 Hi guys, welcome back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Rosal here. Today I'm going to be doing a video about networking. I've done a bunch of videos about home networking in the past. And to my surprise, they've actually proven to be the most popular of the video content I've shared here on YouTube. A specific really, really dry video about how to set up dual one networking on a TP-link load balancer has ended up being my top most viewed video. So I guess that's why people come to YouTube for very specific information. Finally, after years of dealing with very, very bad home internet with about a two MBPS upload speed and having to sort of coordinate my YouTube uploads when my wife wasn't using the internet because we couldn't upload and download at the same time, the bandwidth was garbage, the speed was garbage. And I spent a lot of time rigging up this insanely elaborate home internet setup with cellular, cellular, but I bought a cellular router. I had the ISP, I put them into a load balancer. I had automatic failover so that if the lousy internet connection went down, we'd at least have something a lousy cellular thing. But it didn't really fix the issue because although I managed to basically obliterate downtime by having my two connection router, I still had A or B lousy internet. So Fiber finally came along after waiting for it. They began putting in Fiber here in Israel a few years ago. They said like last year, they'd have half the country done by year end. And the various ISPs here in Israel have these little sort of checking utilities you put in your address and it says, hey, Fiber's available or sorry, there's no Fiber yet. So I was trying this literally every two months for the past year, ISP by ISP checking the lookup tools, waiting to pounce the moment Fiber was there. I don't know what possessed me to check a few days ago but I did and it finally said there was Fiber. So I didn't waste any time. I called them back the next day, the ISP, they sent out a guy two days later. They connected Fiber into my office where I do these videos and I couldn't believe I was getting 100, 100 internet download speed of 92 which didn't really excite me because I don't really know why a super high download speed makes a big difference to your network but the upload speed was 100 and that to me was internet Nirvana after spending the best part of three years dealing with a two Mbps upload speed horrible bandwidth as I mentioned, being able to push videos up to YouTube in minutes instead of hours was like magical so I posted a screenshot onto my Facebook feed telling my friends who've heard about my internet dilemma why have I got Fiber, look at this, it's amazing and what I started getting back was comments being like I think there's something wrong, you should be getting like much faster download speed than 92, you should be getting more like 900 or something. So after the initial excitement I was like, okay well I guess if I am paying for a lot better I should probably see whether it's just like my connection or whether there actually is something wrong on my network. So I went through the kind of various diagnostic procedure of assuming there is a gigabit internet connection coming in, why am I only getting 92 on my desktop? I use day to day for my computing, a desktop computer, it's for running Ubuntu Linux and it's connected by ethernet into the router. So there's kind of very limited explanations for why gigabit internet could be turning into 100 Mbps internet and I went through those one by one firstly starting with the networking card, the NIC, the network interface controller does that have a gigabit port? Now if you have, that's what I discovered with a little bit of help from the good people on Reddit unless your computer is like 10 years old, even more it's probably got gigabit, there's three speeds of ethernet port you're going to encounter on any halfway modern computer. One of those is 100 Mbps, that means the port can support up to 100 Mbps, the next one is 1000 Mbps also called gigabit right, 1000 giga. That's the gigabit internet which is kind of standard and I went most recently developed parts of the world which has the infrastructure to support it and finally you've got 10 Gbps. Now I'm sure there is probably ethernet ports made with even higher throughput than 10 Gbps but that's already like an insanely fast level of throughput. So those are the three possibilities. So I checked off my network card, yep, it's got the speed. I checked off that the ethernet interface was set up correctly on my operating system on Ubuntu. That was set up correctly, checked the cable and it seemed to be fine. Now it was Cat 5V cabling and I put that into Google and it said both Cat 5V and Cat 6 can handle speeds of up to 1000 Mbps. So I think it was a bad cable but this is the spoiler alert. So I spent about two hours on the phone today to my ISP saying what's the story? They confirmed that I was getting far worse speeds than I should be getting. I went through the diagnostic together. Spoiler alert, it was basically a cable that even though it was Cat 5V and that to me still looks like it should support gigabit. I have a huge bag of, a big bag of ethernet cables that I built up over the years just by, you know, installing networks and that kind of thing. And I went through it and I said, well let's find a Cat 6 cable in here. So I pulled out one cable and I said, oh great, this is a Cat 6. So just when I was about to give up hope, I said, let's just try connecting directly from the rider to my computer using this Cat 6 cable. Put it in the ethernet port, went on to Uclas speed test and boom, my 90 Mbps connection was 950 Mbps. The answer was the cable. So again, whether that's a bum cable or maybe there is some fine print, certain types of Cat 5V cables, but there's no reason if you are buying ethernet cable today, it would make sense to get the fastest Cat cable. I don't know what the fastest Cat of ethernet cables. I know there's Cat 7. I don't know if Cat 8 ethernet cables on the market yet but whatever, whenever you're watching this video, get the latest ethernet cable and it's gonna be obviously backward compatible with slower network speeds but earlier iterations of ethernet cable may not be. Anyway, what I thought I'd do was having solved this issue. I thought I would put together a video like the one I'm doing and just kind of diagram out what could be going wrong if you're running into this issue yourself. I'm gonna make myself just a little bit smaller here. So here's a network diagram of how my network is set up. Now this is only for the purpose of illustration and I don't mean to insult anyone's intelligence. I thought I was reasonably good at networking before this but just to kind of show the steps that I went through and that could be affecting your internet. So my internet goes a bit like this. I have a router here. I mentioned that my desktop computer is connected. So I have my desktop over here and I'm using ethernet cabling. I'm just gonna use a line to depict the ethernet cabling and I have ethernet cabling going from one direct to the other. I also have a switch on my network and if you have a home network, you might have a switch, an ethernet switch here. The router connects to the ethernet switch. I'm just gonna get that lined off there and then I also have a this is all these are all the kind of ethernet devices on my network. I have a struggling a little bit with the diagramming software here. I have an access point here. I have a network attached storage for all my video stuff and NAS. This is here and these guys are connected via the switch. Right? And then obviously we also have wireless clients. Let's just say wifi clients. Let's just say laptop for instance, right? And they are connecting over wifi via the access point. Now this might be perhaps more complicated than some home networks, but I think it provides a good illustration of if you are getting slower speeds anywhere in the network, what could the issue be? So this router is actually router, let's just be accurate here, router slash modem. Now when you're dealing with home networking, the speed that you get on from the outside one, from the network from your ISP's network, right? That's coming into whatever point your connection gets to. Now if your ISP has supplied you with a router modem as is pretty common, it's reasonably safe to assume, almost certainly safe to assume they have given you one capable of supporting the max speed that the connection is capable of delivering, right? So that's called router speed equals X. Now the reason I'm doing that is because this is the maximum speed, right? X is our maximum speed. It's not possible for any of the clients on this network whether talking about the NAS or the laptop or the desktop computer, I'm just gonna give it a name here for the sake of thoroughness of my diagram. It's not possible for any of these guys to have a faster connection upload or download faster than X. There are a couple of very, very niche exceptions to that rule. The only one that I can think of currently is connection bonding, like maybe your desktop is connected via the router, but it's also got something like, let's say you've got two ethernet, you've got an NIC in your computer with two ethernet cards and you've got ISP2 piping into it as well and you're bonding up those two connections with something like speedify, right? That's a very, very niche thing that I was exploring when my network was bad and suffice to say that the vast majority of people aren't doing stuff like that. So in the 99% of cases, you're not doing strange stuff like connection bonding on your network. X, the maximum speed or the speed that your ISP is delivering into your house, that's going to be the maximum connection speed we can expect no matter whether we're talking about wireless or wired connected devices. Now, I call these speed bumps, right? And this is, I don't think it's an official networking term, it's just kind of the term I've come to do, I've come to use because I think it's logical and the purpose of this diagram in sort of this video is just explain all the speed bumps that are possible here. So as we said, speed equals X. Now, in my case, the desktop, it was directly connected to the router modem. So the only speed bump we have here is the cabling itself, right? In this case, as I explained, it turned out to be a bad cable, but perhaps it's just a variant of Cat5, I'm not really sure. That's something that can be slowing down your network. So technically, your first port of call really, if you're trying to diagnose these issues is to make sure that all the cables are capable of supporting the throughput. Now, this isn't intended to insult anyone's intelligence because I was struggling with this as well. You can't, if you have something that's going to slow down the network connectivity, that's going to cause not just a speed bump but a speed block. In other words, let's say your cable was, I don't know, Cat3 or something, right? Just for argument's sake. So we come in with our gigabit connection to our house, but then we have this Cat3 cable, which has a top speed of, I think, 100, 100 Mbps. Sorry, it's actually Cat3's only 10, okay? So max speed equals 10 Mbps. That means that this desktop computer is only going to be getting maximum 10 Mbps in both upload and download. Now, let's say you have, for argument's sake, something connected to your desktop or if this was a switch. Once the internet speed has been slowed down on the network by what I call a speed bump, whether that's a cable, a switch, or hardware inside the device, you can, that's it, you're finished. Anything connected downstream of that, you're not going to be able to magically make up the missing, in this case, 980 Mbps, right? So once it's slowed down, anything downstream of that point is going to be slowed down. So your first speed bump on, speed bump, as I call them, on your network is going to be the cabling. Now let's just continue with the computer. Let's say there wasn't that Cat3 cabling, which is providing that speed bump. The cable was, I'm just gonna write it down here, okay? Cat6 cabling. So now we know that, okay, the ISP is coming in at, let's say, ISP one gigabit, okay? From the outside, it's going into our Ryder modem. Cat6 cabling, we're good. We support up to gigabits, so we should be able to get all of the connection out of that. And then in the desktop, we have another potential speed bump, and the speed bump here is going to be the network, the NIC, the network card. If your network card doesn't support, isn't a gigabit network card, then you're not going to be able to get gigabit internet. Now, as I mentioned, if you've bought your computer in the last, it'll be very, very unusual that if your computer had an ethernet port, whether that was on the motherboard or on a network card, that it wouldn't support a gigabit. It's almost certainly can, but you might be in this, your version of the scenario might be that you're dealing with 10 gigabit internet, and the speed bump's actually because it's only a gigabit NIC. So that's the second common speed bump on the network. So we covered cabling, we covered the network interface card, and this goes for all the hardware, if you can check what the, and you have to, it's a good idea to check component by component. What is the RJ45 jack on your NES design to support in terms of max throughput? Is that greater than or equal to speed equals X? Okay. The second one that you can run on to is the switch, okay? So the switch, switches exist with different throughputs on the port. You can have, I'm sure they were out there in the wild, really old 10 MBPS switches, but the, again, the kind of likelihood is that your switch is going to be either rated up to 100 MBPS, 1,000 or 10,000, which is 10 giga, right? So 100 MBPS giga or 10 giga. And again, this can be a speed bump on the network. So we're coming in here with our gigabit internet, we're going into the rider, we're going out assuming that we're dealing with CAT 6 or above cabling here, and then we're coming into the switch. Now this switch in the case of our gigabit example needs to either be a 1,000 capable switch or a gigabit or a 10 gigabit internet switch. If this is only a 100 MBPS capable switch, we're going to have another speed bump. And in this case, the NAS and the access point, which are connected after the switch, would be capped at 100, right? So we have my problem with the desktop would be the problem on the NAS. We could measure the speed the NAS is guessing is getting and we would have gigabit internet here, but the NAS might only, let's say the switch here is 100 just for argument's sake, right? The NAS is probably going to be getting a 1990 connection because it can't, the gigabit connection has been slowed down at the switch because it's lost basically 90% of its speed and that's a very credible scenario. Now just continue with this example. In this example here where we have the switch which is 100 MBPS, the access point is also after the speed bump, right? The speed bump here, I'm just going to give it a color if I can, just give it I guess a red color because it's slowing down, right? So this is a speed bump in our network here. The NAS and the access point are both after the speed bump and the Wi-Fi client is after the speed bump too. So the access point here is going to have now max equals 100 MBPS and therefore a Wi-Fi that connects to the access point is going to have 100 MBPS minus X. Now the reason I say minus X is you're almost always going to lose a small bit of speed when you're connecting over Wi-Fi because of network interference, because of just the way the apartment's built with concrete walls. So, and that's kind of unavoidable even if you had a switch that was 1000, we're going to be expecting our wireless clients to get a little bit less than what we're getting from our wired clients, in this case, the desktop and the NAS. So I think I'm going to stop here. I think that's a, hopefully a decent job at sort of outlining all the ways in which a network can be slowed down by what I call speed bumps to reiterate. Those can be the cables on the network, all the switches on the network and the networking cards in all the end devices and probably a lot more stuff. You might have a load balancer on the router. You might have a firewall on the router. Everything, right? It all has to be, it's a chain. Everything has to be, if you want to avail of the full speed of your connection, at capable of throughput, at or greater than the connection coming into your home from the internet service provider. And if any of those things are not the case, you can, that speed bump can lose you, literally 90% of your speed. Hope that video was useful if you are doing your own home networking and you've just upgraded to fiber internet and you're getting this mysterious problem like I had that one of your clients is only getting a 100 Mbps connection. Worth plotting it on a network, your diagram, everything you have on the network, everything in the chain between your end client and the modem. Go through everything component by component, checking the network card, check the OS setup, check cable by cable. They're all either supporting the cast you need or above. You might want to actually test the cables because they might be a bad cable, try swapping out for different cable. And that way you'll eventually get to the bottom of what is causing the slow down in your network and hopefully be able to either replace or upgrade the infrastructure. I just bought two new ethernet switches today that are 1000 Mbps capable so that the stuff connected to my ethernet switch, the NAS and the access point aren't getting slowed down by this speed bump as I call them. Hope that video was useful. Thanks for watching. If you want to get more videos from me you consider subscribing to this YouTube channel.