My internet is blazing fast downstairs and slows to a crawl upstairs.

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Osukaa

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Jun 14, 2015
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Hello, I have recently got a Bell Fiber plan which has Fiber Optic cables running straight into your home. My plan is Fiber 150 and I receive even better speeds than i'm supposed to be getting... At least on the floor where the Homehub router is. My desktop computer is upstairs and I do some heavy duty downloading on games. The Bell Technician installed a Powerline that is connected to the router and then to my computer. However, I am only getting a fraction of what I used to get on the first floor. Even WIFI is faster downstairs is faster than my Powerline Ethernet Connection Upstairs.

I have a few questions:

1. Is it the Powerline causing the slowdown?
2. Since it is Fiber Optic, Could i Just stick the Powerline next to the white box (Installed beside the fuse box in the basement) and use one of the ports that it has?
3 I have Cat5e cables running to every bedroom (new house) but the Bell technician said that he doesn't set those up.. How would I set it up? (It still has a panel on the jack and it has the letter "T" on it)

Info:
My PC supports Gigabit (1.0 Gigabit Full Duplex)
Downstairs Speedtest DIRECT CONNECTION : 180 mbps down and 60 mbps up
Downstairs Speedtest Powerline: 60 mbps down and 70 mbps up
Upstairs Speedtest Powerline : 19.25 mbps down and 16 mbps up
Cannot test Direct Connection because I did not set up my Cat5e Walljack and I dont want to route a Ethernet cable through the whole house.
 
Solution
Solandri
That's a nice fiber connection. You really should be doing it justice and pull ethernet cable through the walls.

There are a bunch of different speed powerline adapters, so just because it's "powerline" doesn't mean that's the best it's capable of. About 60 Mbps seems to be right though. The fact that your speed drops upstairs suggests the electrical connection between your upstairs and downstairs is the problem, not the adapters. If any of the power outlets in the router room or your computer room are on a different circuit breaker, you could try moving the powerline adapter there to see if you get better speeds.

If that doesn't work, does your house have coaxial cable for cable TV which is not being used? If so, you can try...
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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Mar 16, 2013
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A powerline solution will probably be slower than ethernet to the router
A WiFi solution will probably be worse.

So...
You have Cat5e running everywhere. Does that all terminate in one location? You need to run Cat5e from the router to that location, and maybe a switch to distribute to the Cat5e wires running through the house.

And the Bell guy is correct. Without you paying him extra, they do not provide anything but what comes directly out of the router. All that house wiring costs extra.
 
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hermantset

hermantset

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Sep 7, 2014
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You can try moving the powerline adapter to different outlets to slightly improve your speeds. Powerline adapters are finicky at best in my experience. A lot of it has to do with the wiring in your house and the amount of electrical noise. Most of the time, you're only going to be using a fraction of whatever speed you're paying for with a powerline adapter.
 
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Solandri

Solandri

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Jan 4, 2012
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That's a nice fiber connection. You really should be doing it justice and pull ethernet cable through the walls.

There are a bunch of different speed powerline adapters, so just because it's "powerline" doesn't mean that's the best it's capable of. About 60 Mbps seems to be right though. The fact that your speed drops upstairs suggests the electrical connection between your upstairs and downstairs is the problem, not the adapters. If any of the power outlets in the router room or your computer room are on a different circuit breaker, you could try moving the powerline adapter there to see if you get better speeds.

If that doesn't work, does your house have coaxial cable for cable TV which is not being used? If so, you can try MoCA adapters to run ethernet over the coax cables.

As a last resort, you can use a wifi adapter on your computer upstairs. My bedroom has ethernet ports in the wall, but I usually just use the ac wifi on my laptop. I get about 30 MB/s file transfers, which is about 250 Mbps. So it's definitely capable of matching your fiber connection's speed. The only hitch is that the omnidirectional antennas on most routers have very little signal strength in the up and down directions. If the router has 2 or more antennas, you can mitigate this by rotating one or more to about 45 degrees.

Edit: Just noticed you have Cat5e cable to every room. The T suggests it's wired for telephone, which would be bad and probably wouldn't work for network (telephone only requires the middle two conductors be hooked up). If it is really network cable, there should be a patch panel somewhere in the house where all the network cables come out.. Looks something like this:
http://www.icc.com/content/images/thumbs/0005272_cat_5e_24_port_patch_panel_1_rms.png

Usually it's in a closet, or a garage, sometimes behind a cover or in a box. If you can find that, all you need to do is buy a switch, and plug cables from the different patch panel ports into the switch. That'll connect the ethernet wall sockets in the different rooms via the switch. You can then just plug in ethernet from your main router to one of these wall sockets, and the switch will distribute it to all your rooms.
 
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