Why does my internet slowdown when i use a cable?

Question

I own an acer gaming laptop. At home i connected to the internet using a lan cable connected to my router. This way the connection speed was way faster than if i used wireless. But recently my games and internet started to slowdown quite a bit and one day by accident i connected using wireless and i was astonished that the wireless speed was way faster than before and as a result there was no lag. Any reasons for this shift in balance?

Answer 1

check what sort of data usage plan you are on. if you have a capped data limit (eg 5Gb per month) then your internet will slow down when you hit the limit.

it is possible that when your internet and games slowed dow it was because you had used up all you data usage and where put onto 56k or something slow for the rest of the moth untill it was reset. if you connected to the internet via wifi when your internet speed had just been reset to 256k after 56k then it would seem a whole lot faster than the wire connection! but this is only because your data cap had been reset and the data rate increased.

check your data cap with your isp and what happens if you go over the limit. check what dates it is reset to full speed and watch how much data you use, in order to have optimum speed!

Answer 2

Most likely you have a hardware problem:

1.  Bad integrated switch (or port) in the router.

2.  Bad patch cable.

3.  Bad NIC.  (Or possibly a NIC driver issue.)

Answer 3

A couple thoughts:

Have your secured your wireless with a decent security scheme (WPA or WPA2) and hard-to-guess (i.e., hard-to-crack) password. Have you put a password on the administration pages of your router. If not, your wireless may be getting poached by someone nearby (assuming you live close enough to someone else for that to happen).

Additionally, some routers support Quality of Service (QoS) settings. It's possible that someone (e.g., the poacher or someone in your house) set those so that wireless gets priority over wired, so that their file downloads aren't slowed by your game playing. You could look at your admin pages to see if that is the case.

If you really aren't using the wireless capability, I'd recommend shutting it off completely. (You could also try that as a test to see if your wired speed improves.)

The other thought I had is that I once had a switch that would just slow down over time until it eventually ground to a halt. I would turn it of and on and all would be good again for a few days or a week. It's been replaced for just those reasons. You might try power-cycling your router.