I have been running Gigabit Ethernet on my network for a few years, the speed from my everyday laptop was good enough at 40MBps but wasn’t running close to capacity when moving large files to the server, I assumed that this was down to the 5400rpm Hard Drives on the laptop not being able to fill the bandwidth on the network.
Recently while shopping for network cables to connect my new server I though it time to get a new line for the laptop since the plug clip on the current one was broken. I decided to go for Cat 6 cables just to keep up to date and nowadays there is not such a price premium over Cat 5e.
The first transfer of data through the new cable and instantly got 70MBps, nearly double the 40MBps I was getting before. Wondering why there was such a difference I looked at the replaced cable:
The old cable was in fact the first Ethernet cable I ever owned, acquired in 2000 as part of a Netgear home network kit and since had a lot of use as an emergency and temporary cable, it was used for the laptop only due to it not being used and long enough to reach. It turned out to be Cat 5 and in poor condition, so no wonder it couldn’t cope with speeds it wasn’t designed for.
Getting the most out of a Gigabit home network can be as simple as swapping over cables.