Hey everyone, I’ve been losing my mind since yesterday trying to troubleshoot a weird home network issue, and I'm hoping someone with more experience regarding electrical wiring or Powerline adapters can give me some insight.

I have a VDSL/FTTC connection (TIM, an Italian ISP) that usually runs at a rock-solid 75/80 Mbps download. My house has two floors. My desktop PC is upstairs, and it has always been connected via Powerline adapters (Ethernet from the router to the first adapter downstairs, and Ethernet from the second adapter to my PC in my room upstairs). For months, it worked flawlessly at full speed (75-80 Mbps).

Starting yesterday, out of nowhere, the speed on my PC cut exactly in half and won't go past 40 Mbps.

I’ve already done a ton of troubleshooting to isolate the issue:

• Wi-Fi Test: If I run a speed test on my phone or even on the PC itself using Wi-Fi (I have a Gigabyte B650E Aorus Elite X AX with built-in Wi-Fi), the speed flies at 86 Mbps with a 6 ms ping. So the ISP connection and the router are working perfectly.
• Ethernet Cables: Tried replacing the cables with CAT 6 ones, but it made no difference.
• PC Network Card Check: Windows correctly negotiates the connection at 1.0 Gbps Full Duplex. I also tried uninstalling the network adapter drivers, doing a complete Windows network reset, and flushing the DNS cache. Nothing worked.
• Powerline Hardware Test: I took the upstairs Powerline adapter downstairs and plugged it into my PS5 in the same room as the router. I re-paired them there, ran a test, and the PS5 hit a full 79 Mbps. This proves the Powerline hardware itself is totally fine and not broken.
• Switching Outlets Upstairs: I tried moving the Powerline adapter to a different outlet in my room using a heavy-duty extension cord, but as long as it's upstairs, it caps out at 40 Mbps.
• New Appliances/Devices: Absolutely nothing new has been plugged in anywhere in the house (no phone chargers, appliances, smart LED strips, etc.) over the last two days.

To sum it up: the ISP line is fine, the Powerline adapters work when they are close to each other, and my PC is configured correctly. But the second the adapter goes back to my bedroom, the speed gets throttled to exactly 40 Mbps.

Since I’ve temporarily fixed the issue by switching to my motherboard's Wi-Fi (which is working amazingly well), I'm just purely curious at this point: what on earth could have happened overnight to the electrical wiring or the circuit leading to my bedroom to cause such a specific, consistent 40 Mbps hard cap? Has anyone experienced anything similar?

Thanks in advance for any insights!

Hello All,

I have a problem with my home network and can’t seem to solve it. I upgraded my Xfinity Home service to a 2gbs plan and got a new router. This also enabled me to run an ethernet cable from both my desktop and my Unraid NAS to the new gateway.
But now my desktop can see the NAS in the file explorer but whenever I click it I get “Windows can’t access //Photos” error code 0x80070035 network path not found.

I have no issue accessing it with my laptop over the WiFi however, I just had to use my username and password the first time to access it. I’ve tried a bunch of trouble shooting steps found online through some googling but nothing has worked. I feel like I just need to reset something but I’m not sure what.

Before the new gateway, my set up was a bit more complicated. Both the desktop and the NAS have 10gbs network cards in them, and I was using a crossover/patch cable to connect the two directly to achieve max speeds. I had to use manually set up IP addresses and Powershell to force windows to set the network to private for it to work but it was great. So that was an independent network from the rest of home network, the NAS was on the home network via ethernet but the desktop was on via WiFi.

Now both the Desktop and NAS are running cat8 Ethernet to the 10gbs ports on the new Xfinity gateway which is an XB10 model. I can access the ui for the NAS just fine, and ping it over the network, but I can’t open the file directory with the desktop on Ethernet or WiFi.

I’ve set both IPs to Automatic which solved the problem of being unable to access the internet which was inconsistent before I did that. The NAS wouldn’t connect at all and the desktop could only connect to a few websites. I’ve also tried to clear and reset the credentials in Windows, along with all the steps I found on a YouTube Video that I had linked but that didn’t help either. I included a link to the video but that got my post removed. It was the first one that showed up googling the error code.

It seems like a lot of these steps shouldn’t be necessary since the other computers on the network can access it just fine. Ultimately my goal is to have the best read/write speeds to the NAS that I can since I want to be able to edit photo and video directly from the NAS. All the infrastructure should be there but something is preventing my access.

I’d really appreciate any suggestions anyone might have since all my photo archives are on the NAS and I kind of need them for work.

TLDR: I need recommendations on a cheap travel router that I can use my iPhone hot spot as the internet and can connect my laptop to the router.

When my laptop connects to my iPhone hot spot it limits things that I can do on my laptop. Not sure why. It worked previously and now it doesn’t. To overcome this I was going to try using a travel router so that my laptop connects to the router not directly to my phone. I only need this to work for about 20 min a few days a year so nothing crazy. This seems like a cheaper solution than buying a mobile hot spot and having to pay for data for said hot spot.

Edit: Thank you to everyone who bothered to answer! I will be switching to OPNSense next time my IPFire dies. After a quick research, pfSense CE didn't seem worth it compared to OPNSense.

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Hi. I was wondering if anyone knew any good alternative firewall systems for x64 bit pc to run. I have 250M fiber and sometimes host a web server and a minecraft server open to the internet. I have been using IPfire for some time but it tends to have really hard to understand documentation as well as a frustrating upgrade distribution systeṃ. What would be a good replacement? Requirements to have:

- Easy-to-understand documentation and ui
- OpenVPN/Wireguard support
- IP blocklist or similar to mitigate automated bruteforce attack attempts
- Actively maintained (Preferably oss, but not a hard requirement), with opt-in only diagnostic pings

Nice plus would be if it has easy connection monitoring and data usage monitor.

If you have any inexpensive, quality devices that might serve the same thing i would be glad to hear those as well! If there's something i should add, feel free to ask.

Thanks in advance!

(Ground Floor and 1st Floor are the same layout)

Hi all, I am looking at what non destructive options I have for the going between floors and into neighbouring rooms.

My original idea was to drop an ethernet cable between the interior wall with a port on either side however, this is a 1930's house so I presume it's solid brick and I don't feel like carving the wall out.

Another Idea is to drop a Fibre Optic Cable through the corner of the 1st floor room into the ceiling corner of the room below it then through the wall to the room with the router. How does that sound for an idea?

From the 900mbps connection using powerline only gives me around 90mbps using a AV600 TP Link. So not sure this is an option however I know there is the AV2000 with MIMO that might be better.

WiFi on my Phone (PC doesn't have WiFi) I am getting around 100mbps. So slightly better. I am wondering if it is worth getting a PCIe WiFi Card for the PC.

I am looking to game on the PC so a decent connection is wanted.

No coaxial port for MOCA unfortunately.

Any other ideas/suggestions?

Any decent companies within the West Midlands area that could provide some solutions?

Hi all!

I'm trying to run a fiber cable from one house to another so I have internet here. Ideally buried to protect it from the elements. (200 meters give or take)

Which cable would you all recommend for this?

As well as, what sort of protective conduit should it be placed inside to protect the cable?

RJ45 is out of the question due to the distance.

I've been out of the computer world for years now, and fiber optics is just not something I'm familiar with. Would also not want to blatantly trust AI info for this.

TIA

I have spectrum fiber and using the spectrum equipment. Recently finished a shed conversion for an office 200' away, used a cat6 Ethernet run directly into the spectrum router and speeds are limited to 100. Any ideas on why the speeds are limited. Tried a different cable with no change.

I have an iPhone 15 Pro Max, and whenever I put it on my Anker 3-in-1 wireless charger, the ping goes crazy for everyone on the network.
If I take it off the charger or turn off Wi-Fi on the phone, everything goes back to normal. Charging with a regular cable doesn’t cause any issues.
Has anyone had this problem before?

New apartment has this network enclosure. My modem & router are on the opposite side of the apartment. I was hoping to be able to plug a cable from my router into the wall jack in that room and have this thing distribute to the other rooms but that doesn’t seem to be working.

I'm not a network guy but feels like the other half the strands on these should be connected too? Each white cable is labeled with room names, so I assume this was at least *run* to each.

Hi,

I was recently offered by an electrician that he can put little devices in all the existing sockets and they can connect it all to table from where it can all be controlled.

They said it’s not connect4 but wouldn’t tell me what the devices were.

Has anyone else done this and are there any tutorials or resources I can use to set up.

Thanks in advance!

Based in the UK; I'm on Hyperoptic 1Gb symmetrical with the Nokia Hyperhub (HA-140W-B). I upload large video files for work (about 3-6 GB final exports) and they keep crawling at around 5 Mbps. Speed tests look completely normal.

So far, I've tested:
- Multi-connection speed tests (Ookla, Waveform) are fine: around 500 down / 550 up, bufferbloat grade B.

- Single-connection uploads (curl uploading a 25 MB file to speed.cloudflare.com) are either fast or stuck, with nothing in between:
Over Wi-Fi: 10, 465, 9, 10, 346, 9 Mbps
Wired directly to the Hyperhub, Wi-Fi off: 4, 3, 3, 3 Mbps

- It's the same on IPv4 and IPv6, so I don't believe it's an IPv6 routing issue.

I also tried fixing my 5 GHz channel to a less congested one and it was the same. I still get around 7 Mbps through the Cloudflare WARP too.

So any single connection seems to have a chance of being capped at a max of 10 Mbps, but tests that open lots of connections seem to hide it? Does that make sense?

My Hyperhub's WAN port doesn't connect to a normal wall socket, but rather into a Ruckus wall unit of some kind. I've tried using the spare ports on the unit too and I can't get a connection.

I've raised it with Hyperoptic support and I'm waiting to hear back. Has anyone else seen this? What did it turn out to be and any ideas on how long it took to fix?

I've just never really seen situations where single speed connection would be 100x slower than the multi connection one.

I am learning Texas Hold'em and there is a VERY good game called 'Felted: Texas Holdem Poke on Google play. I can play the game online but many functions do not work on several computers I have tried as well as using Comcast Business and Verizon networks. I used to be a IT tech years ago and playing with some found it was refusal to connect to a MS server in AUS.

This also could because I am Florida where you cannot do online gambling but this is a game.

What is best program to use where I can capture the traffic and see the reason it is not working?

Ive been watching videos and reading on Reddit about UniFi vs TP link and what not but it’s been a month of going back and forth in my head so I figured I’d just post something. Main questions at the bottom

I work in IT and have a desire to learn more about networking topics because I don’t do it myself at work but but deal with networking all the time. So I would like to understand things more. Like setting up different VLANs, firewall rules, looking at traffic, inbound/outbound internet rules, etc.

Based on things I have been reading it seems like go with UniFi if you want to have something stable (which is important to me I don’t want to troubleshoot things at work all day just to come home and figure out why my WiFi isn’t working on any random day) and go with opnsense/own hardware if you want to learn networking.

Questions:
- Is UniFi too simple to make you understand networking topics?
- If my desire to learn networking is higher than the hopefully my desire to not deal with things breaking at home should I go with my own hardware? I would think the amount of times something breaks would be infrequent but it’s still a thought I have
- Is being vendor locked as “suffocating” as it sounds or is it not that big of a deal?

Here’s Rack Sparrow (sorry for the dad joke):
PDU
Ubiquiti UDM Se
Ubiquiti 24-port patch panel
Raspberry Pi running HA, Lutron and IKEA Bridges
U7 Pro, G4 Pro and Chime as well

I started planning a couple weeks ago and asked if I should get a switch (most of you guys said no)

What do you all think? What should I build out next?

I have the Sky SR203 with the landline running from it. I want to get a second router and use this is my wireless hub for better range and multiple networks.

I will disable the WiFi on the sky hub connect the two via Ethernet.

What is the best router for my needs?

Hey y’all! I’ve been on workers’ comp for a couple of weeks, and I’m not sure if this is boredom, me contemplating a career change, or a little bit of both 😂. Since I’m not very mobile right now, I decided to dive into the homelab hobby.
Current setup:
2× Lenovo ThinkCentre M920q i5 8th Gen
● 40GB RAM

● 512GB NVMe + 512GB SSD

● 2.5GbE NIC

● One has an HBA card

1× Lenovo ThinkCentre M920q i7 8th Gen

● 40GB RAM

● 1TB NVMe

● 2.5GbE NIC

What I originally planned:

● i7: Main Proxmox server running Jellyfin, Home Assistant, Immich, Nextcloud, Technitium, NetBird, OPNsense, and other open-source services.

● i5 #1: Proxmox for SOC, IAM, cybersecurity, and other lab environments.

● i5 #2 + HBA: TrueNAS SCALE bare metal with my two 8TB HDDs.

Now I’m realizing TrueNAS can run VMs and containers, so I’m reconsidering the whole layout.
What would y’all do?

● Move the HBA into the i7 and make it the main TrueNAS/virtualization server?

● Run one dedicated TrueNAS machine and one dedicated Proxmox cybersecurity lab machine?

● Or keep the original three-node setup?
Also, what open-source programs/services are y’all running in your homelabs that you’d recommend?

title says it all. Need to cut and reroute 5 cables. Which would cause less issues with 2.5gb running through entire house?

Hey everyone, I’m in Italy and looking at a 10G FTTH plan on the FiberCop network (XGS-PON, through a reseller). The estimated speed at my address is 8.8 Gbps, and I’m going for it because it costs almost the same as the 2.5G plan, so I might as well take the headroom. I want to use my own router instead of the ISP’s, and they said they’d give me the PPPoE login and the VLAN tag. I haven’t ordered anything yet, so I’m trying to pick the router first.

Right now I’m torn between two. The first is the GL.iNet Flint 4: it has a 10G RJ45, a 10G SFP+ and 2.5G ports, with Wi-Fi 7 built in, and it goes on sale now and then for around €325. The second is the Banana Pi BPI-R4 bundle, with 2 x 10G SFP+ and 4 x 1G RJ45, which costs €389 right now. The listing says “dual-band” but also mentions a Wi-Fi 7 module.

What I’m after is two 10G ports, one for WAN and one straight to my PC (I have a free PCIe x4 slot for a 10G card), decent Wi-Fi 7 for a two floor house, and something stable enough that my family doesn’t complain when it acts up.

A few things I can’t figure out:

• Can the Flint 4 do PPPoE + VLAN close to full 10G with acceleration on? And how much does SQM hurt it?
• If my ONT ends up with a 10G RJ45 port, can the BPI-R4 handle it with SFP+ copper modules? Do they overheat, and which ones actually work?
• Does the BPI-R4 bundle really come with the BE14 Wi-Fi module and the antennas? And how’s OpenWrt on that board right now?
• Is there something better with two native 10G RJ45 ports (Xiaomi BE19000 Pro, TP-Link Archer BE800)?

Any firmware problems I should know about before buying either one? Thanks.

The TLDR is my fiber service recently switched over to Quantum Fiber and I can't get my RT-AX11000 to work with it anymore ( it was working flawless when it was still going through CenturyLink ). Perhaps I'm doing something wrong, but I believe the problem is the VLAN 201 tagging requirement, which I don't think the AX11000 can do. So I'm asking for advice and feedback on what I can do to solve this so I'm not stuck with the ISP's own router.

In more detail : My fiber service used to be through CenturyLink. My primary router is an Asus RT-AX11000 ( regular, non-Pro model ) and it was working just fine. Recently the service has completely shifted over to Quantum Fiber and my router has stopped working. I had a tech come out and they switched out the ONT to a newer Q1000K model, but still my AX11000 won't connect to the ISP. I know Quantum Fiber needs a VLAN ID of 201, and I've set that in the IPTV section of the AX11000's settings, but I've also done some searching that says the AX11000 doesn't support VLAN tagging the WAN port so it won't work anyway.

So the main question I have is whether I can get one of my existing routers to work or if I need to get a new one. I don't care about the "latest and greatest" things, 6 GHz wireless, or anything like that. My home isn't terribly large and I don't need a mesh system to keep things connected. However, I do have a few devices I need accessible from outside and I rather like the DDNS features on the AX11000 that automatically register a sub-domain and get an SSL cert ( I understand many Asus routers have this ). I typically have 20 - 25 devices on the network through a mix of hard line and Wi-Fi.

So here are the options I have right now:

1. Use the RT-AX11000 - I'd love to keep using this if I can because I really don't want to set up another router, transfer my DHCP device list, parental controls and filtering, etc. I don't know if flashing Merlin onto the router will solve the VLAN tagging or not. It seems it might do if I use Merlin and some third-party mods, but it would be nice if someone can confirm this. I've also read that the AX11000 is capable of VLAN tagging, but it's something that has to be changed by SSHing in and changing some files since the option isn't exposed anywhere in the GUI. Again, if anyone can confirm that, it'd be great.
2. Repurpose my RT-AC68W - I currently have this flashed with FreshTomato and am using it as a wireless bridge for multiple devices. I'm just starting to dig around in the mountains of menus that is FreshTomato to see if this is possible.
3. Use an RT-BE90 - I may be able to get one of these for free. I know it has the DDNS capabilities I want, but I'm not sure about the VLAN tagging ( some searches say it can, some say only the BE92 can do that ). I don't like that it only has three Ethernet ports since my house is wired with more than that, but it's something I can work around. But if it does work, I could replace my AC68 with the AX11000. And since both the AX11000 and BE90 are tri-band, I could set it up as a mesh with dedicated backtalk channel instead of just a wireless bridge. As said, I don't really need a mesh system to cover my house, but it might be a nice upgrade to have for the future.

If none of the options above will work, then can you steer me to different option that will? Maybe there's some other configuration trick I don't know about, or just a different router model to look at.

Thanks.