I bought a Cat6 Ethernet cable for PSN and it's not gone well!

[cooldawn]

My Sky contract ended so they hiked the price by 68%. I'm paying for a 30Mbps line but I've never got anything like that in normal use on PSN over WiFi. I usually got at the most 5Mbps down which is horrid but I've managed it for 5 years.

I decided today, in an attempt to create value, to buy a 10m Cat6 Ethernet Cable and see how much my speed would be boosted and...well it's gone down.

My wired PS4 is telling me it can download up to 27.7Mbps and upload 3.7Mbps. I just tried to download Titanfall 2 and that average WiFi speed of 4Mbps to 5Mbps has gone down to about 3Mbps to 3.5Mbps using Ethernet. Worse still my WiFi laptop is stable at 15Mbps down and 8.5Mbps up (using Ookla Speed Test) from tests I ran about a year ago.

I decided to go Ethernet because I read people on this forum always say Ethernet is faster and more reliable than WiFi, so as you can imagine I'm at the end of my tether since my expectations of a standard increase in speed, going from WiFi to Ethernet, would in some part counter the hike in price and create value. I was expecting something like 10Mbps or even more.

So my question is, what am I doing wrong? Why is my real-life speed going down over Ethernet?

To make me feel better I'm going to play some Death Stranding but any helpful suggestions and recommendations will be used and tested.

 

[Fliesen]

One crucial piece of information: PS4 game downloads are not a proper 'speed test'. Depending on game, time of day, Sony CDN load, any given game might load faster or slower, regardless of whether your actual PS4 has access to more bandwidth.

 

[Abstrusity]

Try a different port on the modem, and also full power cycle the modem for like 5 minutes. Cat 6 also won't do anything if you modem is trash too, so see if your isp means to upgrade them, talk to th m about your issues. It's more likely that the servers you connect to are trash than any of the above though when it's reading at 27 mbps

 

[ascagnel]

It's not just you -- PSN is, by far, the worst of the download services I've used (Steam is by far the best, and Apple, MS, Google, Amazon, Netflix, and Nintendo are all reliably solid) -- I have a fiber connection that PSN at times will utilize at a 1MBps rate. On top of that, Sony made some truly dumb decisions around download prioritization on the PS4 -- if a game is running, it'll throttle downloads and limit you to two simultaneous downloads; if no game is running, it'll be throttled and run 3 downloads; if the system is in sleep mode, it'll run unthrottled.

 

[TheOne]

My Sky contract ended so they hiked the price by 68%. I'm paying for a 30Mbps line but I've never got anything like that in normal use on PSN over WiFi. I usually got at the most 5Mbps down which is horrid but I've managed it for 5 years.

I decided today, in an attempt to create value, to buy a 10m Cat6 Ethernet Cable and see how much my speed would be boosted and...well it's gone down.

My wired PS4 is telling me it can download up to 27.7Mbps and upload 3.7Mbps. I just tried to download Titanfall 2 and that average WiFi speed of 4Mbps to 5Mbps has gone down to about 3Mbps to 3.5Mbps using Ethernet. Worse still my WiFi laptop is stable at 15Mbps down and 8.5Mbps up (using Ookla Speed Test) from tests I ran about a year ago.

I decided to go Ethernet because I read people on this forum always say Ethernet is faster and more reliable than WiFi, so as you can imagine I'm at the end of my tether since my expectations of a standard increase in speed, going from WiFi to Ethernet, would in some part counter the hike in price and create value. I was expecting something like 10Mbps or even more.

So my question is, what am I doing wrong? Why is my real-life speed going down over Ethernet?

To make me feel better I'm going to play some Death Stranding but any helpful suggestions and recommendations will be used and tested.

Click to shrink...

With a 30Mbps transfer rate, you could have gone with an old CAT5 cable and it would still not change a damn thing.

CAT6 is certified for 10Gbps on close course. CAT5e is certified 1Gbps on a 100m course. CAT5 can do 1Gbps on much closer course, but really has been certified for 100Mbps.

 

[Yogi]

I may have misunderstood but I would open the browser and do a speed test to make sure it's not just PSN. Otherwise, maybe it's still using the wifi connection on the ps4? Otherwise it sounds like PSN isn't playing nice.

Also, screw the contract ending and getting charged more, prices should go down not up.

 

[Cor]

Please take no offence at this very basic question, but... are you aware of the difference between MBps and Mbps?

but yes, it shouldnt happen. Unless theres some severe network issue, eth should be more reliable and faster.

 

[Huntersknoll]

As other has said the CAT6 won't make the difference at that speed.
Don't feel worried about it.. my PSN download speeds are all over the place and almost never are as fast as what I am getting. Blame the sony servers :)
A pro tip is to make sure nothing is running in the background.

 

[Malkier]

I had slow DL speeds till I got feed up and got a new modem from my ISP and it was magically fast after that. No idea why.

 

[ascagnel]

I'd add -- if you're going through a powerline ethernet adapter, you may get poor results. I have to run my PS4 wireless, since the router is in a different room and the building's wiring doesn't agree with powerline ethernet.

 

[NewDust]

It's the first day with the new PS+ titles, so the CDN for your location is probably getting hammered.

 

[Dest]

PSN has always been ass for me. Business lines, home lines. Always shit.

 

[KrillinLikeAVillan]

Try again later, psn downloads are notoriously uneven.

 

[Jolkien]

If you wanna do a proper speed test go on fast.com (free Netflix HTML5 speed test) in your PS4 browser, a lot of CDN Sony use has throughput probnlem.

 

[Teeth]

Just a quick question: are PSN downloads showing 4Mbps or 4MBps?

 

[Deleted member 1003]

CAT6 doesn't matter.

 

[DeadJoshWalking]

I would bet you'll find it gets a lot better when you get off Sky, I've always found big ISPs are terrible in the UK (assuming you are in the UK but realise now there's probably Sky ISPs all over), only way to get consistent results is to pick a smaller supplier and don't be afraid to jump around when the service starts slipping.

Use this website: https://www.ispreview.co.uk/review/top10.php

I'm on UNO personally, don't have a speed test to hand but I know any time I've checked it it's been exactly what I was paying for and PSN has maxed out my connection several times.

 

[SturokBGD]

My speeds doing meatball math when I'm actually downloading can be up to 10x faster than what the connection test on my Sony devices report. They can also be up to 10x slower for no apparent reason, too. I'm sure PSN performance on both PS3 and PS4 has got more to do with how the OS is handling moving files around the hard drive than actual connection speeds but I might just be pulling that out of my butt.

 

[K' Dash]

PSN is by far the worst of them all, it's not just your setup.

 

[GemmolSwitchPS4]

Not just your setup Sony digital games download slow even with 1 gig speed with no data caps

i don't have a Xbox but Nintendo is very fast I can delete nba 2k which holds over 30 gigs and it will finish in less than 30 mins if I download it back to play again so I'm in no rush to upgrade my 400 gig memory since all my games can be remove and come back quickly

 

[LordDraven]

CAT 6 won't make a difference here

 

[melodiousmowl]

With a 30Mbps transfer rate, you could have gone with an old CAT5 cable and it would still not change a damn thing.

CAT6 is certified for 10Gbps on close course. CAT5e is certified 1Gbps on a 100m course. CAT5 can do 1Gbps on much closer course, but really has been certified for 100Mbps.

Click to shrink...

Cat5e can do 10Gb over short distances as well, iirc

 

[Thera]

My wired PS4 is telling me it can download up to 27.7Mbps and upload 3.7Mbps.

Click to shrink...

Cat6 wasn't necessary for a 30Mbps connection manage by a 100 or 1000 router, you could have bought the worst ethernet cable, it would have been fine.
So everything is fine here.

The rest is all on PSN. I already read the speed is awful. In must say, in France, it was true for the PS3 era but since PS4, I have really "great" speed.

My speeds doing meatball math when I'm actually downloading can be up to 10x faster than what the connection test on my Sony devices report. They can also be up to 10x slower for no apparent reason, too.

Click to shrink...

I experienced that but mostly at the beginning of PS4. It is quite rare now (once again, in France, each region has their own infrastructure).

 

[AMAGON]

Psn servers are trash, not your cable

 

[komaruR]

theres alot of fake cat6 out there. i bought a roll of cat6 thinking to rewired my house. it has cat6 written on them then i created a few cables, hook it up and notice somethings not right with my isp speed and i keep getting dc. went into my router and the router says the cable is 10mb or 100 forgot. i was like this isnt right, switch back to cat5e, it says 1000 or 10000mb, eitherway its higher than the cat6. i quickly made another cable from the spindle and still say the same.

reading a few amazon review, theres some post mentioning their cable speed is slower too.

so yea, watch out for fake cat6 that has worse speed than cat5e.

 

[StrayDog]

Speed test is very deceptive if you don't know where the FROM and TO the testing being done. CDN server may be located in some far away and complete oppose direction of the speed test server.

note:
I know Sony uses Akamai (Amazon) as their CDN service provider.

 

[MP!]

you could probably plug that cat6 directly into sony's servers and it wouldn't do you any good

 

[upinsmoke]

The cable wont make a difference. You would be fine with a cat5 with a max speed of 30mbps. In fact anything up to 100mbps

 

[TheOne]

Cat5e can do 10Gb over short distances as well, iirc

Click to shrink...

very short distance yes, but it hasn't been certified for it so ymmv.

 

[OnionPowder]

PSN is actually a dumpster fire

I get 400mbps on Steam vs like 20-30 on PSN. It's the difference between the game taking an hour on PC vs taking an entire fucking day on PSN. Both hardwired, same situation in 3 separate houses, multiple modems and routers, different cities, different ISPs and it's affected my PS3, PS4 and PS4 Pro. I have enough experience with it to know it's not worth whatever they're charging for online play.

Straight up trash service.

 

[The Albatross]

PSN is just horrible an unreliable. I have a PS4 Pro and an Xbox One X literally next to each other, on the same stand, less than 1 ft away from a high performance wireless router with 450mbps downstream from my ISP, and will usually get 120-180mbps on Xbox Live, and get .... anywhere from ... 5mbps to ... 700kbps... to 25mbps on PSN downloading. It makes no sense, but I had an identical experience with the PS3. I used to think it was the wireless radio in the PS3, but it's likely that and just unpredictably shit PSN.

note:
I know Sony uses Akamai (Amazon) as their CDN service provider.

Click to shrink...

Just a random useless clarification, that Akamai and Amazon aren't the same, although they can be used together... It'd be a little weird to not use CloudFront (Amazon's CDN) if Sony is using other AWS services. But who knows, could be an old contract. I didn't know they used Akamai to begin with.

 

[Shambala]

Lol man it's crazy. I seem to be the only one that downloads games in minutes on psn 🤷‍♂️. 20mins tops for 60gb+ games

 

[senj]

The cable wont make a difference. You would be fine with a cat5 with a max speed of 30mbps. In fact anything up to 100mbps

Click to shrink...

Correct

Although contrary to people blaming PSN's servers, it seems like it is actually the PSN Store app running on the PS4 itself that appears to be written to be slow: https://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/2017-08-19-slow-ps4-downloads/

The tl;dr is that it forces the use of an inefficiently-sized "receive window" for the size of chunks of downloaded data, specifically and only for PSN Store downloads, which results in downloads being a lot slower than they would be if normal congestion-control algorithms were allowed to size the window appropriately for the connection.

 

[Ceannaire]

I find putting my PS4 into rest mode after a download has started seems to speed up most downloads. crawls when i play a game at the same time, dont know if its to do with congestion on the HDD or something.

 

[Orb]

PSN is always slow for me but weirdly if I start the download and then put the system into rest mode, it downloads much faster. You just have to make sure you have the setting to allow downloads during rest mode enabled at the system level.

 

[CommodoreKong]

I remember reading years ago PSN uses multiple companies for CND servers and the one you get can greatly affect your download speed. No idea if that's still true or not.

 

[Cleve]

Every time PSN speeds get brought up I think it's worth mentioning that you should close all apps, even background ones like Spotify when attempting to download or the ps4 gives lower priority to the traffic. There was a reddit thread a few years back explaining the reasons with a ton of packet capture and analysis. Just close everything including system apps and see if it improves for you.

Does anyone have a link to that thread handy?

-edit-
Never mind, found the source:

https://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/2017-08-19-slow-ps4-downloads/

That said, there's no guarantee this is the root of your PSN issues, but it's worth giving it a shot.

 

[number8888]

Like other's said PSN is slow. You speed is as good as the slowest segment in the network chain.

If you want to properly max out your connection try downloading from Steam. Xbox is usually pretty good too.

I remember people recommending doing stuff like suspending your PS4 or stop/pause then resume your download for better speeds. Maybe that will help.

 

[xxracerxx]

CAT 6 doesn't make your internet faster.

 

[Deleted member 9305]

Make sure to use the correct MTU.

 

[melodiousmowl]

very short distance yes, but it hasn't been certified for it so ymmv.

Click to shrink...

I have done a few where the runs are under 50-75ftft in-wall, crossed my fingers and had good luck so far, but yeah if you can avoid it go cat6 hehe

 

[Dyno]

Lol man it's crazy. I seem to be the only one that downloads games in minutes on psn 🤷‍♂️. 20mins tops for 60gb+ games

Click to shrink...

I don't have the speeds you do but yeah, I'm basically always hitting my speed cap. I've often wondered if it's an issue with sports and that some routers just have the right settings and others don't, as the issue seems to be widespread but I've never actually seen it happen

 

[Shambala]

I don't have the speeds you do but yeah, I'm basically always hitting my speed cap. I've often wondered if it's an issue with sports and that some routers just have the right settings and others don't, as the issue seems to be widespread but I've never actually seen it happen

Click to shrink...

I use the cm600 modem and the nighthawk pro to maximize my speeds. I never use the provided equipment from the provider

 

[Deleted member 37303]

Google PSX Download Helper. You need a PC to act as a proxy for your PS4 but using that is the only time I ever get my full download speeds with PSN.

 

[mug]

Wired connections are always better than wireless. With wireless you're susceptible to environmental issues such as co channel interference from neighbors along with various metals refracting the signal. It can be great one day and shit the next. The main issue with wireless is the half-duplex meaning a device can only send or receive at a time. Sharing other devices to the wireless AP or router this can easily balloon into a bigger issue.

With wired, you have full duplex or the ability to send/receive simultaneously and in gaming or voice that's pretty critical. As far as speed goes, it really depends on your ISP and your equipment. It could even be a bad cable. As previous posts above, a speedtest or downloading content really isn't a solid test as to the actual throughput on your local network. Lots of other variables are in play that can skew the results.

 

[Box]

My Sky contract ended so they hiked the price by 68%.

Click to shrink...

I hope you kicked off.

 

[Fool]

Like mentioned, PSN is trash so you can't draw conclusions regarding internet speed from that.

But I was thinking about your laptop's WiFi speed, how old is the router and are you using 5GHz WLAN?

 

[TheTurboFD]

Just want to say whats been going on with my PS4 Pro that could be occurring with you. If i left it asleep, wake it up and start downloading it is really stupid slow and I'm at 1gbps up and down. Now if I restart the PS4 from the menu , the speeds easily are boosted exponentially. Not sure why this occurs.

 

[shark97]

30 mbps??! dang here in the states i get 400mb like nothing in rural area, and 1gigabit is common

 

[Deleted member 13645]

PS4's horrible download speeds are annoying. I love that on PC I don't have to worry about deleting games because I can re-download them quickly. On PS4 that's not the case, all downloads take a while for me.

It's not just you -- PSN is, by far, the worst of the download services I've used (Steam is by far the best, and Apple, MS, Google, Amazon, Netflix, and Nintendo are all reliably solid) -- I have a fiber connection that PSN at times will utilize at a 1MBps rate. On top of that, Sony made some truly dumb decisions around download prioritization on the PS4 -- if a game is running, it'll throttle downloads and limit you to two simultaneous downloads; if no game is running, it'll be throttled and run 3 downloads; if the system is in sleep mode, it'll run unthrottled.

Click to shrink...

Surprisingly Steam is 2nd best for me. Origin/EA is the best for me, it's the only one that maxes out my gigabit internet.