Help with upgrading office network.

[katharsis]

Been having some trouble at my office for some time now, mostly with our ISP, Oceanic Cable that belongs to Time Warner.
We got a 5/5 MB (with 3/3 MB guaranteed) dedicated line but our speeds shared on 8-10 workstations just sucks.

Mainly the up and download to our main servers in Europe. I do understand that it is a long way from the US and its being capped at some point. But I am getting the same rates with my home cable internet that I do with a dedicated business line at a tiny portion of its cost.

So we recently found a new provider who gives us 10/10 MB at any given time with 99.99% uptime. So far so good, the overall experience has definitely increased, however the upload to our servers is just all messed up.

On most PCs (all are running XP Pro) I only get 70 KB/s ... on 2 of them I get up to 140 KB/s and on our Mac Pro I get 280 KB/s !!

Here is the basic setup:

modem - 4-port switch - 3 individual routers - workstations

This is the same setup as it has been before and all computers had an upload rate of about 100 KB/s

So I tried switching the routers and cabling. Nothing!
Been using CAT 5e and CAT 6 cables (which the CAT 6 seem to be bring a bit higher speeds than the 5e)

Could this have something to do with the computers network cards ???

It's pretty frustrating at the moment and the new ISP will run some tests as they are not sure what might be causing this.

Any input is much appreciated.

[Blu Kreme]

Could be a number of things. How are the computers wired? Do they plug directly into a switch or do they plug into a wall then a patch panel then into a switch?

What is the speed/model of the switch? Are those speeds guaranteed? Network cards also play a role.

[katharsis]

The setup right now is:

modem ---cat5e---4portswitch---cat5e---router---cat5e---computer

They put brand new lines in from outside hub in the street into the building.
There is 5 jacks that are all plugged into the modem simultaniously.
The problem seems to be the speed rates as soon as it leaves the islands, because when they had me run speed tests to one of the local universities they came back fine with average of 11MB down and 9MB up.

They told me to check if the NIC are set to half/full duplex or auto negotiation and if its the settings within the router. It is all on auto when I checked.
The main thing I don't understand why the upload speeds are so different.
I mean from 70KB/s from one PC to 140KB/s to another PC and then about 280KB/s on the MAC. It's like double the speeds. There has to be something within in the computers because I tried the exact same cat cable going to all 3 machines.

At home right now so I cannot give you the exact model description of the components. Switch and router are LinkSys though.

[katharsis]

Would it make a difference whether the NIC is on the motherboard or if it is a PCI card ?

[Blu Kreme]

I would plug each system directly into the switch and run a speed test. There is no difference between onboard and add in ethernet connections. Only difference would be if the speeds were different to start with.

Most cards are 10/100. Now they are starting to be standard at 10/100/1000