A bad cable was the r00t of all my problems...

Last year, I saw an ad on Twitter about some high quality Network cable so I thought why not, lemme order a few and replace all the Ethernet cables in my house; So I bought a few of these and connected one from the main wall socket to the router and another from the router directly to my laptop.

Didn't notice anything at first, then for the past year, I noticed browsing websites was a bit laggy, like when I click on any link, it would take 2 seconds before it starts loading. I didn't give it much thought as I know our ISPs here in Dubai have a lot of censorship so might be simply be their filtering that is causing this lag. Another reason why I couldn't have suspected these new cables is because an internet speed test, the download/upload speeds were fine matching whatever speeds I paid for.

A few months later, we moved to a new house and switch to a different ISP. Co-incidentally, I also upgraded to a new router from my old TP-Link Archer C5400X to an ASUS RT-AX88U.

The lag when browsing websites was still there, just like before but the download/upload speeds were fine.

Here is when I started noticing an issue.... I would be working on my laptop and randomly, the internet would just go down and I would get a message in my browser from the ASUS Router saying "Network Cable Disconnected". I thought it was an issue with my new router so I started trying older firmware perhaps it would fix this and while the older firmware did mitigate the issue, or so I thought, it still happened, it didn't mitigate anything I just though it did since these disconnections were random.

I then called my ISP telling them to send a technician over to physically check the connections in the house because I am having these random disconnection issues.

The technician came over, checked everything and he said everything is fine but he went to some site and showed me that I am having lost packets. Since my router is setup with my VPN, I thought that's ok maybe it's just the VPN.

I then saw another ad on Twitter about some new fancy CAT 8 cables so I clicked on the link, it took me to the Amazon site, I checked the reviews and someone mentioned my exact same issue about lost packets and when he switched to a cheap old CAT5e cable all his issues were solved.

I then changed all my cables form these fancy new ones to old CAT5E (ie. CAT 6) cables that were old, dirty, but I just thought I'd tried and I was shocked! The snappy internet browsing was back like in the old days, sites loaded instantly, my upload speed for some reason was now giving me the full upload speed from my ISP (200MBPS), and no more disconnections on my router even with the VPN on. I then tried that packet loss test and I have 0% loss packets!

I feel like I just got a huge upgrade for my internet just by ditching those new fancy cables for the old trusty ones.

Just wanted to share my experience, hope it helps some of you who may be in the same situation.

@Aivxtla @downloads

 

Yeah there’s a lot of gimmickry and at times deception with cabling. Standard unshielded Cat 5E is more than good enough for gigabit and even 5 gigabit at shorter runs and CAT6 is good enough for 10 Gigabit for most homes unless you need like 10 Gig at long runs. Once you start getting into things like the shielded CAT6/CAT6A/CAT8 you need to be very careful as improper shielding or damage from bending too tightly ( thicker/shielded cables have a higher minimum bend radius, lower the gauge number = greater thickness) can in cases result worse performance than the standard Cat5 E or CAT6 unshielded cables like you faced. Additionally those flat/thinCAT6/CAT8 with very high gauge values (like 32-36) are not within spec also in terms of lack of twist in cases. Some of the worst ones actually use copper coated rather than actual copper wiring. You can still use flat CAT6 cables, I do as well for better form fitting along walls since they have a much lower bend radius but don’t necessarily expect them to perform well at like 10 Gig, for 1Gig they’ll be fine.

Amazon’s own CAT5E/6 cables are pretty decent just avoid their shielded ones which comically enough reading from quite a few reviews apparently the shielding is missing grounding at both ends...Additionally note I didn’t mention CAT7 because as far as I know it’s not a standard IEEE cabling spec and not approved by by TIA/EIA.

For new home wiring I’d probably recommend CAT6/CAT6A just to be a bit future proof.

Additionally Amazon unfortunately is a cess pool for fake reviews, especially with many of these no name brands.