Back in February Bored help me solve the serious software deficiencies of my Linksys WRT 1900 router.
As the grandchildren will be invading on June, I decided to add bandwidth. My plan from Paul Bunyan telecommunications was 20 Mbps up and down, but it always measured 30 Mbps. Anyhow I wanted to go to 100 Mbps. The only way I could do this was go on their Gigazone. The speed at our home on Benedict Lake would be 250 Mbps up and down for $72 per month.
So I signed up and the technician duly installed the new converter and gear in their box in the garage. A cat 5e cable was spliced with a connector to where my Cat 5 entered the conduit system. I was thrilled to see the 250 Mbps up and down on my wired HTPC and around 200 on Wi-Fi from my laptop.
Problems came in spades quickly. The Internet would slow, frequent contact would be lost with the Internet. Connection could be restored either by a router reboot or unplugging and reconnecting the cable from the PB box and the router. In addition DSL Reports gave only a C grade to the service, and there was a lot of buffer bloat.
So I quickly found out the Giganet is 'Not your Father's Internet.' It is T-Base, with a new 5 level coding system called PAM 5. To cut a long story short, this system is easily downgraded by interference in the cables and needs a better S/N ratio. In addition reflective errors from cable impedance miss match cause much more trouble. As well as having marginal bandwidth for the Gigazone, my hook up had a 20 ohm cable impedance miss match, likely to result in reflective bit errors.
Paul Bunyan engineers were convinced my cabling was the problem. My eldest son was little skeptical, but in fairness not highly.
Now although my cables run in conduit, we had a furnace freeze up one very cold January about 10 years ago. We had to add insulation behind the end of the garage in a hurry. This meant the conduit was not easily accessible.
So last Monday I bit the bullet and took down the end of the garage, to get to the conduit to the studio and the lower level great room. Conduit was placed form the PB box to the conduit location. Cat 6 high quality solid core cable was pulled from the PB box to my router in the studio chase unspliced. Two Cat 6 cables were run from the router to the system in the lower level great room.
After test there was 250 Mbps up and down wired and at least 150 Wi-Fi. Buffer bloat was minimal and connection to the NET grade A. So the end of the garage was put back together and more insulation added and easy access to the conduit system allowed for in future.
I left the Benedict yesterday for Eagan and there was no need for any reboots or reconnects since installing the Cat6.
I started this thread as some members may be upgrading to Gigazone service in the coming weeks, month and years. If you have Cat 5 you will need to upgrade to Cat 5E or better I think Cat 6, as the cost difference is minimal. Now you are set for 10 Gig service!