Ethernet speeds increasing - make sure your hardware can keep up

[Clarity]

Now that Wifi speeds on these newer PCs exceed OLD wired ethernet, one should begin to consider planning to upgrade network switches so that the wired network is not your bottleneck as we move into the future.

Newer PCs are already coming with upgraded LAN adapter speeds. Up to 10Gb, current ethernet wiring seems sufficient.

FYI

Ethernet 2.5Gb.jpg (104.85 KiB) Viewed 721 times

[8Geee]

I reallydon't see the need for this rate of data Xfer unless competitive gaming, or bitcoin mining. This puts it off the USB2/3 pipe onto either SATA3 or PCI. This is looking not so 5-Volt friendly.

8Geee

[wiak]

I reallydon't see the need for this rate of data Xfer unless competitive gaming, or bitcoin mining. This puts it off the USB2/3 pipe onto either SATA3 or PCI. This is looking not so 5-Volt friendly.

8Geee

What?!!! Are you one of the few not communicating with your friends via 3D holographic transfer? I'm not even sure where the 'real me' actually is any more.

[Grey]

Mmmm... Well, let's start watching online videos with a resolution of 4k 8k 16k 32k 100500k. But an increase in the speed of the subject will cause a chain reaction and will lead to the purchase of a 100500k monitor, video card with support for 100500k and so on.
Something tells me that not all Puppy users are wealthy respectable Europeans and Americans or Russian oligarchs

[mikewalsh]

I really don't see the need for this rate of data Xfer unless competitive gaming, or bitcoin mining. This puts it off the USB2/3 pipe onto either SATA3 or PCI. This is looking not so 5-Volt friendly.

8Geee

What?!!! Are you one of the few not communicating with your friends via 3D holographic transfer? I'm not even sure where the 'real me' actually is any more.

^^^Lololol!!!!

I very much doubt the vast majority of folks will give a hoot one way or the other. I think for many, the usual issue is not so much how FAST their connection is - or can be! - but rather that it isn't so SLOW as to make online activity of any kind a painful, wearisome business.

Despite that infrastructure is improving all the time, I confess it surprised me to learn that 'average' wifi speeds are now much faster than my OLD Ethernet connection operating at the 'fair lick' of 100 Mb/s..... To me, that was a good rate of data transfer, and perfectly satisfactory for MY needs. Because the laying of physical cables tends to be concentrated in and around urban conurbations where a good 'rate of return' can be expected on the investment (per head of population), large rural areas still don't have decent wired connections. Granted, wifi is becoming much faster, but Ethernet is still considered more reliable.

Only "ubergeeks" are going to bother themselves about shaving off a couple of milliseconds here or there. No doubt 'network benchmarking' software is available somewhere, for those concerned about such stuff..!

Mike.

[Clarity]

If wiring is important to you, consider this "NEW" delivery.

Also, this expands use of home's cable TV wiring to data needs without running wires.

ALL of the solutions discussed, here, are aimed at use within the home as more and more devices in the home are now affordable. For example, IP cameras, door operations, appliances, power-management, etc all operating together in one's home for our family benefits.

FYI

[dogle]

Thanks all for this useful thread .... right now I have a vexing problem which may be related (or p'raps not?).

Background:- mostly, I'm running Dpup Stretch 32 with Palemoon on a now-elderly (Pentium D) box, and living in rural UK I have been using exclusively a 3G cellular data link for years with much satisfaction ... until a few weeks ago, when suddenly a very frequent, intermittent, infuriating difficulty emerged - it was taking so long to connect to websites for much of the time that I was getting timeout messages, but otherwise I still had instant connection.

My first point is that "speed", as such, may be a red herring if the underlying cause of difficulty - whatever the means of transmission, be it ethernet / cable / cellular - is a packet-routing failure on the part of the ISP network (that's my own prime suspect right now).

After doing substitution checks for my modem / cable / OS / browser without result, I have today run a "speed" test download for a 275 MB Puppy - fortuititously, instant connection, then timed at 5 min -> 7.6 Mbits/sec. (assuming 8:1 conversion). That's puny by today's standards, but much more than adequate for my own very modest needs (I don't do any online gaming, video downloads, crypto mining etc.).

I have long ago fixed Pupdial to report signal strength from my local base station every time I connect, and it remains quite adequate. Blinky keeps hinting that that my cellular base station is intermittently ignoring my requests for website connection, hence my thoughts that my problem might just be local.

In the the UK there has been a movement to mast-sharing in which the base is installed and maintained by contractors rather than the ISPs themselves, and unfortunately in my case the contractors seem to have been poorly supervised and lacking in both respects. Sites like 'whatsdown' indicate that the problem is not a regional or national one, and I therefore surmise that it may just be a bad circuit board at my local base station which keeps dropping packet routing requests.

I have not yet had chance to do a substitution check on my computer, which seems to be performing normally, so the reference to 'hardware' in this thread title has me wondering. Can anyone offer better insight on this very annoying problem, perhaps from similar experience?

[Grey]

maintained by contractors rather than the ISPs themselves

Oh contractors. It seems today this is a problem for any country. Large organizations are already completely lazy to do their job and give contractors even responsible operations. And the contractor is in most cases your neighbor who just looked at YouTube how to do it

[Clarity]

Hello @dogle
How are you and your home equipment connected to the Internet:

• via ISP Modem?

• via your cell phone?

If via the ISP's modem, does it provide home Wifi?

If via your phone,

• what does your phone show as your Internet provider's speed for upload/download?

• If after testing what your phone shows, run a speedtest on your PC to see if they match.

  • If they do, call your ISP and complain about your speed.

  • If they disagree, check how you connected your PC.

Hope these hints are helpful.

[dogle]

Many thanks, Clarity, for your kind hints but I fear we may be somewhat at cross purposes ...

... but first, for the record and in answer to your queries, I access my cellular data service via a USB ‘dongle’ modem connected to a PC - this offers no WiFi functionality (which I don’t need anyway).

As part of my recent substitution checks I replaced my ageing, ‘jailbroken’ Huwawei ?169 dongle (which has served me very well over more than - woohoo! - seven years now) with a similar more recent Huwawei version dedicated (locked) to my current ISP network (Hutchison Three) - no difference whatever, so I feel sure I don’t have a modem problem.

I’m sorry that I failed to make perfectly clear in my prior post that I had already run an accurate “speed” test, and that I was entirely satisfied with the data transmission rate once connected ... it’s the persistent, intermittent failures-to-connect which have been driving me wild over the past couple of months, and right now a dud board in my local base station failing to process packet routing properly seems to me to be the most likely culprit.

As to what to do next? - Oh, wow, Grey, you speak truth! ... you are right on the ball as to the shortcomings of contractors and the general lack of accountability ... as in, were I to ring “Customer Services” (oxymoron alert!) I fear I’d just be connected to some contractor in Oceana speaking Pidgin, not really having a clue but lying unashamedly about the ‘service’ and having neither authority nor any incentive to get things fixed (Haven’t we all been there?).

Other than just moving to another ISP (which might if I were unlucky be sharing the same mast run by the same duff contractors) my best chance of getting things fixed might be via sufficiently persistent whingeing at the ISPs retail outlets? For that reason I shall be ever so grateful for feedback from anyone here with experience of a similar problem, to be sure that I am accurately on target.

[Clarity]

@dogle, is there any chance you have another PC to try your dongle on to see if, when running on another PC, the service issue goes away? If so, and it does not, you have enough evidence to show your ISP that they are responsible for intermittent service issues.

Hope this helps.

[8Geee]

Well, the N.E. USA especially MA, CT, NY are certainly not short of $$$. But ye old ATT now Frontier, was in fact near-negligent in maintanence of the Copper-wire-infrastructure. Wires here are old enough to collect Soc. Sec., and the insulation is failing, and its not coax. Now, THERE's a NOISY bottleneck. We have fiber to the last mile or two, but that last mile or two is in VERY bad shape.

OTOH, CATV-based internet gets the job done, but at price-points above a senior citizen income. My next door neighbor has CATV/phone/I-net bundle. Phone is useless, 200 channels, and 60Mps I-net. With the home-wifi option, this is about $300/month.
His property taxes are about $500/mon, and his electric runs $200/mon... Then theres the oil heat. But I differ, my needs are not as great, Property tax about $400/mon, electric about $75/month and I-net about $50/mon. Prepaid cel-card $25/mon, no CATV, just a $10 "Flatscreen" antenna (gets 20+ stations... all locals plus a few interesting sub-channels). So, going shopping for what I want is cheaper than what someone tries to sell me.

So when it comes to computing, I'm no artist or programmer (anymore). I don't need Gimp or Libre-Office to accomplish spreadsheets, letters, or picture manipulation. Free Office and mtpaint serve well, with a much smaller footprint. I make do with a single core original Atom N270, and without overhead or meltdown/spectre concerns, it holds up very well on the main tasks of I-net browse, buy, secure, privacy, bank. Like others here have pointed out, milliseconds don't really matter unless addicted to technology. But progress marches onward, and talk-and-text-3G has to make room for phone-computers, so I HAVE to consume more bandwidth than I need, and at a faster speed that I can not perceive, instant is instant at some point.

In a word "efficient".

Rambling muchly, but with purpose
8Geee