meg connection
> -- I'm not sure if that's true or not.
> 
> In any case, I hooked up a new Motorola Surfboard to the computer, ran
> through the self-install and presto, I have a 10 meg connection -- until
> I reconnected it to the router. I now feel really dumb for not trying it
> directly connected to the computer. After updating the router firmware
> from it's old 2000-era firmware to the most recent (2004) version for a
> BEFSR41 1.0 model, I'm now up to 6-8 megs, but I still cannot reach the
> nearly-10 meg speed of a direct connection.
> 
> Any suggestions? Do you think this router is slowing things down or that
> any router would take this much of a bite out of a 10 meg connection?

It depends.  It sounds like the modem itself has a 100baseT ethernet
port on the LAN side (100mbs), the question is whether the ports on the
router are 100baseT or 10baseT.  It sounds like it is only a 10mbps port
on the router.  It could be that the LAN ports on the router are
100mbps, but only 10mbps on the WAN (modem) side.  Because of Ethernet
protocal overhead, you will only ever reach a maximum of 70-80% of the
port speed.  So, it sounds to me that somewhere there is a 10baseT port
when the router is in place.

sjm