Q. why would my wifi be better then a connected Ethernet?

I’m just curious… I have comcast cable, I pay for 300 MB/s down/20 MB/s up… And I use to get that on all my devices till about a week ago, and nothings changed… but now my PC and Xbox when connected to my ethernet is only getting about 90 down and 6 up… yet on my laptop and when I disconnect those same devices and use my wifi I get around just under 300 down and 18-20 up… how could that be possible? I always thought the rule was connected is better. And yes, I’ve checked all the wires, the modem, reset it, unplugged it etc etc… still can’t seem to get back to what I once had and still paying for. (next call is to comcast.)

How old is the ethernet cable and/or the router? A CAT5 cable (it might say it on it) will limit it to 100 Mbps down/up. A CAT5e or CAT6 will allow 1000 Mbps.

With a command prompt in Windows (type cmd.exe in after a Win + R) you can check your adapter connect speed using the following command:

wmic NIC where NetEnabled=true get Name,Speed

…and you’ll get a result like this:

Intel(R) Ethernet Connection (7) I219-V 1000000000

or less if it’s 100 Mpbs (100000000, one less zero).

So it could be the cable, the network adapter built into the PC (unlikely if not that old) or the modem/router, and if the latter is giving you 300 down on wireless then probably not that. You might just need to get a CAT5e replacement cable…

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Thanks… but with all the same stuff last week it was 300/20… but I’ll check. The PC is my 15 year old Alienware, which is finally getting replaced tomorrow. (if FedEx comes in a tropical storm, lol) but the new Xbox Series X… that’s brand new… the router is what Comcast gave me years ago, probably time to swap that up.

Thx.

Yeah, if it was working fine before then that’s probably not it.

You could monitor what else the PC is doing/downloading, incase something else is using bandwidth while you run the test that shows 90/6?

I haven’t used it for a while, but something like this is pretty good at showing network activity on a PC:

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Are all the ethernet cables connected to comcast’s box? I would think that’s the problem. If you have a switch instead, that’s where I would look for the problem.

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