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    wired realtek lan suddenly slow downloading

    Hi all - I'm hoping for some pearls of wisdom from the kubuntu community, because I am stumped.

    The situation is this - we recently had our fibre internet upgraded to a 350 mbs down / 20 mbs up service. Works great and often is actually faster than advertised.

    Mu girlfriend uses her laptop connecting via wifi, and this was capping her connection at 80-90 mbs. To give her more speed we bought some powerline adaptors (tp-link av2000), and plugged her laptop in via an ethernet cable (gigabit rated at both ends).

    To start with, this worked great and she was getting the full 350 down / 20 up at her laptop.

    After a few days she started complaining that things were slow, and re-testing the speed showed that her downloads were now only around 4 mbs. However her uploads were still at the original 20 mbs.

    My first thought was that it was a problem with the powerline adaptors which can suffer from interference on the mains supply. However after some investigation, including re-pairing the powerline adaptors, re-seating the connectors etc. the problem remained.

    So then I took my small laptop and connected it to her powerline adaptor via a usb gigabit lan dongle, and I saw the full speed again. So this was the same powerline adaptor and lan cable. Plugging the usb dongle into her laptop then again gives the full speed.

    So the problem is narrowed down to her laptop lan connection. The two odd things are:

    a) It worked great to start with and then suddenly had a problem after a few days.
    b) The problem only affects the download speed and not the upload speed.

    The onboard lan is a realtek gigabit adaptor which lspci reports as Realtek RTL8111/8168/8411. I appreciate that it may be a hardware problem with the motherboard or the RJ45 socket, however I don't want to RMA the laptop (which is only a few months old and still under warranty) if it is actually a driver or settings issue.

    Does anyone have any suggestions how to investigate further and see if I can pin it down to hardware or software?

    Thanks (and sorry for the long post)!
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