Hi thanks so much for the reply, I'm assuming by your answer this is a problem and not normal because of the switches? I actually ran all the cables myself prior to renovating the house and office. I used Cat5e in the house as I had loads of it but used external grade Cat6 for the office. I did test the cables before and after termination be it a wall point or RJ45 and all was ok. The longest cable run from the office to the house is only about 23 metres which I thought was well within the tolerances before any degradation of speed. I will run the tests on the switches you suggested though just to make sure they are ok and also test all the cables again just to make sure they are still ok as well - thankfully I can access them all fairly easily. If all these tests come back ok is there anything else I should or can look at? Thanks again Paul