Should I redo my network?

What does your network look like now? Are you using an ISP-provided router/wifi thing to access the internet? (I think so?)

What other endpoints are in play, other than the Celeron machine and the regular desktop?

Is your tribus accurate/are you in Spain?

koala said:

Right now on a wired weeny computer (a Celeron N5105), I get 90-95mbps on a speed test (down/up).

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I'd be really surprised if the pc has a 100mbit port, so I'm guessing you've got a bad cable or maybe router port that isn't negotiating a 1000mbit connection speed for some reason. If you're on windows you can see the link speed in network settings.

Might be an easier fix than redoing everything else.

It would be helpful to know all of the equipment, and all of the cabling, in your current environment. Most networking gear except very ancient stuff should support 1Gbps. But things like ethernet surge protectors and pinched cables could easily knock that back to 100Mbps, which seems to be what you're seeing.

For example, if you've got a switch or router or something between your ONT and your PC, try plugging directly into the ONT first, run a speed test, and then add more and more complexity until you figure out what's bad. But honestly I think we're dealing with a bad cable here, unless you're using an ethernet surge protector.

Sounds more like "that's how little I care about money", to be paying for a connection that you only use 1/5th of. But that desktop performance is insanely bad. That's not a crippled machine in terms of specs and it should be able to max out that 1Gbps connection just fine, even if it has the shittiest laptop mechanical drive available, unless you are using old Cat5 (not 5e) cabling so you're not even getting a 1Gbps link to the gateway.

As for the wireless, what kind of adapter is the desktop using? You may just need a better adapter, not a better AP (ISP gateways are generally pretty high-speed wireless), but even with the very best AP and adapter, you're realistically only going to get at most 500Mbps throughput. Individual devices/adapters usually only have two, maybe 3 antennas at the high end, which limits the actual connectivity no matter how amazing the marketing is on the access point. Four antennas on an access point with 3Gbps 802.11ac capability really only helps you to connect MANY individual devices that can use 3Gbps of aggregate link speed; an average 2-antenna device like a desktop/laptop/mobile phone with 802.11ac is only going to get an 866Mb link, which will only get 400ish of actual transfer rates. If you had 3 antennas, you might hit 1.3Gb/700Mb with 80MHz channels, and if you're lucky and your AP and device can both do 160MHz or 80+80MHz channels then 2.6Gb link is possible so you could possibly saturate the Internet service that way, but you'll pay through the nose for that equipment.

Edit after seeing your equipment: your AP/router is not the main bottleneck. Your wireless adapter probably is, and either the cabling or the switch for the wired desktop. Fix the models/specs on those and you'll be able to make full use of the 1Gbps connection with the wired PC, and get a solidly fast wireless link as well (probably an 866Mbps link rate, 400ish throughput). If you really need to get more on the wireless then you can look at upgrading the AP/router but will probably need to upgrade the adapter to match.

Further edit: are you sure your main desktop is using the 5GHz link to the AP? The OpenWrt page for the Archer C6 V2 indicates there are some issues with the 5GHz radio on that device. You may only be using 2.4GHz, which would limit you to the 400MHz rate even if it was using 40MHz channels, and that would match the speeds you're actually seeing in testing. The page for the V3 also indicates major limitation of the channels on 5GHz.

koala said:

Well, it's a mess right now. I'm using:

• their ONT
• my own wireless AP flashed with OpenWRT (TP-Link Archer C6 - AC1200 wireless router Gigabit, WiFi MU-MIMO dual band, multimode, 4 antennas, 4 LAN ports and 1 WAN of 1000/100/10 Mbps)
• a switch (which might not be gbps-worthy)

It's likely the wireless AP is a bottleneck. I know I have to iterate step by step finding the bottlenecks. I'm just wondering if there's anything else to know before I get started.

(If I get started, I got the files out and likely the next time I'll be able to run those processes in a VM in a datacenter, so I'm not too worried...)

(No ethernet surge protectors. I'm careless with the cables I use, though.)

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Honestly all that should be fine. Cheap unmanaged 1Gbps switches have been around for decades at this point. A make and model on the switch would say for sure.

Honestly I think you'll be iterating though cables, not devices, to find the problem. A good cable tester would be ideal, but just swapping patch cables and seeing the results may be good enough.

IMO get your wired networking house in order first, then look at wireless. I'd ignore potential wireless issues for now.

koala said:

I'm paying 25€/month, and I could only downgrade to a 20€/month (and there are no significantly cheaper providers). Yeah, I see no reason to spend a lot more than 5€/month of my labor on this, thanks.

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I don't understand your point of view there. There would have been no labor cost at all to saving that other than calling the provider and asking to downgrade, and you could have saved all that money for however many years you've been paying for something you don't use. You're trying to defend knowingly throwing money away. You're NOW going to spend your time and labor and spending money to buy equipment to start trying to make use of it after having wasted all that money all this time.

First off, that N5105 doesn't help things depending on what you're trying to do with it. It isn't the fiber connection, it's the device(s) in this case. it literally is another case of too much to "lift". The Celeron N5105's are great for little media streaming PC's or doing some web browsing, though I personally don't trust them under sustained loads (experience). It may be better to look at something better geared to processing what you're working on that can handle the demand/load over the network.
That being said, you don't mention the wired connectivity on your regular desktop (other than the WiFi) vs this under-powered Celeron unit. The "AP" is actually a multi-function router- and an older one to boot. The C6 was great in its hay-day, but being it was first put out in Dec 2018/Jan 2019, it is a bit long in the tooth. Pushing gig symmetric fiber through that via the ONT probably doesn't help either.

As others pointed out, look at and possibly replace the cabling, look at and possibly replace the router/AP, and definitely that questionable switch (cheap little 1Gbps ones fail more often than many realize). Once you rule out issues with those, then look at the N5105 Celeron and possibly clean things up there (disk space, add RAM, etc).

I only brought up disk space in that last statement as one thing no one has brought up yet- drive thrashing.
You don't mention OS, on it or available drive space, or RAM.

Prime example (general, not specifically yours): a N5105 has 8GB RAM and is running Windows 11 AND has VM's on it with a 256GB SSD/NVME M.2. Under those circumstances, any OS in a VM on that trying to handle 100GB files AND push them over a network to a OneDrive absolutely WILL thrash the caching on said drive and slow things down. Upping RAM and freeing up drive space (or moving to a larger drive) should only improve the performance, even over the network. Microsoft rule of thumb is 30-50GB free with OS install. Add apps and other items and the demands generally work to 30% of a drive should be free space for caching, etc.

tiredoldtech said:

First off, that N5105 doesn't help things depending on what you're trying to do with it. It isn't the fiber connection, it's the device(s) in this case. it literally is another case of too much to "lift". The Celeron N5105's are great for little media streaming PC's or doing some web browsing, though I personally don't trust them under sustained loads (experience). It may be better to look at something better geared to processing what you're working on that can handle the demand/load over the network.
That being said, you don't mention the wired connectivity on your regular desktop (other than the WiFi) vs this under-powered Celeron unit. The "AP" is actually a multi-function router- and an older one to boot. The C6 was great in its hay-day, but being it was first put out in Dec 2018/Jan 2019, it is a bit long in the tooth. Pushing gig symmetric fiber through that via the ONT probably doesn't help either.

As others pointed out, look at and possibly replace the cabling, look at and possibly replace the router/AP, and definitely that questionable switch (cheap little 1Gbps ones fail more often than many realize). Once you rule out issues with those, then look at the N5105 Celeron and possibly clean things up there (disk space, add RAM, etc).

I only brought up disk space in that last statement as one thing no one has brought up yet- drive thrashing.
You don't mention OS, on it or available drive space, or RAM.

Prime example (general, not specifically yours): a N5105 has 8GB RAM and is running Windows 11 AND has VM's on it with a 256GB SSD/NVME M.2. Under those circumstances, any OS in a VM on that trying to handle 100GB files AND push them over a network to a OneDrive absolutely WILL thrash the caching on said drive and slow things down. Upping RAM and freeing up drive space (or moving to a larger drive) should only improve the performance, even over the network. Microsoft rule of thumb is 30-50GB free with OS install. Add apps and other items and the demands generally work to 30% of a drive should be free space for caching, etc.

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I disagree with like 80% of this. You seem to be one of the type that thinks everything has to be the best available to just get a basic job done, that ever user needs to have a supercomputer just in case they might one day want to run supercomputer workloads. That Celeron should be able to handle that dinky 1Gbps link just fine, even with a crappy drive, when just performing a speed test at the very least. OP never said anything about running heavy loads on it, and even with a VM running, unless it's actually DOING something in the VM that's not going to thrash the hard drive. Just streaming data, either in or out, over the network isn't even going to thrash the drive unless the machine is doing many different disk-intensive things at once, and you really have to be doing a lot to make real use of the pagefile. Any SSD, even when operating in real TLC/QLC mode due to low space, can easily handle a regular workload including whatever OneDrive files there are. You've made a lot of assumptions about the machine and the work it's doing in deciding that it's underperforming.

The AP/router isn't slow. 802.11ac is 802.11ac. Just being older hardware doesn't make the spec suddenly get slower. It wasn't the best 11ac router ever made, but OP obviously doesn't need the best. While the wireless link alone is not capable of maxing out a 1Gbps Internet connection, it IS capable of much better performance than what OP is getting and should absolutely be the last thing to consider. (Though I would bet that the limitations of OpenWrt on it are actually the problem.) It's also perfectly capable of handling a 1Gbps link to the ONT device, even if it doesn't have the switching throughput to handle 1Gbps between every switch port and maxing out the wireless all at the same time which is an unlikely scenario in any home use and given OP has two, maybe 3 total devices.

koala said:

It's likely the wireless AP is a bottleneck. I know I have to iterate step by step finding the bottlenecks. I'm just wondering if there's anything else to know before I get started.

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Nope, this is what you should be doing. IMO - skip the other posts in this thread til you've figured that out.

koala said:

Well, it's a mess right now. I'm using:

• their ONT
• my own wireless AP flashed with OpenWRT (TP-Link Archer C6 - AC1200 wireless router Gigabit, WiFi MU-MIMO dual band, multimode, 4 antennas, 4 LAN ports and 1 WAN of 1000/100/10 Mbps)
• a switch (which might not be gbps-worthy)

It's likely the wireless AP is a bottleneck. I know I have to iterate step by step finding the bottlenecks. I'm just wondering if there's anything else to know before I get started.

(If I get started, I got the files out and likely the next time I'll be able to run those processes in a VM in a datacenter, so I'm not too worried...)

(No ethernet surge protectors. I'm careless with the cables I use, though.)

Click to expand...

I would be curious about this switch before looking too deeply into other possibilities. It's far from impossible that this is an older and/or weird switch model that only does 10/100mbps ethernet, and your reported results on the wired "weeny" computer is exactly what I would expect to see if you were maxing out a 100mbps ethernet connection. Although if the WAP is behind this switch that would seem to disprove this given you're doing better than 100mpbs there.

The speed results on the desktop using wireless could be a limitation of the WAP, the wireless adapter on the computer, or the environment. Given that we know the WAP model and that should be capable of better, I would guess the adapter or the environment. Although it's also possible OpenWRT is losing you some functionality that depends on proprietary blobs it doesn't implement.

First of all:

1. What do you mean 'working with' 100 GB files? Just uploading or downloading a file that large once a week? Once a day? Rendering a video from a source that big to a smaller encoded file and then uploading the smaller file? What do you do that needs more bandwidth? We need to know that before we can recommend addressing why it takes longer than desired.

2. Is the Celeron machine doing any of the work on those files? Encoding? Uploading via HTTPS? SCP/SFTP? VPN encrypted? Compressing on the fly? If so, check the CPU use on the machine while you are doing that 'working with' the large files and see if it seems busy, even if a single core seems at 100%.

3. If the Celeron machine is the main work horse you use, is it wired to the network or using wifi? IF it is using a wired connection, there is little point improving the wifi performance to address that issue.

4. If it is wireless, the router/AP running openwrt might be the issue. Openwrt is often not optimized to take advantage of all wireless features on given hardware so even though it might add seemingly cool features for the network, it might take away basic performance for wifi or NAT/packet forwarding by doing everything 'in software' rather than via the hardware supported capabilities the router uses when loaded with stock firmware.

5. If the main PC is on wifi, get it onto a wired connection if you can or figure out what wifi adapter you have.

6. Your wifi router is a bit long in the tooth. It claims "Simultaneous 2.4GHz 300 Mbps and 5GHz 867 Mbps connections for 1200 Mbps of total available bandwidth*" which really means that best case you will get around 110 megabit on 2.4 Ghz or 340 megabit on 5 Ghz channels. Real world will probably be much worse if you have more than a small number of wireless devices in use or if your neighbors also have a lot of wifi devices in use nearby. You could upgrade it to something new for relatively cheap and solve the potential openwrt issue.

No idea if this is offered where you are but it is cheap, I bough a couple for myself and it is a substantial improvement over my Archer C7 that I had before (which I thought was fine for years).

View: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07HY4TNLW

I get nearly 1 Gbps on wifi now with my higher end devices.

7. If you are using a wired network connection, what is the switch in use and what network adapter does the computer have? Does it show a 1 gigabit link?

Lord Evermore said:

I disagree with like 80% of this. You seem to be one of the type that thinks everything has to be the best available to just get a basic job done, that ever user needs to have a supercomputer just in case they might one day want to run supercomputer workloads. That Celeron should be able to handle that dinky 1Gbps link just fine, even with a crappy drive, when just performing a speed test at the very least. OP never said anything about running heavy loads on it, and even with a VM running, unless it's actually DOING something in the VM that's not going to thrash the hard drive. Just streaming data, either in or out, over the network isn't even going to thrash the drive unless the machine is doing many different disk-intensive things at once, and you really have to be doing a lot to make real use of the pagefile. Any SSD, even when operating in real TLC/QLC mode due to low space, can easily handle a regular workload including whatever OneDrive files there are. You've made a lot of assumptions about the machine and the work it's doing in deciding that it's underperforming.

The AP/router isn't slow. 802.11ac is 802.11ac. Just being older hardware doesn't make the spec suddenly get slower. It wasn't the best 11ac router ever made, but OP obviously doesn't need the best. While the wireless link alone is not capable of maxing out a 1Gbps Internet connection, it IS capable of much better performance than what OP is getting and should absolutely be the last thing to consider. (Though I would bet that the limitations of OpenWrt on it are actually the problem.) It's also perfectly capable of handling a 1Gbps link to the ONT device, even if it doesn't have the switching throughput to handle 1Gbps between every switch port and maxing out the wireless all at the same time which is an unlikely scenario in any home use and given OP has two, maybe 3 total devices.

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Re-read the original posts. OP stated they are running/processing 100GB data files and doing transfers to and from OneDrive. Fully loaded down Celerons are known to bog down (documented, try a search on web forums about this, known to be bad for information/data mining large data sets - such as 100Gb files) on local data loads this large. I'm basing responses on provided data and I DID STATE GENERAL EXAMPLE for part of said responses.

As for the Router/AP, no where did I state for OP to obtain the latest and greatest. That being said, the TP-Link Archer C6 is over 6 years old and does have trouble keeping a true 1Gbps connection (physical connections at 1Gbps, but we are talking sustained throughput, not just local/wan connection) under load over multiple WiFi and wired connections at the same time. Multiple documented prior testing via more than a handful of review sites shows it truly maxes out at less than gigabit under load with single connection tests. That only tracks downwards when handling multiple units attempting to route through at the same time. Pure raw connections are NOT the same as real-world with overhead and translation. You continue to confuse this on several of your posts.

Honestly, @Lord Evermore this isn't the first time you mis-read something and wrote inflammatory responses on misperceptions. Stop attacking others you disagree with and try to contribute to the conversations.

@Paladin made/makes some of the same observations and suggestions (better worded/detailed) regarding the OP's request for observations and assistance.

BTW, per TP-Link's own forums:
https://community.tp-link.com/en/home/forum/topic/192286?sortDir=ASC&page=1 and https://community.tp-link.com/en/home/forum/topic/194950?sortDir=ASC&page=1 (for just 2 threads/examples of many). There are several posts of the C6 series having problems getting proper and full throughput on ports for 4 common issues: network cabling, using QOS, using NAT, and simply- defects with the specific device network ports- forcing a downgrade in auto-negotiation to 100Mbps, even on the WAN side (even when any/all ports are hard set to 1Gbps Duplex). Being that this is an older unit, it raises the odds of a possible problem related to this- that's even before diving into alternate firmware for the router/AP.

Paladin said:

1. What do you mean 'working with' 100 GB files? Just uploading or downloading a file that large once a week? Once a day? Rendering a video from a source that big to a smaller encoded file and then uploading the smaller file? What do you do that needs more bandwidth? We need to know that before we can recommend addressing why it takes longer than desired.

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Why does it matter why he wants to get more bandwidth? He wants it, and wants help getting it. Why do you want to try to talk him out of trying to get it? Speed tests show low speeds, not just the work he's doing with the files.

tiredoldtech said:

Re-read the original posts. OP stated they are running/processing 100GB data files and doing transfers to and from OneDrive. Fully loaded down Celerons are known to bog down (documented, try a search on web forums about this, known to be bad for information/data mining large data sets - such as 100Gb files) on local data loads this large. I'm basing responses on provided data and I DID STATE GENERAL EXAMPLE for part of said responses.

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Completely irrelevant. He's performing speed tests and getting less than 100Mbps. That Celeron can easily handle a 1Gbps network connection on a speed test, so that's what needs to be fixed. Whatever he's DOING with the files on either machine is obviously already working for him, and it's only the data transfer that is an issue. He's working with the files, and when he's done with them, they need to be transferred and the network speed is far slower than it should be, and the files themselves are absolutely irrelevant to that.

tiredoldtech said:

As for the Router/AP, no where did I state for OP to obtain the latest and greatest.

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Your first statements are "get better hardware because yours is old and slow", with no evidence for it being too slow for what he's doing, while all evidence points to an underlying network issue with the wired link and the function of the wireless. The C6 should be capable of far higher speeds than what he's getting, which indicates a problem that can be resolved, without needing to replace the hardware simply because it's not the latest and greatest, and it could possibly be enough performance for this user since it would let the wired computer get full use of the Internet service and greatly improve the wireless performance to a point that may be sufficient between the two. He has TWO devices on the network (probably 3 with a phone). He's not overloading the C6 with devices, and gigabit Internet providers rarely provide true gigabit speeds themselves, and it's even worse if a router is passing through the ISP's own gateway rather than a direct connection (since the gateway probably isn't capable of bridge mode).

Fix the obvious problems, then decide if something really needs to be replaced to improve things to your liking, unless you just like throwing money away (which it seems is the case here anyway).

Known problems with the C6's network port speeds were not an obvious problem, and have nothing to do with it just being "long in the tooth" as you initially stated. If you'd started out with "the C6 has known issues with link speeds", I'd have agreed with you. Given that, it's very likely that the LAN port is only running at 100Mbps given the speeds seen (even if the switch is Gigabit-capable), but the WAN is at 1Gb since the wireless is capable of 200Mbps transfers, and that the 5GHz isn't even working right with OpenWrt so the wireless device is only working with 2.4GHz. If that's the case then obviously the C6 should be replaced and that will probably fix everything. Without knowing ahead of time about the known issues, that was not an obvious thing to consider, and it's not like this is a router that everybody has heard about and is aware of such problems, but following proper troubleshooting procedures would have eventually found the LAN link speed problem. WITHOUT that known issue, everything I said still applies - it's a perfectly serviceable router based on the specs.

Lord Evermore said:

Why does it matter why he wants to get more bandwidth? He wants it, and wants help getting it. Why do you want to try to talk him out of trying to get it? Speed tests show low speeds, not just the work he's doing with the files.

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Because it helps to understand what someone wants to do with a 100GB file before you recommend how to accomplish it.

Same as if someone said, "Would a school bus help me with my 500 pound gorilla?"

Uh... depends what you want to do with the gorilla? Run it over? Take it to school? Bathe it? Teach it to drive a manual transmission? Show it the color yellow?

After near 30 years of helping people with technical questions, it has become clear to me that understanding their actual needs is really important in giving a good recommendation. I never tried to talk anyone out of getting anything. Not even sure what you are referring to getting?

koala said:

a switch (which might not be gbps-worthy)

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As you are likely aware, a simple 5 or 8 port gigabit switch can probably be had for less than your monthly broadband bill, if it turns out the existing switch is a bottleneck. So if your wired clients are being choked by the switch, that is a quick and easy fix.

Also, good quality pre-made patch leads are readily available in many lengths and colours to suit your requirements (at least in the UK, look on eBay) so again, cheap and easy to fix if you identify a problem link.

What are these 20-10gb files?

Photoshop? Wordpad?

If anything, swap out any easy to replace patch cables with decent quality Cat5e or Cat6a patch cables and maybe upgrade your router with a new one if you find your internet service still does not meet your expectations but be sure to test with a wired computer for internet performance first so you can isolate wifi peformance from the equation. Wifi is almost never as good as you might hope once you have it in a real world setup.

Other than that, sounds like you have a good resolution that is better for your needs even if you had found and fixed a problem on the local network.