Not too long along we had some bad weather and my whole network took a knock. ADSL router got fried and the CPE on my side of the wireless bridge also died. So I replaced both with the CPE getting a shiny new RB411.
Now like 5 months on, all is running well. Last week I noticed that Port 1 on my router has a yellow light and not green. All other ports have green lights. Now I knew this meant that speed was no longer 100Mbps but 10Mbps.
I swapped ports, rebooted the routerboard and even reset my router to factory default. All to no avail.
Once logged into the routerboard with Winbox I checked the interface settings. The ethernet port had auto-negotiation turned on and of course everything looked okay. Except that it was confirmed that the connection speed was only 10Mbps.
Now I did some transfer tests and 10Mbps is still fast enough…for now. In South Africa we only still have 4Mbps ADSL main stream but 10Mbps is due this month. Inevitably ADSL2+ is coming and then 10Mbps on the CPE is going to bottleneck my network.
Is there anything I can do short of returning the routerboard under warranty?
You mean winbox into the RB411 direct from my PC, bypassing the ADSL router? Yeah, I guess I can do that. I was just wondering how something like this all of a sudden happens. I came to the conclusion that the RB411 is most probably faulty, what else could it be?
You probably had bad weather again. If you have a bad power supply, or improper grounding, the Ethernet chip can get damaged, either completely or to 10 Mbps, from ESD.
It was by chance that I discovered the root cause because I was not really bothered to return the routerboard due to the downtime that would result. A few weeks later, some of my other ports on my router starting going yellow. Only 1 port would work on green but even if I tested the routerboard on that port, it would not work on green.
Because my Netgear router was now the likely suspect, I had it swapped out and all ports are green/full speed again. Seems my DGN2000 ADSL router was about to fall over.
