Unable to hit 30Mbps with Lynksys BEFW11S4

Question

Hello,
I just upgraded my connection from 15Mbps to 30Mbps. And I have the strange problem of not being able to go above 20Mbps. From what I understand a 10/100Mbps is technically able to do up to 100Mbps? (Ethernet connection, not wireless)
I just got off customer support and they said it's normal that it's capped at 20Mbps, the lady that was serving, albeit nice, didn't seem to understand what she was saying so I didn't try to push to get more info.
If anybody can enlighten me as to why the BEFW11S4 is capped at 20Mbps for my internet conneciton, I'd be extremely grateful!
Thanks in advance,
V.

Answer 1

There are no detailed specs on the actual throughput. It depends on a lot of factors and there is no real standard accepted by all manufactorers which is why they don't publish this data on consumer router.
Your BEF is simply too old. It's a 802.11b router probably ten years old. It is just too old and slow to handle that kind of speed.
The 10/100Mbit specification only tells which standard the ethernet port follows. They could wire "100BASE-TX" or mention some 802.3 standard instead. All it says which technology is used, wiring, pins, etc. It says that through a 100 Mbit/s link you are technically able to transfer data as fast as ~90 Mbit/s with ethernet.
It does not say how fast your device is or how fast it can read or write useful data.To route 100 Mbit/s instead of 10 Mbit/s packet streams means for the router to process 10 times as much at the same time. Of course, only because you use a 10/100 interface on a device doesn't mean it is capable of doing so.
Thus, generally, if a device has a 10/100 Mbit/s port you can expect performance higher than 10 Mbit/s because if it was even slower than that they would have built in a cheaper 10 Mbit/s port. But how fast it actually can do is limited by the CPU power etc of the router and not the interface.
Or: Only because you use a 3G digital phone today which may be able to transfer data up to 7.2 Mbit/s doesn't mean you are able to talk faster to fill a 7.2 Mbit/s channel with your talking... ;-)
You'll find some speed test at smallnetbuilder: http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/lanwan/router-charts/view
But I think they don't have the BEFW11S4 on their tests anymore. But as you can see, performance of almost all routers is never close to the maximum speed of the interface. If that would be the case, most routers would be either ~90 Mbit/s or 900 Mbit/s in the list but not in between...