Fibre 900, slower than expected speeds

[Keith87]

Hi,

I'm hoping I can be pointed in the right direction. I have wired Cat6a cables to my laptop, server and router. My server is next to my router and ONT. My laptop is further away, with two switches between. This is a test of my local network bandwidth.

Laptop download from LAN server -

Laptop upload to LAN server -

My Router is a Netgear R7000 connected directly to the ONT with Cat6a. I have used and tested different cables but I get the same, slower than expected speeds when running speed tests on the internet. My upload appears to be fine but my download rarely goes beyond 450Mbps. I have seen the download at 700Mbps but not often.

Here are some tests on the internet from my laptop -

 

 

 

This is a speed test on my server which is connected to my router/ONT within a foot of distance -

These tests were performed with no overhead on my network. I would appreciate your thoughts or some help. Thanks

[brookheather · Accepted solution]

The R7000 is over 10 years old and its cpu simply isn't up to the job of processing PPPoE at gigabit speeds - you will need a router with a faster cpu.  I assume if you try with your SmartHub2 connected you get the full download speeds?

[rbz5416]

Is this a new installation, an upgrade or always been like this?

As @brookheather said, try with the SH2 but it's not unheard of for the wrong profile to be assigned.

[michaelkenward]

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@Keith87wrote:

These tests were performed with no overhead on my network. I would appreciate your thoughts or some help. Thanks

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Have you tried different speedtests?

With the R7000 you can use the Netgear genie. This talks to the R7000 over wifi but it does that to ntell the router to test the speed between it and the ONT.

I assume that you have the latest firmware for the R7000. (There as a new one recently.) And that you did a factory reset when you introduced it to the ONT.

There is no reason why the R7000 shouldn't get near to Gbps speeds. There will always a some processing overhead but half the expected output is wrong. But piling on switches and servers does add to the work.

[brookheather]

Here is a similar thread with the same problem:

https://community.bt.com/t5/Archive-Staging/FTTP-910-110-NetgearR7000-300Mbps-download-limit/td-p/21...

[Keith87]

Hi guys,

Thanks for your responses. I updated my router firmware (DD-WRT v3.0-r55779 04/12/24) and went through my settings. I had Shortcut Forwarding Engine (SFE) enabled, which I thought would give me the best throughput. Changed the Shortcut Forwarding Engine setting to Cut Through Forwarding (CTF). My speeds have now almost doubled.

There may be stability and security concerns with enabling this setting, so it may not be a solution for the long term.

Thanks for the help!