We have a new customer that we have taken over IT services for and are having a little problem diagnosing a speed issue with their Internet connection. Note: we are working remotely with WinBox.
They have a 100 MB connection through Comcast. When connected directly through the Comcast modem, our download speeds are consistently 95-105 MB. When we plug the router into the Comcast equipment, connecting the router to the local switch and connecting to that, we’re getting (consistently) half those speeds on all computers.
We’ve been through all the settings we could think of and cannot find anything that may be throttling down bandwidth.
Many smaller, inexpensive SOHO Mikrotik routers cannot do 100Mbps of throughput. Some routers can do this if you use the fast-track feature (e.g. the 2011 series).
The key is to watch the CPU utilization during a speed test (through the router from a PC, not the BTest service in Mikrotik itself). If the CPU maxes out while speed testing, then that’s your problem.
Thanks for the info. Just snooping around the Internet, I found this video on the “Fast Path” option of the Mikrotik router/firewall https://youtu.be/HpMzsfaETfI
After adding this rule in the firewall, my speeds went from 48 MB download to 85 MB.
So the whole problem does look to be router-related so, until the customer says it’s just not enough, I will just leave this rule in place rather than simply replacing the router with anew model.