WiFi Speed

[Quijibo Jones]

16 gig is 16 gig. No speed booster can magic that faster. What it can do is spread the load of the connected devices. The routers that are provided by bt, sky, virgin are the cheapest s**t money can buy. A good WiFi router costs well in excess of £100.

It could be that your router is saturated with devices connected on WiFi. This is certainly the case in my house with phones, iPads, tv’s, sky q etc. When this happens you’ll get drop outs and less speed. You can combat this by wiring in devices such as tv, game consoles. Or you can buy a high end router.

Sorry to say though, 16 g is never going to go far. We run a hundred gig with virgin media. If you can get that in the area it’s simply the best for consistent speed.

 

[Smartbear]

I live in a rural area & BT claimed 2mbps speeds, I’ve gone with a 4g huawei cube which seems to work well (apart from the spying of course)
Just tested at this which lets me watch utube with no buffering, I have seen up to 40mbps but it’s not common.

Rob

 

[ronk]

On reflection, my 16mbps isn’t that bad after all - I think stability seems to be the key?

 

[mmm-five]

Sorry to put the boot in, but my home Virgin provides a decent speed of 220/21mbps, and that’s despite me downgrading twice when their ‘free’ speed doubling offer came through.

My phone on EE 4G Max phone gives about 80mbps too, so I occasionally use it as a back up when there’s engineering works on the Virgin line.

Most devices are WiFi connected (smart TVs, tablets, visitor phones, alarm, etc.) but the Xbox is hard wired via 500mbps rated power line adapters.

 

[ihadablackdog]

It could be that your router is saturated with devices connected on WiFi. This is certainly the case in my house with phones, iPads, tv’s, sky q etc. When this happens you’ll get drop outs and less speed. You can combat this by wiring in devices such as tv, game consoles. Or you can buy a high end router.

Can SkyQ be hard-wired instead of wifi? For some weird reason my main Sky Q box wont pick up wifi in the corner of the room it is placed (yet my AppleTV which sits on top of it gets wifi with no problem!). So I've put a wifi powerline jobbie in the main power socket behind the tv and it works ok, so wifi is working on the box.

However, I'm thinking if it will work wired, then I could disable wifi on that powerline plug and reduce a bit of congestion.

Also, if the mini box is also hard wired, can I get rid of the sky booster box I needed for the signal to reach both of them (I think this creates its own wifi network). (I am with BT, so dont get the mini box to be an access point).

 

[Quijibo Jones]

yes yes and yes but the problem is likely that the apple tv is on top of it and they are on the same or similar waveband. We plug it in with a wire running in the middle of the room when we want to download a UHD film! I havent got around to wiring it in!

 

[nick_l]

Modem placement plays a massive part in connection speeds.

I’m an ex virgin media networks engineer and one of the most common faults was the modem location. People like to hide them behind stuff. Behind TVs behind fish tanks, in cupboards. All of this stuff seriously restricts the WiFi signal. Also the frequency you’re connected to will also affect the speed.

Most modems broadcast 2 networks (sometimes hidden as one) 2.4g and 5g . People assume the 5g is better because the number is bigger. 5g is the faster of the two, but isn’t good for distance as the signal delays quicker. Channel selection also plays a big role. Most modems now days are smart and will auto switch between congested channels. If yours don’t then I’d recommend playing around with different channels and seeing if that helps.

This is what I’m getting wireless

 

[ihadablackdog]

Yeah, will try turning Apple TV off as a test.

Would like to relocate my router but SHMBO gets twitchy about it being on show. It’s on the top off cabinet now for testing but I know it can’t stay there!

 

[ihadablackdog]

What do you think of those mesh systems like the BT whole home?

(sorry for hijacking the thread)...

 

[srhutch]

I’d always use a LAN cable where possible. I’ve recently buried an armoured cable in the garden to connect to the garage. Faster and less problematic than WiFi. All game and media devices under tv also hard wired.

 

[ihadablackdog]

So I turned the Apple TV off and removed it. Then turned off the power line Wi-fi adapter and after a minute or so the Sky Q box picked up the Wi-fi signal! Downloaded and watched 4 episodes of Killing Eve and it downloaded them much quicker, so thanks for the suggestion.

Does power line ethernet get congested or is it the same as using a non managed switch? I’d expect the speed to be slower than ethernet, but wondering how much you can connect? Only talking couple of Macs etc, not gaming stuff.

 

[N4LLY]

 

[Quijibo Jones]

So I turned the Apple TV off and removed it. Then turned off the power line Wi-fi adapter and after a minute or so the Sky Q box picked up the Wi-fi signal! Downloaded and watched 4 episodes of Killing Eve and it downloaded them much quicker, so thanks for the suggestion.

Does power line ethernet get congested or is it the same as using a non managed switch? I’d expect the speed to be slower than ethernet, but wondering how much you can connect? Only talking couple of Macs etc, not gaming stuff.

It won't get too congested as you have to carry out the physically act of plugging end points into it. However, it might suffer from signal loss. If you think about the route a signal takes from one end of the ethernet wire to the other, it's direct. You are replacing that wire with all the wires in your walls and putting two end points on it. You feed a signal into one and it travels across all of the wires in the your house, finds the other end and exits the walls. So it will naturally be slower. hope that makes sense!

 

[enzed4]

A few tips that may help if you can implement any of them:
1. Use wired connections back to the router wherever possible - not necessarily because your wifi is poor, but it helps to reduce the load. Remember, wifi is a shared medium of fixed bandwidth, the more devices using it, the smaller the slice each device gets. That's before even considering interference from neighbouring networks.
2. On wifi, use 5GHz as first choice. There are more non-congested channels available, and fewer non-802.11 sources of interference (e.g. microwaves, baby monitors, electric motors, cordless phones, elevators (hey, I don't know what your house is like....). Use 802.11ac if your router and devices support it - set channel bandwidth to 80MHz, or even 40MHz if it only supports 802.11n. Every little bit of bandwidth helps (but only on 5GHz. Don't use 40MHz channels on 2.4GHz unless you live in an area with no neighbouring networks). Set the channels for the least-congested.
3. As mentioned already, locate the WiFi router in the best possible place for reception; not hidden behind the TV cabinet or in a room on the other side of the house.
4. If using Ethernet over power (powerline?), use the newer versions if possible - the old versions were slow.
5. A lot of times, poor broadband (not wifi) speeds are caused by internal wiring. Check you have the best possible cabling from your service provider's box (don't know what you call it, here it's an ONT if fibre) to your router.

I installed a Ubiquiti Unifi router, switch and AP to handle our home network; I'm getting around 945Mb/s down, 540Mb/s UP on fibre.

Best of luck

 

[Anonymous]

How much speed do you actually need?

 

[enzed4]

How much speed do you actually need?

I wanted to know if my cabling and hardware could handle it. What can I say, I'm a gadget-geek, plus I'm a Telco Engineer so it's kinda what I do . Bit like remapping a Z4 - you don't need the extra power/speed, but it can be fun seeing what it's like