The Misadventures of Quinxy von Besiex truths, lies, and everything in between

Router with slow download and upload speeds? Don’t connect it through your UPS’s over-network voltage protection!

This is just a technical note for anyone who winds up with the problem I did the other day...  I bought a new wifi router the other day, hooked it up and was shocked to find my download and upload speeds were  abysmal, in the 1 Mbps range (rather than the expected 75 Mbps down and 20 Mbps up).  I spent an hour trying different firmware in the router, looking for problematic options in the router's config, and replacing cabling.  But somewhere in my sleeping hours the answer came to me...  My cable modem's network cable feeds into my UPS which then feeds into the wireless router.  The UPS provides voltage filtering, arguably useful for preventing distant lightning in my rural neighborhood from destroying more networking equipment than it otherwise might.  The idea came to me that the UPS network feature might not be gigabit rated.  My old wifi router was not a gigabit router, thus it would communicate with the cable modem at 100 Mbps, within the rating of the UPS.  But the cable modem is likely gigabit and the new wifi router is gigabit, and thus they would communicate at gigabit speeds.  And the UPS may unwittingly screw up that speed of communication by the filtering it does on the signals passing through.  I bypassed the UPS and sure enough everything now works as expected!

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