Testing limits of home Ethernet wiring

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unmesh

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Apr 17, 2017
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Regarding the Windows setup, I got my USB-C female to USB-A male adapters today and swapped one laptop with another that did not have any USB-C connectors but only USB 3.0 Type A ones. The iperf3 results are still the same at sub 2Gbps compared to 2.35Gbs with Linux.

Can anyone that is getting 2.35Gbps on Windows share your driver version? I'm on the latest from the Realtek website.
 

jpmomo

Active Member
Aug 12, 2018
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I was able to run at 10Gbps rates over some older cat5 cables from my office on the main floor to my lab in the basement. I tested this by connecting a small multi-rate switch to the wall jack under test. I already had a multi-rate switch connected in the basement lab. Some of my connections would only link up at the slower 5Gbps rate but some would link up at the full 10Gbps rate. This seemed to correlate to the distance between the 2 switches. I wound up putting a switch in between the 2 end switches (in the basement but closer to the home run cable going to the main floor.) this allowed me to get a couple more wall jacks to sync up at 10Gbps. the intermediate switch seemed to act as a type of repeater for the signal.
 

unmesh

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Apr 17, 2017
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I need to see if I can borrow some multirate switches for testing since I'm not quite ready to buy them
 

unmesh

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Apr 17, 2017
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I got some of the Wiitek 10G copper transceivers that support 2.5 and 5 and put one of them into a Mellanox CX-3 NIC with the 2.5G USB adapter at the other end of an Ethernet patch cable. They autonegotiated to 2.5Gbps but iperf3 shows 2.2Gbps from the slow end to the fast end but only 750Mbps in the other direction.

These transceivers supposedly do the autonegotiation themselves without support from the NIC/switch which report a 10G link and that might be the source of this anomaly.