Network, cables & switches

Good Saturday Morning all,

Recently I was browsing the community and came across a thread on radio disconnects.  I can't seem to find the recent thread. However in that thread there was a mention by a gent about finding a bad network switch and once he replaced it the radio issues disappeared.

I have had occasional radio disconnects as well.  I've not worried too much about it but after reading that post I became curious.

So yesterday I decided to check out all the switches in my home network.  I have quite a few due to when the house was remodeled I routed CAT5e everywhere so there are like 5 switches.

I found several interesting things.  At the point where my internet cable modem feeds my IQ router, the IQ router was feeding two managed 8 port switches.   These turned out to be 100mb switches.  I thought they were gig but it turned out they were not.

This was interesting because a couple months ago I had received the email from Comcast, my internet provider, that they had magically and at no cost to me upgraded my network speed.  Multiple speed tests from my computer still gave me a fairly lousy 40 mbps download.  But my IQ router would test and report over 500 mbps.

So I logged into the first managed switch and low and behold it reported its maximum capable rate of 100 mbps.  So why still was my computer not able to get close to 100!?  I began to dig into the managed switch menus and finally stumbled upon a statistics page which showed a whopping error stat of about 35%.  I checked the other managed switch and it was similar with actually a higher rate.

I tried a reboot of the switches and watched the stats pages during network download tests and both error rates rapidly incremented up to the 35% range.   These things were HP switches, not that old!  I went and checked my amazon order and clearly I tried to order gigabit switches but what I received were older models.  They looked the same but were 100 mb swtiches.

So first point:  When you order new equipment, especially these days of massive online ordering be very careful to check what you get.  I'm long past the return date on these switches by well over 3 years.

So I had a gigabit 8 port switch.  I swapped it in for one of the managed switches that feeds my desk computer.   Speed test.  Still 45 mbps.   So something still not right.

I had two trendnet gigabit switches with fiber sfp ports and I had fiber.  So as a test I ran one of those off the back of my IQRouter, then ran fiber across the floor to my computer desk and plugged the computer into the trendnet directly.

Speed test:  648 mbps download!   Wow...   I plugged the flex radio into this same trendnet and got my iPad out (cellular) and connected to my radio over smart link.  Suddenly things on the ipad were nice and snappy.  It was actually much more usable!

I ran a network cable to a WiFi access point from the trendnet.  I then fired up my maestro which had been kind of spitting and popping audio before.   I went outside, about 60 feet away to a nice table in the back yard and fired up my maestro on battery power.

I set the refresh rate to 25 fps and made the waterfall nice and fast.  Suddenly just nice clear audio.  No pops or clicks!

I logged into the WiFi access point and it was reporting very high throughput to the maestro.

So I continued to look at various wiring and switches and found another switch which was somehow degraded.  I replaced it with another small 8 port gig switch I had and suddenly Apple TV was MUCH happier as well.

So sorry this post got so long, but my point is simple.  If you have hardwired stuff or if you have multiple devices it pays if you are not sure of things to do some snooping around.

I ordered some new gig switches from amazon, all 12V DC powered so I can power them from nice quiet supplies but with my several patches and making use of the fiber channel I have all my WiFi access points, my desk computer, the radio all getting nice fast network throughput.

I left SmartSDR running last night and no disconnect.  I keep it running all the time and I will monitor to see if I get dropouts.

So check your gear!