# Home Network bottlenecks



## Andre (Feb 15, 2010)

Hello Folks

I have been wondering about my home network. I upgraded my internet service to 150mbps and I wonder if all my connected equipment (TVs, Bluray (for Netflix), etc) are getting all that they can. Here is some additional information about the network

From the service provider's modem I have a ASUS RT-N66U this is connected to two Gigabit switches (1 for the theather and one for the rest of the house). The house was internally wired with CAT 6, however I don't know if the RJ45 connectors used were CAT 6. The patch cables from the switches "Should" be Cat 6 but a few do not have a CAT rating on the cable that I could see.

So I was wondering if there was software that I could run on my main windows computer in the basement that would snoop through all the connections to see if any had bottleneck because of sub standard connections


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## theJman (Mar 3, 2012)

Even if the patch cables were really old cat5 they should be good for 100Mbps, so not full bandwidth but still fast. If it's cat5e than it's rated for 1000Mbps and it could easily handle whatever service you have. If the patch cables are not marked and aren't cat6 then there is a very good chance their cat5e as I don't think you can even buy cat5 anymore.

Does your laptop have a gig ethernet port? If so, it might be cheaper/easier to test performance by getting a short cat6 cable and connect it to each end point (TV, player, etc) and then browse to someplace like speedtest.net and check the throughput. Probably the first place to test is the uplink from the service provider, just to see if you're even getting 150Mbps there. If it's from a cable company you're likely not as all they provide is shared bandwidth and they won't guarantee a speed.


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## Soundernaline91 (Aug 24, 2019)

You can run a trace route command to find out if the router is causing the bottleneck. Access the command prompt by typing "cmd" (without quotes) into your search bar, and then type "tracert [destination IP]" (without quotes) to run the Traceroute command, where the destination IP is a specific IP address or website URL. 

As packets move along the path from your computer to the destination IP, this diagnostic test asks every router it goes through to report back to your computer. Among this information is the amount of time it took for that device to respond. In a healthy network, devices respond in reasonable amounts of time. A router causing a bottleneck, however, will report a significant increase in time over the previous router. If the problem router has the name of your ISP in it (such as "myISP.router32.backbone.net"), then the bottleneck likely resides with your ISP. If this is the case, note the results of the Traceroute before closing the command prompt window, and contact your ISP with this information.


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