When connecting your computer by cable, the maximum data rates may not be reached either. Network components such as firewalls, switches, routers and powerlines you bought may only be designed for 10 Mbps or 100 Mbps. The supported data rates are not always clearly evident. Otherwise, you must read up on this in the system documentation.

Switches

For switches, the issue often is that they are only designed for a transmission of 100 Mbps. Accordingly, faster subscriptions cannot be used to capacity at all. Problems may arise for switches with interfaces of 1 Gbps. Transfers from 1 Gbps to 100 Mbps require large enough interim storages, since data packages will otherwise be lost. If too many data packages are lost, the data rates that can be achieved will reduce significantly.

Router and firewall

Routers forward the data packages between the home network and the internet. Firewalls or firewall functions integrated in routers will review the data packages according to many different criteria. The performance capacity of routers and the firewalls should be so that the forwarding functions cannot reduce the data rate. There are many devices that will reach less than 100 Mbps for forwarding between the home network and the internet. This limitation should be listed in the technical documentation for the devices under the term "WAN-to-LAN Throughput". However, this is not always the case. A list of router performance limits can also be found online, under the term of "Router Throughput".

Powerline

Powerline uses the power supply of an apartment to transfer data. The quality of the wiring is important for this at all times. Older wirings may strongly influence the connection and data rates. Another influence factor in powerline use is the operation of other power devices. They may lead to data rate fluctuations and interruptions. The other way around, we have also observed that a powering installation could disturb other devices in the household, such as the TV or DSL modem.

The following table shows values measured for different powerline adapters in a connection between two rooms without any other power consumers.

Ethernet cables

For internet connections with more than 100 Mbps, all computers and network devices must have 1 Gbps interfaces. Gbit-capable wiring is necessary as well. If you have any older Ethernet cables with only four wires installed, your devices will only activate 100 Mbps connections, even if the two terminals have 1 Gbps interfaces.

For data rates up to 10 Gbps, you need 10 Gbps-capable network devices, network cards, and cabling. The Ethernet cables must be at least Category CAT 6 (less than 55 m in length) or CAT 6A.