XPS15 9550 - Gigbit ethernet issues

I just had AT&T Fiber internet service hooked up at my new house. Problem is, I seem to be limited at 100 Mbps via hardwire connection. The Realtek USB GbE Family Controller is set to Speed & Duplex = Auto Negotiation and is running the most recent available drivers from Dell's support site. My ethernet connection goes through a Netgear ProSafe GS108v3 ethernet switch and connects to my computer via a Gigabit ethernet-to-USB3 hub ( this one, specifically). Even if I change the Speed & Duplex setting to force it to 1.0 Gbps Full Duplex, it still seems to be limited to 100 Mbps.

Any ideas as to what's going on? I have ordered another ethernet-to-USB-C dongle to try ( this one, specifically) to see if it is my current ethernet dongle that is the bottleneck.

 

That sounds like something between your computer and the switch ... can you bypass the USB hub?

 

There's no way to bypass the USB hub since the ethernet jack is integrated into the Hub and the XPS15 does not have an ethernet jack. Oddly enough, if I bypass the Netgear switch and plug the ethernet cable from the wall directly into the USB-Ethernet Hub, the network connectivity keeps dropping out. I am at a loss.

 

Do you have any other hard wired machine you can try? How about on wireless what do you get?

 

Unfortunately, the only other machine I have is my work laptop, but that's locked down to only work through the corporate VPN which strangles the throughput even further. When on WIFI, I get ~380 Mbps up and ~460 Mbps down. According to AT&T, that's about what I should expect, but others have said they get 500+ Mbps on WIFI, so who knows.

 

Network cable?

 

Test with another Ethernet adapter. Here, Ethernet via WD15 runs okay now, but I've got an Aukey USB-C to 3xUSB+Eth hub where Eth reconnects once in a few minutes. They both seem to have Realtek USB GbE chips, and I've tried drivers from Dell, Realtek and Aukey with no improvement.

I think it is not a good idea to omit the Eth connector, seen same thickness laptops which do have one.

 

Yeah, one of my annoyances with the M3800, M5510 and now XPS 15 9560 has been the lack of real ethernet. The Dell USB-C 3.1 adapter which came with the M5510 works great with the 9560 as well, although it took the better part of a year after the M5510 came out for that to work well in Linux.

The WD-15 works nicely as well. Before Linux support stabilized on the USB-C stuff, I had very good luck with a couple of non-brand ASIX-chipset USB 3.0 adapters; I don't remember the brand but they were about $15 on Amazon 3 1/2 years ago when I got my M3800. Much faster than the SMSC chipset USB 2 one that the M3800 came with and no less stable.

 

I use this one on my xps15 and can confirm it gets gigabit speeds via iperf3: USB Network Adapter, Rankie SuperSpeed USB 3.0 to RJ45 Gigabit Ethernet Network Adapter - R1161 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B010SEARPU/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apip_Vo7CEMmeKTxT1