Currently the VDSL line into my house is priced for a speed of 50mbps. I never get that, it's more like 32, but generally i'd been told that on wi-fi that would be fairly typical. I was offered to upgrade it to 100 mbps for equiv of about £3 per month so I went for that. For reasons not yet clear, the line speed is now between 83 and 120 according to the technician who visited, but I saw no increase in the speed test on my laptop using wifi. The technician blamed my modem. So now I have the potentially difficult task of finding out what that problem might be.
However, when I consulted a neighbour who knows a bit about this, he questioned whether I need the upgrade. I had assumed that the higher speed would reduce buffering when watching TV over the web, but he said that if there are no other machines in the house taking up bandwidth, and I am already getting 30mbps or more, the buffering is for other reasons. He said increased line speeds help in households where you might have e.g two teens both playing games on the web, etc.
Anybody got any comments on my neighbour's view? And what might be wrong with my modem that it does not respond to a higher incoming line speed? (I know I have to test it connected to an Ethernet cable)
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I ended up agreeing to an extra £4 a month with a speed upgrade. Incidentally for that I get the cable TV and Tivo box, a landline and broadband with wifi.
What I learned is that your speed and connectivity can be diluted and weakened by the number of devices in your home. Alexas, tablets, desktops, phones using wifi, smart TV, smart lightbulb stuff and so on.
Since the increase, using a device in a previous household blind spot has stopped being such a problem.
Can you check your broadband speed with a device plugged into the router with a cat6 RJ45 ethernet cable rather than one using wifi?
Edited to add: I think your neighbour is correct. 60Mbps should be fine for streaming 4k UHD/HDR. I don't get anywhere near that and don't buffer at all.
Your ISP may also throttle your internet speed due to use in your local area by other customers at certain busy times during the day.
Lastly, location of your device(s) to the router also has an impact.
hellotech.com/guide/for/how-to-change-wifi-channel-on-router
Would like Fibre to the property, but will wait for the price to drop a tad more
I just did the ethernet cable test (although not sure if the cable is of the quality @cafcfan proposed) . Clear improvement, three tests, different connections but all producing 49-51 mbps. Whip it out, back on wifi, back down to 24-27mbps. All on incoming line speed "priced" for 100mbps. Upload speed is always around the same, between 4.5/4.75 mbps
When I watch internet on TV or play music via Sonos or Spotify on the phone, this is all happening in the same room where the modem router is, and the laptop would be no more than 3 metres from the router and in clear sight of it. I also generally use Zoom and similar on the desktop computer in the study and that seems to work OK too.
@Big_Bad_World yes I've been told a bit about the games ISPs play and unfortunately here I am dealing with a monopoly supplier. Imagine BT with its legacy of the old phone network, but now owned by Gazprom, and with no competitor in the area, that's what I'm dealing with. However, when their technician came round yesterday he had his own modem. Chunky box thing with a readout panel on the top of it. He showed me the 83mbps reading, and when straight away I did the Ookla speed test on my laptop over wifi I got 32...that is a big drop, and I could also get that sort of figure before the line speed was supposedly increased. That is the bit I can't get my head round. Can you? Anybody?
I have worked for a couple of ISP's over the years in tech support supporting ADSL etc, personally I am with TalkTalk (used to work for them), the router that they supplied needed rebooting every month as they are basic. They tend to run out of memory so I bought myself a better router and my problems went away, now I'm not expecting many people to spend nearly £300 on a router but that is exactly what I did.
Happy to offer advice.
with regards to Wi-fi the signal will decrease in strength over distance from router, it will also depend on how old the router is and what standard of Wi-fi it is using. The newer standards are able to travel longer distance.
wifi signal can also be affected by number of devices in the house, location of router, construction materials like thick brick walls or metal.
provided you are getting about 30-50mb that should be enough for streaming on one device/ possibly two
As for what I'm watching @Big_Bad_World, well apart from the obvious (Valley Pass I mean, and that works well) that's the thing....BBC iPlayer and sometimes All4 or ITV; these all require a VPN, which is my separate hell, especially with iPlayer. VPNs seem to further cut the speed down. So I assumed that if I upgrade the line speed, I would have a better speed than now via the VPN and so get rid of buffering, but my neighbour questions that.
I get 176mbps when wired but only 68mbps to my Nvidia Shield TV Pro box through Wi-Fi (which is more than enough even for the gaming aspects of it), and that's with 4 mobile phones, two home computers, two tablets, two Firesticks, three Smart TV's and a smart meter all connected.
Also have three signal boosters strategically placed around the house.
Like has been said, try and check your wired speed/router if at all possible.
It's worth saying that at my office, a few miles away we had cabled internet. It was excellent. The speed we paid for was the speed we got, every time.
Should also say I have nothing like the number of wired up gear you have. I have a signal booster in the study but that's mainly so we can sit on the terrace in summer and use the net.
The 100mbps is a bit of a red herring as contracts normally state 'up to', which is their get-out-clause. Very few providers offer guaranteed speeds (through Wi-Fi). I believe only BT do over here and that speed is only a guaranteed 10mbps for every room in your house.
Up until about a year ago I was putting up with 2mbps and BT wanted £50k to run fibre to the house - as you can imagine I told them where to shove their FTP. I switched to 4G and get a wopping 20mbps download and 10mbps upload - plus a ping of around 21ms. That'll do for me and more than enough to stream Netflix, general internet use and Echos all over the house!
Supposedly promised FTP at some point as part of the general rollout but I don't expect that in my lifetime!! The price of living in the back of beyond - bloody carrot crunchers!
Just an option to consider testing.
Power line works well for me but I mainly use it for ethernet for my PC/ps4.
That web page you sent re changing wifi channel is very interesting though. I will try that. It suddenly occurred to me that maybe one of our neighbours might use a fair bit of bandwidth, as we recently found out, from the media, that he's one of the country's porn barons! But he'd been busted, so seems like it's all gone quiet, over there...