Signal Loss in your LinkSys Local Area Network

Off the bat I’m not speaking of Wi-Fi signal loss but rather the ports in the back of the router that connect via network cable to your Network Interface Card.

I noticed a problem with my LinkSys router when it had a mix of 100baseT (100 mbps) and 10BaseT (10 mbps) Network Interface Cards connected to it. Usually the 100BaseT connection would lose it’s signal once it went beyond 9 ft. of Cat 5 cabling resulting in disconnection. Interference was already out of the question since I followed the networking caveats during installation (i.e. stay away from flourescent lighting etc).

Googling the problem I found out that some hubs and routers can’t accomodate a network with mixed speed and would most often switch the max network speed to the slowest, which in my case was the 10BaseT connection (yes, we still have 10BaseT connection where I come from).

On the PC’s part, it’s automatically suppossed to adjust to the speed of the network. However, in some cases it doesn’t. So the solution to the problem would be to manually configure your LAN card to the proper speed.

In Windows 2K/XP this is done by right clicking on the My Network Places found on the Desktop, Selecting the appropriate Local Area Connection card, right-clicking and going to Properties. From there hit Configure and go to the Advanced tab.

At “Link Speed/Duplex Mode”, choose the appropriate value other than “Auto Mode”. Since the router I have uses half duplex and my slowest interface card uses 10BaseT, I chose “10 Half Mode”.