We get called out to flats around Easter Road for slow broadband more often than almost anything else, and a good number of those visits end the same way: the Wi-Fi is fine, and the wired machine is the slow one. Someone has run a network cable from the router in the hall to a desktop in the back bedroom, and that desktop is quietly capped at around ninety-four megabits while every phone in the flat is several times faster.
That number is the whole story. A speed test that lands at 94 or 95 Mbps on a wired connection is not a broadband fault and it is not a router fault — it is the fingerprint of an Ethernet link that has negotiated 100 Mbps instead of a gigabit. Once you know to look for it, it takes about a minute to confirm.
Why 94 Mbps Is the Giveaway
A 100 Mbps Ethernet link cannot actually deliver 100 Mbps of usable data. Once you subtract the packet headers and the framing overhead, real-world throughput settles at roughly 94 to 95 Mbps, and it sits there with unusual consistency — the same figure morning and evening, on any device, on any server. Genuine broadband congestion wanders about. A capped link does not.
So if a wired speed test gives you 94 Mbps twice in a row while a phone on Wi-Fi in the same room gives you 300, the bottleneck is the last few metres of copper, not the line coming into the building.
Check the Link Speed in Sixty Seconds
Windows will tell you outright. Open Settings, go to Network & Internet, choose Ethernet, and look for the line marked Link speed (Receive/Transmit). If it reads 100/100 (Mbps), the adapter and the router have agreed on a 100 Mbps link. If it reads 1000/1000, your Ethernet is fine and the slowness is coming from somewhere else entirely.
If you would rather do it in one line, open PowerShell and run Get-NetAdapter | Format-Table Name, Status, LinkSpeed. It prints the negotiated speed for every adapter in the machine, which is handy when a PC has both a wired and a wireless card and you are not certain which one is actually carrying the traffic.
This is the first thing we check on a networking callout, before touching the router or the broadband settings, because it splits the problem cleanly in two: either the link is negotiating gigabit and the fault is upstream, or it is not and the fault is in the cabling.
The Part Almost Nobody Knows About Ethernet Cable
Here is the detail that makes this fault so persistent. A network cable contains four twisted pairs — eight wires. A gigabit link needs all four pairs working. A 100 Mbps link only needs two of them, on pins one, two, three and six.
That means a cable with a broken, crushed or never-connected pair on the other four wires still works perfectly. The lights come on, the internet loads, video calls connect, nothing errors, nothing complains. The link simply drops down to 100 Mbps and stays there, silently, potentially for years. There is no warning message anywhere in Windows, because as far as the operating system is concerned the connection is healthy.
That is why this is a job we find rather than one customers report. People ring us about the broadband being slow; they almost never ring us about the cable, because the cable appears to be doing its job.
The Tenement Wiring Problem Around Easter Road
The flats along Easter Road, and through neighbouring Bonnington and Leith, are largely Victorian and Edwardian tenements. They were never built with structured data cabling, and very few have had any chased into the walls since. The master phone socket — and therefore the router — usually sits in the hall or the front room, and the desk almost always ends up in a back bedroom at the other end of a long hallway.
What bridges that gap is nearly always an improvised run: a long patch lead along the skirting, taped round a doorframe, tucked under a rug, or squeezed through the gap beneath a door. Every one of those is a pinch point, and a pinch point is exactly how one pair of eight wires gets crushed while the other three survive.
We also still find the other version of this in older converted flats: a network wall socket that looks proper but was punched down with only two pairs, because whoever fitted it was reusing phone-era wiring or simply did not terminate the rest. It looks like a professional installation and it will never run faster than 100 Mbps.
A Recent Callout Off Easter Road
A customer in a second-floor tenement flat off Easter Road called us in because their gaming desktop was slower than their phone, and they had already been round the houses with their broadband provider — two engineer visits, a new router, no change. The provider kept measuring the line at the socket and finding it perfectly healthy, which it was.
Link speed on the PC read 100/100. We plugged a short lead from the same PC directly into the router and it came up 1000/1000 immediately, which told us the machine and the router were both fine and the twenty-metre run down the hall was not.
A cable tester walked the run pair by pair and showed pins seven and eight open. The break was at the bedroom door threshold, where the cable had been run under the door and flattened by a couple of years of the door being pushed shut over it. We replaced the run with a flat cable routed above the architrave instead of under the door, and the same PC went from 94 Mbps to just over 900 on the next test — on the same broadband package, with the same router, on the same afternoon.
That job is the reason we now check link speed before anything else on a wired-slowness visit. Two engineer visits had already confirmed the line was fine; nobody had looked at the last twenty metres.
When It Is Not the Cable
A handful of other things force the same fallback, and they are worth ruling out before anyone pulls up carpet.
A manually set adapter speed. In Device Manager, under the network adapter's Advanced tab, there is a Speed & Duplex setting. If a previous troubleshooting session pinned it to “100 Mbps Full Duplex” it will never negotiate higher, whatever the cable can do. It should read “Auto Negotiation”. Sorting out settings like this is standard software troubleshooting work and does not need anyone touching the wiring.
Power-saving features. Realtek and some Intel adapters ship with “Green Ethernet” or Energy-Efficient Ethernet enabled. On a marginal cable run these can make a link flap or drop a tier rather than hold a stable gigabit.
Powerline adapters in the path. If the run goes through the mains rather than through a cable, no amount of cable-hunting will help — powerline throughput in old tenement wiring is a different problem with a different fix, and we have written about how powerline compares with mesh Wi-Fi separately.
An older router port. Some ISP routers, particularly units a few generations old, do not have gigabit on every LAN port. Moving the lead to a different port on the same router is a ten-second test worth doing.
Why This Matters More Than It Sounds
For general browsing, 94 Mbps is genuinely enough and you may never notice. Where it bites is everything that moves large files: pulling a game update down onto a desktop, backing up to a network drive, editing video off a NAS, or shifting a large project folder between machines. A gigabit link does those roughly ten times faster, and it is a difference you feel every single time.
It matters most on desktops, which is why we check it as a matter of course on the machines we assemble — a fast SSD and a slow network link is a frustrating combination, and it is one of the small things we verify before a custom-built PC leaves the bench.
Getting It Checked Properly
Confirming the link speed is something anyone can do in a minute using the steps above, and swapping in a short known-good lead is a safe test. Beyond that, tracing which pair has failed on a twenty-metre run needs a cable tester, and re-routing a run neatly around a tenement hallway is a job worth doing once, properly, rather than three times.
That is the kind of visit our networking and Wi-Fi service handles, and for anyone in the EH6 and EH7 streets around the stadium our home visit computer repair in Easter Road page covers how the callouts work. Customers a few streets over are covered by the same run — the same-day repair service in Leith page is the closer fit if you are down towards the Shore, and we cover Bonnington, Meadowbank and Portobello on the same trips.
Related Reading
If your problem is on the wireless side rather than the wired side, a couple of our other guides fit better. Our guide to slow Wi-Fi in a Leith tenement covers the interference and band-steering problems that come with dense flats. And if you have upgraded your broadband package and seen no improvement at all, why a fibre upgrade sometimes changes nothing walks through where the new speed actually disappears.
When to Call Us Out
If a wired machine reads 100/100 in Windows, a short lead straight into the router reads 1000/1000, and the Speed & Duplex setting is already on auto-negotiation, the answer is in the cable run and it needs testing rather than guessing. If the link already reads 1000/1000 and the connection is still slow, that is a different fault tree entirely — usually Wi-Fi, DNS or the line itself — and worth a proper look before anyone changes provider.
Either way, it is a short visit rather than a bench job, and it is one of the more satisfying ones: the broadband was always there, it just could not get down the hall.
Last updated: 25 August 2026