Sooooo...... I have an old wrt 54g wireless router that can do the 54mbps wifi stuff, and has a 4 port 100-base T switch builtin. I just upgraded my internet connection to some sweet comcast, and I was getting some surprisingly slow download.
Initially my speedtest.net test that I ran earlier in the day topped out at about 28Mbps (I must have not been going through the wifi router for the initial speed tests), which pleased me because the old centurylink was giving me about 3. Hours later I started doing a steam download which was topping out at about 1.4MB/s (multiply by 8 and it's about 11.2 Mbps) which was unimpressive. Then my iTunes download was being slow too, my windoze performance manager said I was pulling about 5 Mbps.... which seemed way off. Time to troubleshoot.
My setup was Comcast modem -> WRT54g -> gigabit switch -> computers. No biggie right, since the WRT54g has a 100-base T connection right? Plus it's already where it is, and moving it would be annoying.
Well, did some googling on "wrt 54g switching speed" (since it's a switch and not a hub, and hubs would be really sad). So anyway, some people were saying their wrt 54g tops out at about a combined 13mbps, which is really really sad.
Anyway, bypassed the WRT54g and went straight to the gigabit -> computers, and my "3 hour" download dropped down to 9 minutes, and network performance says 30Mbps, which I'm a lot happier with. Going to Tee the wifi off the gigabit router so the wifi people can go be slow together. Funny thing is I always had wondered why advertised 54Mbps wifi was only getting about 20% usage.... guess the wrt54g internals are only intended to be used with the 11Mbps older wifi and it got some new protocols it can't really handle. I may or may not care enough to replace it, but anyway, was a maddeningly insightful night.
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