Forum Discussion
Thanks Dan,
I had the same thought. I have tested this in 2 ways. First, I ran a brand new cable directly from the Roku to the router (no switches in between). I had the same experience, nothing over 10Mbps on the old cable and the brand new direct one.
Second, right after getting 10Mbps on the Roku, I plugged the same wire into an Apple TV and got ~200Mbps on some very high bit rate content that the Roku would not even load and start.
Still scratching my head.
Thanks again for the idea.
Yeah, that sounds like a defective Ethernet chip. Not much you can do about that, as the Ultra doesn't support using a USB Ethernet adapter. What you could do is use the existing Ethernet cable and add another WiFi access point that would be close to your slow Ultra and connect wirelessly. I have a Netgear router connected in this manner near my Family Room equipment. The Netgear is in Access Point mode, and works great for that purpose.
- ChefLamont2 years agoReel Rookie
That is definitely a possibility. I thought about that as I have a few spare, good routers laying around. I may end up doing that.
Thanks!
-Steve
- Justy742 years agoChannel Surfer
We have a few roku tvs.. express 4+.. an Ultra box. Not one of them on ethernet will go over 100 mbs. So that tells me the port on the back of roku is 100 max. Which comes around 90-92 mbs. If you are getting less than 90 I would say a bad cable or something. But you wont get like 1 gb because from what I have seen roku ethernet does not support that speed. Actually when I look at my router dashboard page all the rokus show full duplex at 100 mb. So only way to get a faster speed would be wifi. But nothing far as I know uses anything close to 100 mb so faster would be overkill. However with ethernet your latency and stuff is better. And I will always choose ethernet over wifi. Usually more reliable and less lag. Less streaming issues. Just my 2 cents.
- atc980922 years agoCommunity Streaming Expert
Justy74 Roku devices with Ethernet ports are all 100 BaseT, also called Fast Ethernet. Yes, that has a theoretical limit of 100 Mbps, but with network processing and overhead you are correct that they max out around 92 Mbps.
The fastest speed I can get on WiFi is using my Ultra 4800 connected to a 5 GHz access point that is less than five feet away from the Roku. It tops out around 230 Mbps, which I feel is the hardware limits of the Roku processor and associated hardware. Even playing a video using the USB port, which bypasses all networking within the Roku, I cannot play a fixed rate 250 Mbps video without some buffering. So the current hardware simply won't handle anything faster. My Premiere 3920 can't even reach 200 Mbps, again with an access point within a few feet. That tells me the hardware in the Premiere has less capability than the Ultra (which isn't a surprise given the price difference between the two and the fact it's only 2.4 GHz WiFi).