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We currently have some really cheap network cable connecting the modem to the router. This cable is about 30ft long. I bought this cable about two years ago, and whenever I connect a device wireless to the router, the internet connection seems very slow.

Two questions:

  1. Can lousy cable affect the browsing speed of the device that's connecting to the router?
  2. What kind of cable should I look for when connecting the modem to a router that's about 30-40ft away?

Thanks.

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  • Have you tried plugging a device directly into the modem (bypassing the router altogether) and testing the speed? Use a known good cable, not that 30ft one.
    – Rohn Adams
    Aug 30, 2016 at 21:09
  • Thanks for the post. To be honest, I'm not sure if it's the speed or the range that's affected. But I feel the tablet (in this case an ipad mini) is not so far away from the router that the connection should be so slow.
    – rbhat
    Aug 31, 2016 at 20:00
  • @rbhatup Tip: if you want to wrap the text to a new line in your questions you have to put two empty space after the text. See your question with the edit link.
    – Hastur
    Apr 12, 2017 at 13:50

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For your 1st question, if your ethernet cable is old and damaged or just has a lot of cross talk within it then the cable will affect the speed information can be passed along it so yes, a losy cable can affect things very badly.

For your 2nd question, generally when selcting ethernet cables, there are a number of choices but their use is limited to what you are connecting ethernet cables to.

If you was talking about connecting a PC to a router and you have other ethernet devices connected to the router via ethernet cables such as NAS drives or other PCs sharing files etc. between them, if the PCs, other devices and router support their speed then Cat-6a cables would be beneficial for each device to the router as they will offer faster file transfers.

For the use you are asking for (between the router and modem), a Cat-5e cable will suffice as the use you get out of that cable is Internet connection and not networking multiple devices. You probably don’t even have over 1 Gigabit Internet, so you won’t see any increase in your Internet speed if you use Cat-6 cables instead of Cat-5e.

See this site for more detail

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