Hi everyone,
I have a mecool km3 box on which I have Netflix, Amazon Video, Hulu, etc. Ever since I got it, it has buffered to the point of making things pretty much unwatchable. I have it connected via Ethernet and have tested the cable on a laptop with results consistently around 500mb/s.
When testing the internet speed on multiple sites/apps on the box, it shows my speed around 4mb/s download and less than 1 upload. However, when I test it on fast.com (which I guess is run by Netflix) it shows my speed at 500mb/s. I have retested with the same results every time. This makes me think the box is getting the full speed but something is slowing it down to 1/100th of the speed when using other speed test sites/apps.
Has anyone else had these issues? Any ideas on how to fix it? I asked a friend of mine who (supposedly) knows what he is talking about and he said to try a VPN because ISPs will purposely throttle certain devices. I gave that a shot and got roughly the same results.
This is an autonegotiation failure if I ever saw one.
The box you have does 100 mbit ethernet - the proper name of that standard is 100BASE-TX.
There's a problem with the 100 mbit standard - how to do media autonegotiation was never uniformly standardized. Some devices do it one way, others another way.
Why does this matter? What does autonego do?
In a 100 mbit, you have to figure out a few things:
Well, since the standard here sucks, some devices get the wrong answers and you end up with a dysfunctional link.
In college I had a mail server connected to a Cisco 2400 switch. Both the mail server and the switch had 100 Base TX ports (vanilla 100 mbit ethernet), and the cable between the two was a standard, correctly functioning cable.
However, if I let the two devices perform autonego, I'd have the same problem you're having - performance was like 4 mbit tops, lots of stalls, and lots of packet loss.
If I went on the switch and turned off autonego and instead forced the port to 100 mbit full duplex, the mail server could figure it out and operate at full speed without issue.
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Alright, how do you fix this?
One way is to try configuring the switch port that you're plugging into as a full duplex 100 mbit port, turning off autonego. Or do the same on the host device (the android box).
Not all home routers let you do this, so it may not be possible.
Another way is to put a 3rd device between the original two devices. Sometimes thats enough to get autonego to stop spazzing out. Got a spare 100 mbit switch? In a pinch you can make a switch using two ethernet adapters on a computer and telling the OS to bridge them. You can do this in Windows or Linux, you can use built in adapters or USB adapters. I once made a 4 port switch out of a raspberry pi and 4 USB ethernet adapters.
You could also side step the issue if you use wifi, but that is its own can of worms.
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Fun fact, gigabit eth over copper twisted pair (1000base-t) doesn't have this problem - they fixed the standard for autonego so that there's only one way to do it. They went a step beyond and also added auto-mdx so that you don't need crossover cables anymore, the ports simply figure it out on the fly. This is why your laptop did just fine.