Internet Connections

[Tosh McCaber]

I have a nominal internet connection from my ISP of 2.0Mbbs, which I obtain most of the time. I’m getting confused between this and my Local Area Connection, which appears o vary from, yesterday, 3Mbbs, and today, 100Mbbs.

How do the two inter-relate?

[txdmy1]

LAc

is usually the speed of the connection between your piece of kit and the router

[rgbrock1]

Depends on what is on your LAN. However, that throughput variance as you wrote seems unreasonable. I can see some performance issues if your LAN is saturated with traffic. Which, I suppose, it could very well be.
Also depends on routers, routings, gateways, etc.

[txdmy1]

I'd be concerned

with that, mine is always 100mbs, unless the kids, the wife and I all have our laptops on wireless, this box is hardwired to the router hence 100

[green granite]

Are you clashing frequencies with one of your neighbours? That would degrade things somewhat and could be very variable as well.

[hellsbrink]

Good point, GG, most people never change the "default" channel so you can end up with a few networks all competing for the same frequency.

Tosh, if your router is set on ch11 change it to ch6 and see if that stabilises things

[rgbrock1]

I don't see how one LAN can be affected by another LAN as they are both on different, well, LANs. One has absolutely nothing to do with another.
Unless he's sharing a router with the neighbors!

[Saab Dastard]

802.11g in "turbo" mode goes up to 108Mbps, while 802.11n goes to 150Mbps, and both will fall back to very low speeds with poor signal strength, so depending on the kit, 3 - 100 Mbps is not impossible for a wifi-only setup.

You cannot get 100Mbps ethernet to report as anything less than 10.

SD

[hellsbrink]

rgbrock

If 2 wlans are using the same channel and, therefore, frequency, they can interfere because they are transmitting on he same "band" so the different data streams can block each other to an extent.

[FullOppositeRudder]

If 2 wlans are using the same channel and, therefore, frequency, they can interfere because they are transmitting on he same "band" so the different data streams can block each other to an extent.

Not altogether unlike two aircraft "in together" with a position report on the same VHF radio frequency at the same moment .....

FOR

[rgbrock1]

Yes, if two W-LANs are on the same frequency oddities can occur.
But the original poster did not mention anything about a WLAN but used the term LAN. Two separate LANs (ethernet/wire-based) cannot cause problems by their very nature.

WLAN is an entirely different matter.

[FullOppositeRudder]

From rgbrock1:

WLAN is an entirely different matter.

You are of course quite correct. I was swept along by thread creep and for that I apologise.

Unfortunately that hasn't gone any distance towards solving the original question either.

We need a few details perhaps Tosh ....? Is there a wireless component in your system ..? How many computers are on the LAN etc.?

for

[Tosh McCaber]

To be more specific, my Belkin 802.11g router, which has wireless, also has 4 hard wired ports. I've always used a hard wired connection between my computer and the router. I had another computer in the house on wireless, onto which I have now hard wired the router connection.

When I first put forward my query, my Local Area Connection to my original computer was2.8Mb/sec, and the new connection read 3.2Mb (hard wired). Thereafter, and right now, they both have been displaying 100Mbbs constantly. So it could have ben a transient slow down?

As I mentioned before, I have a nominal internet connection from my ISP of 2.0Mbbs, which I obtain most of the time. My original query was, in simple terms, how do the two speeds inter-relate? If we can only receive 2-20Mb/sec from ISPs, why such a high LAN speed?

Thanks for the replies so far.

[Saab Dastard]

how do the two speeds inter-relate?

They don't. LAN speed and internet connection speed are not related in any way. Neither are wifi speed and wired speed on the same router / access point.

why such a high LAN speed

Basically because the technology came from corporate computing to home computing.

The original Ethernet specification was for 3Mbps, shared between all nodes on a segment. This became 10Mbps in the early 80's and remained at that until the mid-90's, when 10base2 and 10base5 thin and thicknet bus networks were superseded by the now-familiar star topology running 10baseT (RJ45 twisted pair), and an advance in ASICS and cabling standards allowed 100Mbps to be introduced.

Initially aimed at backbone and aggregated connections, it quickly became cheap enough to implement on all network cards and switch ports, so the de-facto ethernet speed standard became 100Mbps (with a backwards compatibility with 10Mbps) - and that spread equally to the home network, as these became ubiquitous with the take-up of the internet.

Now it is common to have network cards supporting 1000/100/10 Mbps, simply because it is as easy for the manfrs. to do so than not.

The same is not yet true of switchports, and your bog-standard switch will support 10/100Mbps, even though the upstream connection to the ISP may be less.

A LAN speed (hard-wired) should show either 10 or 100Mbps; anything else is an error, possibly due to incorrect autosensing or duplex mismatch.

A wifi LAN speed could show anything from 1 to 150Mbps, depending on implementation and signal strength.

SD

[jimtherev]

... and, of course which I'm sure SD intended to add, Internet connection speed is something which is totally out of our control, and subject to some script-reader in India, his/her employer, and any engineer they may care to throw at the problem.

[Tosh McCaber]

So, presumably, both hard-wired and wifi networks are many times more than capable capable of transferring through the home network any connection speeds that an ISP will be sending in the foreseeable future, with no slow-down of the signal through the network.

[Bushfiva]

That's a good generalization, depending on where you live. My internet connection is 160 Mbps in both directions, so it's much faster than my wi-fi (54 Mbps, say 20 Mbps after encryption overhead and general noise) but slower than my wired network.