This stumped me for months and I eventually arrived at the point where I just didn’t care anymore. I blamed it on my computer’s NIC, and then just left it at bad signal levels from the cable company when I found that all the other computers on my network were almost as slow. A couple of nights ago, in a fit of disgust I decided to go downstairs and plug my netbook directly into the cable modem. The speeds were fast as lightning, as things should be. What device on my network could have caused such a bottleneck?

The culprit was an old Intel 16-port switch I had thrown into the mix when I mounted a small contingent of servers and networking equipment in the basement. Back then I didn’t have enough ports on my Netgear wireless router to support everything, so I had everything going to that switch. Over time things kept getting slower and slower. Now that I use one of my servers as the router, I can take the old switch out without impacting the network.

Lesson learned. I’m getting acceptable speeds now.