Does a router affect internet speed through Ethernet?

Question

My parents are moving out to the country, so obviously i go with them. We have an internet service that supplies 1.5 Mbs down and 600 Kbs Up, or something around there. We just got it set up today and my step mom went out and bought a router, the cheapest one bc the service provider told her to do so.

She says shes been having problems with video loading and was wondering of it was the routers fault. Im not sure if the router is at fault or its just teh bandwidth. Shes running it through an Ethernet cord and I game alot on PC and i know that its pretty intensive. Im close enough to the router to have an ethernet cord myself, but i dont know if it will be enough to handle one person at a time and my step mom, like i said, thinks its the router. Im not sure myself either bc im not into networking as much, but someone who is told us to get a better router.

SO, does the router actually affect the speed through the ethernet cord, or is it just Wi-Fi.

and yes i know, i wont try to game when someone is tryig to stream videos and such.

Sorry if i rambled and its confusing, if you need clarification i will try my best.

Solution

Yes, a cheap router can affect Internet speed through Ethernet, especially on slow ( < 3 Mbps) connections.

Even the cheapest routers on the market today have hardware that's more than capable of handling the speeds of your Internet connection, but unfortunately, cheap routers tend to have "bufferbloat" problems on slow connections, increasing latency and making congestion worse.

To add to the misfortune, cheap routers don't usually give you access to settings that could help this, such as telling the router to rate limit what it sends on the link to the known speed of the link, or enabling Active Queue Management (AQM). You might want to see if your router is supported by DD-WRT, OpenWrt, Tomato, or another aftermarket router firmware Linux distribution. Those firmware distros usually give you access to lots of performance tuning settings.

For further reading, here's a good article on the subject from one of the key researchers on the bufferbloat problem, Jim Gettys.

Comments

[Matt Clark]

1.5 Mbs down WiFi, and the router are not your problem, your ISP is. Even the cheapest router you can buy today is going to be 10/100, or even 100/1000 over ethernet; and probbly no less then 54MB/s over WiFi: well over what you are capable of doing.

[Spiff]

@Weeaboo Your apostrophe key appears to be broken.

[Weeaboo]

@Spiff Ill look into that :P

[Weeaboo]

So, if thats the case, would it be more beneficial to get a new router that doesnt have all the bloatware or to mess with it, even though im incredibly inexperienced in this field?