Vodafone router fauly ethernet ports

[the_weegie]

Hi,

Posting on behalf of less technical elderly parents who signed up to the Vodafone 100mb but then got upgraded to 900mb.

Parents were complaining about slow internet speeds, I have their firestick and PC connected through Cat6E ethernet cable. I plugged my own laptop into the first ethernet port and got very low download speed (4mbps) but high upload speed (813mbps) (HomeSpeed1.jpg attached).

I rebooted the router and tried this again later in the evening with different cables in different ethernet ports and got similar results (HomeSpeed2.jpg and HomeSpeed3.jpg).

I’ve run a tracert to bbc.co.uk twice (HomeSpeed4.jpg) which doesn’t show any excessive latency, nor does a ping -t (HomeSpeed5.jpg).

I’ve tried choosing different servers on speedtest instead of the default Vodafone one but similar results (HomeSpeed6.jpg and HomeSpeed7.jpg).

I’ve been running a thinkbroadband quality monitor for a few days (HomeSpeed8.jpg) and it shows low latency and no dropped packets.

My final test was to connect to the wifi on the router instead of plugging in with an ethernet cable and low and behold I get much better speeds (HomeSpeed9.jpg). Not 900mbps but I’m willing to accept that’s more likely a limitation of the wireless adapter in my laptop which is a few years old. 

Given the broadband quality monitor, tracert, and ping -t all indicate no problems with the outside world, and the relatively high speeds of the wifi the only conclusion I can come to is there’s something wrong with the router, either the firmware or the ethernet ports themselves. I’ve used 3 different cables that I know to be good (tested them in my own home router) in 3 different ports on the Vodafone router and all give speeds approx. 5mbps.

My parents live in an old sandstone house where wifi propagation is pretty poor (thick stone walls, gravel under the floorboards for sound deadening etc) so ethernet really is the best way of getting an internet connection where it needs to go.

What’s the best way to go about getting this fixed?

[bain]

Are you sure that the results are repeatable? I've found the results from speedtest.net and the speedtest app can be a bit misleading and vary by quite a bit, sometimes less than 600mbit, then a few hours later over 900mbit. The best way to check port speed is to plug in a laptop with ethernet and run an iperf server, then use another laptop as iperf client and either plug that one in or use Wi-Fi depending on what you want to test. I've done this with the white WiFi 6 power hub and found that iperf tests between the ethernet laptop and WiFi laptop do run at close to the limits of the 1gbit laptop ethernet port (actual result was about 950mbit iirc). These local tests are very consistent, unlike the internet speed tests.

[Cynric]

@alpacanations If you are concerned about the router, what speed does the router show that you are getting and what's in the log?

[alpacanations]

it's definitely due to the powerhub router only having gigabit ports which don't give the full speed consistently. I know this because on virgin media their hub has a 2.5gbe lan port, same as my motherboard and I was getting 1.1 gbps consistently but if I switched to one of the gigabit ports the speed immediately went down. I switched to my own router today (GL.iNet GL-MT6000) and I am now seeing up to 938 Mbits basically at all times. In my opinion, the vodafone superhub is fine if you only care about wifi speeds, as it can deliver them just fine, but it's not suitable for wired connections as you will not be using your 910 plan to it's full potential.

[Cynric]

@alpacanations There have been odd things mentioned with the THG3000 with different ports having different speeds, particularly port #1. However I'd want to see what the THG3000 thinks its speed is and are there any errors in the log. I have no recollection of the WiFi ever being better than the cabled connection.

[alpacanations]

The lan connection was displayed as 1000mbit if I remember correctly and the log wasn't showing anything too strange other than igmp snooping packets being ignored

[Cynric]

@alpacanations I think that could be the mode the port is operating at rather than the actual speed.

[bain]

> I switched to my own router today (GL.iNet GL-MT6000) and I am now seeing up to 938 Mbits basically at all times.

It's interesting that changing to a non-Vodafone router appears to have fixed the issue for you. @weegie is based in Glasgow and had the same issue, that ethernet would slow down in the evening, but WiFi was unaffected. In this Edinburgh thread @Dobbie reported the same problem. And in this Aberdeen thread users have been reporting slowdown in the evening, slowdown that can be fixed by using a VPN. I have personally seen downstream bandwidth around 75mbit in the evening, but it rises to 300mbit if a VPN is used, however in my case the slowdown occurred on both ethernet-connected Orbi mesh and the Vodafone power hub WiFi.

I wonder if it's not a hardware fault with ethernet ports, but some issue with the network routing packets differently because the type of connection or router causes the type of packet to change. Perhaps for those who are seeing different results on ethernet versus WiFi the ethernet is ipv6 and WiFi ipv4, or vice versa. Maybe changing to a different router fixed the issue because it has different IP settings, like whether or not ipv6 is enabled.

[Ripshod]

You've hit the nail on the head there. I was involved in the Aberdeen thread and my observations were:

• The problem occurrs every evening during peak hours
• The slowdown affected both my Vodafone router and my asus. 
• Sometimes it affect just IPv4, sometimes just IPv6, and sometimes both.
• Didn't happen when the first two octets of my IPv4 were in the same range as my gateway.

Conclusion:

It has nothing to do with what router is used, and everything to do with vodafone's routing. One possible (but likely) reason for this being deliberate is a section of vodafone's network is down and we're being routed around it. I just wish someone from vodafone would acknowledge there's a problem and possibly give us an end date.

They wouldn't do this during the daytime and risk upsetting their high paying business customers. 

[Cynric]

@Ripshod Their high-paying and/or high-importance customers of course can "go to Pluto"[1] in the evenings though 🙂

[1] A Roman saying

[Ripshod]

As it's showing 1000Mb then physically and electrically the cable is good - any problem it would show much lower, if at all. This doesn't however preclude an internal fault with the router's electronics.