A Blast from the Past: Did anyone actually max out their 10/100 routers?


nenegad149

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Nov 20, 2025
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With all the talk about multi-gig networking, Wi-Fi 6E, and fiber optics, I've been feeling a bit nostalgic for the tech of the late 90s/early 2000s.

It got me thinking about the classic 10/100 Mbps Ethernet router. It was the standard for so long, but I have a question for the hardware-savvy crowd here:

In practice, did you ever actually saturate that 100 Mbps (~12.5 MB/s) wired connection?

I'm thinking about scenarios like:

  • Old-school LAN parties with games like Quake III or Unreal Tournament.
  • Transferring large files between two computers on the same network.
  • Early network-attached storage (NAS) devices.
Or was the theoretical 100 Mbps limit something you rarely, if ever, hit due to hard drive speeds, network overhead, and other bottlenecks of the era?

Share your stories and tech memories!
 
I had a coax + RJ45 connection on my networkcard. It was 10Mb coax and 100Mb RJ45.
Usually the HDD was slow enough to limit file copies from PC to PC, but if it was a .zip it could be limited. But everything was slow in that era. CD drive was still 1,5X speed.
When I went to a 400MHz AMD CPU we still ran slow HDD's, but network copies were slow. Internet at the time was slow to, I had 8MB/s sometimes via cable internet. But when the others also got cable it slowed down.
Personally I thought 100Mb was fast enough as the rest was so slow. But I did think it was slow, but each new PC was faster. When SSD's were introduced I quickly switched. With networking, I now run 10Gb which is usually fast enough for file transfers. But with 7GB/s disks the 1,2GB/s is still a bottleneck.

When at a LAN you would spend a lot of time connecting everyone up to a single network. I ran LAN games from a 24 port 10Mb switch, fast enough at the time. Not for big file transfers though. And mixing Win95/98 with NT was also a challenge sometimes. And don't forget to terminate your coax connections.

(new poster, AI?)
 
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