My network transfer speed has dropped, why?

Hardware Hub Networking
1

I set up a shop in my back yard for my computer lab and I ran some Cat5e to it. I used to get a transfer rate of 100 MB/s and now it is 11MB/s

My setup before was the server was sitting right beside my desk with one swtich that connected my PC and server (plus everything else).

Now I have a swtich in the lab that connects to the server and computers in the lab, then back out into the house again around 120ft. Inside the house it goes into another switch to the PC that was right beside server.

So I added a 120ft cable and one additional switch and have lost around 80MB/s in transferring files to the server. They are Gigabit switches and I know that no one is using the server. I also read that Cat5e is rated for around 320ft runs then lose bandwidth. I am 200ft shy of this on this run of cable.

Is this normal to lose that much bandwidth over that distance or is there a problem somewhere else?

2

Try setting it all up in the same place and swapping out long cable for a shorter one and see if that fixes it. I've done about a 300ft run outside to a barn and got decent speeds (was a while ago, don't recall exact figures), but it was cat6. What I can say though is that even with cat6 it can be pretty easy to accidentally physically stress the cable one way or another on longer runs. In my case I found the kinks and cut them out, then put on connectors and inserted a female to female to splice the run. Of course handling the cable increases the risk of damage, so it would be a good idea to bring the equipment back in and do the test with the short cable first, in case it isn't the wires after all.

TL;DR use the process of elimination

3

I just finished up solving my problem. I took your advice and started to work my way backwards and I found that the problem was I had about 7 kinks in the cable behind the wall plate. When I ran the cables I thought I would just stuff the excess inside the wall but I didn't realize at the time it could kink and that would also hurt transfer rates very badly.

Lesson learned and thanks for the advice. My mind went straight to it being something super terrible.

I just wanted to post the update in case someone else had this problem.

4

thanks 

 i am going to do some longer runs (50 feet in drop ceiling) but still good advice