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Forum Discussion
Orbi satellite ethernet port speed
Just picked up an Orbi last night and have a question on the speed of the satellite ethernet ports. I have the satellite in my family room entertainment center and am shocked at how fast the wifi is there. The entire reason I bought the Orbi was how slow my wifi was in that room. I have a 3300 sq ft. U shaped house the the internet feed is on the front wall at the top of one of legs of the U so to get to the family room the signal has to go through 2 stucco walls, a hallway and then through another wall into the family room. With the Airport Extreme I was using, I could get around 16-18 Mbps up and down (I have 150/150 FIOS in the house). The Orbi is repeatedly giving me 145-147 Mbps down (testing on an Apple TV using wifi). Needless to say I was very happy about that as I thought I'd have to move the satellite closer to the office with the main router in it.
Now my question: I have an 8 port switch in my entertainment center that feeds my TV and various other devices. It was plugged into a Powerline adapter that was giving my around 40 Mbps speed, but is susceptible to interference and would occasionaly hang which makes it annoying to use for streaming or gaming. As I mentioned the wifi signal is very fast. When I plug the switch into the satellite and run the speed test from my Apple TV using a wired connection, the speed drops to around 95 Mbps . The overhead of a switch should be minimal so I can't figure out why it is so much slower. Any ideas?
5 Replies
You should get more than 500 Mbps througput using that switch over the Orbi backhaul. You need Gigabit Ethernet gear to see that level of speed though.
It definitley sounds like you have a 100Mbps wired link somewhere in there.
Is your switch actually a Gigabit switch?
If so, is everything connected with Cat5e or better cables?
Are the ports on the swtich set to 100 Mbps for some reason?
Are the devices you are using to test speed capable of Gigabit operation?
https://support.apple.com/kb/SP724?locale=en_US
Apple TV 4th generation ethernet port is only 10/100. Surprising isn't it? I was shocked.
So that 95 is about as good as you are going to get with a wire.
Wow. that is a great find - thanks! I was wondering if something was set up incorrectly.
It is pretty disappointing to read this, but given how it also doesn't support 4K or HDR I guess I shouldn't be surprised.
richpjr wrote:Wow. that is a great find - thanks! I was wondering if something was set up incorrectly.
It is pretty disappointing to read this, but given how it also doesn't support 4K or HDR I guess I shouldn't be surprised.
loomis1975 just confired what I suspected. You were testing over a 100 Mbs link.
I hope it's clear that you will still get >500Mbps throughput with your 8-port switch over Orbi backhaul, if you are using wired devices with a Gigabit Ethernet.
I'm not sure there's much to be disappointed about. 4K video only requires about 25 Mbps.
