Full Fibre Broadband – What is a realistic speed at device

[BrianMusic14]

Hi all. I am thinking of taking Sky Stream, Broadband and Phone at the end of this month. I'm with Virgin Media at the moment. We have recently had City Fibre install over-ground full fibre cables in our street. If I decide to take 500Mbps broadband (which Sky say is now available to me), what is the realistic wifi download speed I would get at my devices (not the router speed)? All my devices (4) will be in the same room as the router.

[cookiemonsteruk]

@BrianMusic14 

A category 5e ethernet should get you 95% of the router speed

A 5ghz wifi connection could get you 90-95% of the router speed

A 2.4 ghz wifi connection can be variable and depending on other devices connected to 2.4ghz and other nearby network ssids in the area can be as low as 50% of the speed to the router

[jamesn123]

@BrianMusic14 

You can't put a number on it because WiFi can vary so drastically with a very minor environmental change. 

It totally depends on your house construction, appliances you have, neighbours WiFi routers, client devices you are using & what phase the moon is in 😆

[TimmyBGood]

@BrianMusic14 

All WiFi is zero Mbs on the other side of a few walls or over some tens of metres of free space, and hugely affected by what the neighbours are doing.

We suspect the Max Hub is also affected by its mandatory dynamic frequency selection required to avoid some restricted wireless spectrum.

[BrianMusic14]

Thanks everyone for your advise. Nothing concrete then!

I'm with Virgin Media at the moment, with a Gig1 package, but I only get 240Mbps maximum through WiFi, often less. Ethernet from VM router to my laptop right now is 130Mbps, and via WiFi it's 75Mbps!!  Wifi to my mobile is 230Mbps, and 260Mbps next to the VM router. Maybe I need to replace my 14 year old laptop?! 🙄

This WiFi performance is why I'm thinking of moving providers.

[TimmyBGood]

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@BrianMusic14 wrote:

Maybe I need to replace my 14 year old laptop?! 

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The wireless chipset in hardware of that vintage might be 802.11n rather than 802.11ac, which makes a significant difference.

[Doc5907]

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@BrianMusic14 wrote:

Hi all. I am thinking of taking Sky Stream, Broadband and Phone at the end of this month. I'm with Virgin Media at the moment. We have recently had City Fibre install over-ground full fibre cables in our street. If I decide to take 500Mbps broadband (which Sky say is now available to me), what is the realistic wifi download speed I would get at my devices (not the router speed)? All my devices (4) will be in the same room as the router.

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@BrianMusic14 

Real world example here. I have Sky max 500 with white hub.

Via ethernet in same room * as hub = 520mbps download ,70mpbs upload, ping 10ms consistent readings to PC since i had in dec 24.

Wifi reading in same room as hub = 410mbps via wifi sweetspots app.

* my ONT is in different room to my devices so used cat 6 ethetnet to move my hub so i can connect main devices by Ethernet. In the room where hub originally was the wifi speed is 160mbps

[jamesn123]

@BrianMusic14 

Your unlikely to get much different numbers with Sky in terms of the WiFi performance. You'd need to look at getting 3rd party routers for higher performance

In terms of the laptop, if its 14yrs old its likely to have ancient hardware which will be limiting both wired & WiFi speeds.

[BrianMusic14]

Thanks to you all again. So based on your replies, I might give Sky a go,  probably going to be a bit cheaper anyway. I might also invest in a new laptop later in the year (Black Friday deal?), as mine is Windows 10, and Microsoft won't be supporting it after October.

Thanks again. Cheers.

[Chrisee]

@BrianMusic14 unless you plan to download large files regularly you will see minimal speed improvements on most apps even if you double WiFi speeds. 200+Mb/s is more than ample for most domestic and business apps. As an example Netflix recommend 15Mb/s minimum for watching in UHD and indeed the maximum a video streams can use is around 30Mb/s.. 

[Doc5907]

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@BrianMusic14 wrote:

Thanks to you all again. So based on your replies, I might give Sky a go,  probably going to be a bit cheaper anyway. I might also invest in a new laptop later in the year (Black Friday deal?), as mine is Windows 10, and Microsoft won't be supporting it after October.

Thanks again. Cheers.

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@BrianMusic14 

In the meantime you could look at something like This to plug in to your existing laptop to get faster Ethernet speeds.

[FLC]

@BrianMusic14 

It could well come down to luck. There a numerous reports daily of the latest Hub being absolutely dire for WiFi, something borne out by my own experience. Many of these have either moved from another ISP or changed the router, so not environmental issues as it was fine before. But it's really hard to quantify exactly how widespread the issue is. It's probably the single most complained about issue here, but there are also thousands not posting. Whether that's because they don't have issues or simply haven't found the forum, who knows?

Best advice I can offer is expect it to be dire for you too, with the expense of buying either a new router or a mesh system. Then if you get a good one it will be a bonus!