How much speed can an ISP provide on a copper/RJ45 connection actually? They have plans saying 50-100 mbps, but is it even theoretically possible without fiber? Fiber isn’t available in my area and my desk is 8-10 foot away from the router, what’s my best bet to increase smoothness and have low friction during video calls especially?

Do you mean from your home router to your machine or do you mean from the ISP’s router(which may be common for your society/area/etc - some ISPs do this) to the machine?

Airtel's copper lines limit speed to 40Mbps

@bitter-salesclerk-57109 oops, I mean the distance between the tp link router at my home and the desk I work on is around 8 foot. So if my isp uses cat 6, they can actually deliver what they mention in their plan list. I thought it was a marketing gimmick and has limit of max 25-30 Mbps just like Sathyajith mentioned above

I’m a little confused. Do you get the full 100mbps at your home router?

got it. Thank you Sharang 😄

I too faced the same challenge with act fibernet and D-Link router . On fiber I get 75 Mbps on router I get 22 Mbps so I spoke to D-Link team on chat and they helped me changing the channel numbers and other settings which resolved the issue. May be you too can reach your router company support team .

You can also use a 5Ghz WiFi router. I get the ISP limit (200 Mbps) speed even 10min away.

CAT6 cables can max out at 1 Gbps - this is the typical port speed available with major routers, laptops and desktops There are NOC/DC appliances which can do 10 Gbit on copper (CAT 6A or CAT7 cables) Nobody usually goes beyond 1 Gbit on copper. But in order to get 100+ Mbps over wifi you need a Wifi 5 or Wifi 6 router (802.11 ac or 802.11 ax) with the same being supported in your laptop/mobile. Plus wifi interference, signal strength may also play spoil sport in that.

@strong-evening-37474 There are two networks here: ISP network to your router: Even with copper, if your ISP has switched from ADSL to VDSL technology they can provide 100-150 Mbps depending on how far you are from their local exchange. Internal home network: This is either wired or wireless from your router to your devices. TL;DR version: Use an ethernet cable to the router and kiss your bandwidth issues bye-bye. Wired is most reliable and you will not face random issues, especially on video calls. Modern wireless 802.11 g/a/n/ac are good enough for video calls but depending on your neighbourhood you might have too many devices on the same channel. Stick to channel 1, 6 or 11 in the 2.4 GHz range or preferably move to 5 GHz which has few devices and more channels. To get 100 Mbps on wireless you will need a router AND a device that can do 802.11 ac/ax/n. And a single slow device on the network may slow it down for the others. Good routers have switches to disable legacy devices so you only cater to high-speed devices.

learned a lot, thank you so much everyone for sharing the details in such a simple manner. So my first action item should be to get a good dual band router, got it.

Off topic question: what are you guys doing with a 100mbps line? I use a 50mbps connection which is more than enough to run 4k videos on youtube. I mainly look for latency(ping) which sadly ISPs don't advertise.

I use a 25 Mbps plan, everything works fine, streams without buffer on all platforms. However I have noticed 2 consistent issues: downloads via s3 are slow (avg at 900-1000 kbps max as per chrome downloads UI) and video calls. Video calls are way smooth for me on 4G Jio don’t know how lol. I think it might be because of my 2.5ghz old router though + 25 isn’t exactly a great one for video calls I think?

25Mbps is more than enough. My twitch upload streams at 1440p / 60fps tops at 5Mbps. Unless you're doing 4k calls (most video calls have built in measure-and-downscale options), your video calls shouldn't be needing more than 2Mpbs

@modern-table-48211 makes sense, looks like I need to update my router first and go from there

I load balance 200 mbps and 50 mbps lines. I get 180 mbps or so aggregated speed. Why? I got used to the high speed and didn't want to downgrade 🤷‍♂️ I can change from load balancing to failover and get the full 200 mbps but I want the other line to be used a bit too so I don’t 😆

@kind-queen-6796 5 people at home, every OTT service can run simultaneously along with online school, video calls, whatsapp videos, etc. This is a real usecase, not hypothetical. I also push and clone massive git repositories and having symmetric 200 Mbps upload speed is something you get used to very quickly if you upload lots of stuff ;-) I get 1ms latency which means ssh connections to remote servers don't lag even with OTT in the background.

@helpful-gigabyte-47939 I see, that looks like a good use of bandwidth. I'm not a developer so the largest thing I push online is usually a 50kb png file. 😄

@modern-table-48211 In theory, yes, the video stream shouldn't need a lot of bandwidth. The problem happens because of "head of line blocking" on network routers where a large stray packet (say a huge attachment being sent in email) gets ahead of the TCP ACK packet needed by the media stream. So the server is waiting for the ACK and won't send data thus causing glitches. (very high level explanation) It is popularly also know as "bufferbloat". Several routers, especially those running Linux now have mechanisms to avoid this, if configured properly (which they rarely are). In such cases, having more upload bandwidth is a work around for the problem.

Amit: which ISP gives you symmetric 200?

@bitter-salesclerk-57109 Tata Sky Broadband, Airtel (Jio too, but they're not available in my area yet)

@bitter-salesclerk-57109 I am presently with a local operator specific to my area who has uplinks from Tata and Airtel. Gives symmetric speed. On 100 Mbps.

@bitter-salesclerk-57109 how do you load balance between two lines? I’m curious to know more on this as I’m planning to do similar setup between 50mbps & 100mbps line.

@witty-gigabyte-47737 get a router which can run openwrt & setup in it, or an appliance which can do pfsense. or if you want to explore, get a 4 port mini pc & configure stuff manually on linux - iptables, pppd, etc (my present setup - it was balancing 2 broadband and 4g a while back)

Thanks Nilesh for the info. I will do some learning on this topic.

I use Edgerouter X (by Ubiquity) which has the option to set it up in the firmware. Some others do too. Or you can install custom firmware which does that.

Several medium and high-end routers support load balancing. They usually have a WAN1 and WAN2 ethernet port. e.g. ubiquiti usg/edgerouter. Or if you have a spare PC lying around, and you know your way around networking and firewalls, you can set one up with Ubuntu/Debian.

A friend recently bought TP-Link R480T+ which does it natively. Idk how good/bad it is so DYOR.

Thanks guys for the info. I last month bought TP-Link AX1500 Router which I think doesn’t have multiple WLAN ports. I do have a spare PC lying around but my wire situation is not flexible enough to configure this thing.

so a good side effect of load balancing approach is we can have 2 different connections from maybe 2 different providers and even if 1 goes down the other can save us? Interesting!

@strong-evening-37474 that's not a side effect, in fact that is one of the main reasons why people keep two connections. Just for higher speed it doesn't make sense to handle all the hassles of maintaining two connections.

Indeed. I no longer need two connections being load balanced for speed. I need it because our ISPs don't have 'scheduled downtimes'. The local linesman has no qualms arbitrarily taking down the entire neighbourhood when trying to install a new connection or performing repairs.

This is a killer thread with loads of information which I wasnt even aware of currently I am using ION and planning to change to Airtel how is the service @helpful-gigabyte-47939?

@gorgeous-terabyte-12126 Airtel is rock solid in my area. YMMV.

Almost everyone praises Airtel

@helpful-gigabyte-47939 my current provider ION they always complain about the wire being cut whenever there is an issue but I have question regarding Airtel fiber connection they say on their website the speed is upto 100 mbps so it can also be 1mbps and such right?

@gorgeous-terabyte-12126 Yeah, local operators always complain about that because they pull wires over trees, lamp posts, etc. Airtel, Tatasky Broadband and Jio put them in hard plastic pipes in the ground that are very hard to accidently cut through. Once you get fiber to the home, you should get upto 10Gbps with the provider just changing the cards on their end and the router at your end. So you're pretty much set for life. The current routers being provided can already support 1Gbps. @bitter-salesclerk-57109 Go around your building (virtually, in COVID!) and get a list of people who'd sign up for Airtel and present it to them. If they have more than 10-15 sign ups, they'll be interested. Also commit to annual plans in the first year to sweeten the deal as it helps them to recovers costs sooner. That is how I did it in my area.

yes but my concern was that the plans are upto 100 mbps speed so it can vary right?

@gorgeous-terabyte-12126 what can vary? Airtel offers copper (telephone-line) or fiber-based plans depending on area. Just ask them which one this is.

Its Fiber one they are offering so would that matter if its upto 100 mbps like they dont have fix 50mbps 70 mbps plans thats what I was saying if its upto then it can vary right?

@gorgeous-terabyte-12126 The plans vary by region because their local infrastructure might not support offering higher speeds. IOW, If they only have a 1Gbps upstream connection, they can offer ~10 100Mbps connections and ~5 200Mbps connections. Once they upgrade the 1Gpbs connection to 10 or 100Gbps, they'll be able to offer faster connections. e.g. In Pune, they started with 100Mbps, then 300Mbps and now offer 1Gbps connections in a space of 2 years.