I got a new TP Link XE75 mesh router. I noticed that when I am hardwired to the satellite, I get higher ping and lower upload speeds than when I am connected via Wifi.
I have a Cat 8 ethernet cable connected between my Mac Mini M2 and the TP Link satellite.
Any ideas? I would have thought hardwire would give me lower or same ping and higher or same upload speeds. Thanks!
What speeds are you getting? Are you connecting with 1gbps over Ethernet? How long is the cable? How far from the router is the Wi-Fi? Ethernet cable running near electrical cabling, behind a fridge etc.?
Tried a different cable? If it is only gbps, anything from Cat 5e should give
Usually the latency over cable is much lower and, sub gbps, the cable should provide better throughput as well. This sounds like a damaged cable or it is getting interference from something that is causing packet loss.
Also, what are you pinging and what results are you getting? The ethernet route should have no jitter.
I suspect the issue is the firmware in the routers. Since you presumably don’t have wired backhaul between the nodes, you’ve got buffering occurring in one of the nodes. Basically a form of buffer bloat. The computer sends packets, but the node is buffering them a bit so there is enough of them to bother forwarding. Then it switches to forwarding mode, and sends them over WiFi to the other node. The the other node buffers them until they all arrive, and then forwards onward.
In general, it’s doing the job it was designed to do, and unless you’re experiencing a technical issue because of it, I wouldn’t be too concerned about the nittygritty details.
I have a mesh system. I have the satellite hooked to my Mac Mini by Cat 8. All ethernet connections are Cat 8. All cables are in the clear.
Again, I am using mesh with a wifi backhaul. Ping when I am connected directly to my cable router via Wifi is usually 11-13. When I connect to my mesh (either ethernet or Wifi), it’s 11 - 400 and speeds are slower.
Thank you. I notice some buffering from time to time when I am connected to my mesh. I don’t at all when I am connect via Wifi to my cable router. FYI…I am on the 3rd floor and my cable is on the 1st where my son is hard wired for gaming.
I ended up buying the Orbi Mesh 6 (not 6e). I’ll let you all know the result since it comes Friday.
My concern is that I occasionally work from home, and I need a stable connection for MS Teams meetings. Also, the upload speed of the mesh from my video server to the outside world doesn’t seem to be as robust and fast as I would like (only about 8-10 megs).
Thanks everyone for the thoughts!
Could it be you are comparing a mesh that has QoS/bandwidth shaping with a wired connection to your ISP hub, which has none of that?
What mode did you have the QoS set to? There are several on mine, gaming, streaming, surfing etc. Tried setting your test device as a VIP?
Also, a network optimisation is recommended regularly, think that looks for channel clashes.
400ms ping doesn’t sound good though.
Same DNS servers used in both configs?
I am hardwired to the satellite, not the router itself. So the numbers I’m giving are using the mesh or the hardwire to the satellite.
QoS: All I have is Enable or not and I put in the total bandwidth up and down. I have prioritized my computer.
I have used the app to scan to Analyze Channel Congestion, and I always get “Good” until now. I just got a warning to optimize so I did so. Let’s see if that helps long term.
Here are my stats after I just Optimized (first is wifi, second is wired to the satellite). Note the high ping rates.
You need to get everything else off your network other than the mesh and the system you are checking on we had a similar issue, albeit on a pc network that traced back to stepson using Wow, voice chat and bittorrent
You can also get a lot of chatter from smart bulbs and sockets. (probably the Biden administration reckons their calling home to China) have had it happen once when one was failing
The other thing to check, if you look at the topology of your mesh units in the app, is there a decent WiFi connection between them? I moved a few units around until all were showing full signal.
Also how have you configured the cable router? Are you able to stop it routing (bridge mode), review any security features that may be duplicating features the mesh gives you too etc.
Yes regarding the strength between the base and the satellite–very strong connection. I will try bridge mode at some point but I remember doing this a few years ago and it was a pain to swtich back (I had to factory reset the cable modem and set it back up again).
I guess the Orbi today will tell you for sure if it’s the TP-Link mesh or something else in your setup causing this.
Might be worth doing a test using speed.cloudflare.com because it also gives a reading for jitter, which can seriously mess up transfer speeds.
On my (aged) mobile phone, connecting to my (equally aged) WiFi, I see latency of 35ms but jitter of 161ms, which illustrates one of the problems with average quality WiFi: packets aren’t arriving in the right order and have to be shuffled back into order for video or audio. If however you get worse jitter than that, something would definitely be seriously wrong.
That’s more like it! You should have pretty flawless service with results like that. 
PS: definitely envious of your connection speeds 
Glad the Orbi worked out for you. I’ll have to keep your experience in mind with the TP Link device.
Yep. I’ve been using Orbi for the past day and it’s been very consistent and the download it at the cable’s max almost every time as well as the download. Being that I work from home occasionally on a virtual desktop, this is quite important. It’s even more consistent than my cable modem but keep in mind it’s 2 floors down, ie no satellite.
Orbi is twice the price but well worth it.
