Supernatural speed

[derekac56]

Whilst we have supernatural fibre and everything in the house is wifi, my sons are telling me the download speeds are getting slower and slower, my eldest has the newest/flashy pc and says he's getting well under 400mb reported on a regular basis even with a WiFi booster. Area and equipment checks on here say no problem but something clearly isn't right, can you advise please?

[Chrisee]

@derekac56 dont know anything about "super natural fibre" but the fibre broadba nd service Sky provides is definitely earthly.

400Mb/s over wifi especially via a booster is excellent and amply fast enough for gaming, watching video and working indeed most of the time the PC will be using under 50Mb/s. Downloads will be a bit faster if he had faster WiFi but given the highest Sky guarantees is 25Mb/s in every room if you buy their WiFi Max add-on. To get higher speeds in every room over WiFi will req uire you to buy at the minmum a WiFi 6 triband home wifi set up which depending on the size and layout of your home could costs around £500.

If your son wants the best experience with his PC you need to run a direct Ethernet cable from the hub to his room which will give more bandwidth and much more important if he plays games have lower latency. Failing that a decent powerline networking kit thst uses the mains wiring is another possibility but buy one thst offers st lesst 3 times the speed you need as they rarely get close to their rated speed.

[TimmyBGood]

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@derekac56 wrote:
 my eldest has the newest/flashy pc and says he's getting well under 400mb reported on a regular basis even with a WiFi booster

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Almost nothing a PC can do uses 40Mbs, let alone 400Mbs.  As @Chrisee advises, if gigabit connection is desired (for some inexplicable reason) then ethernet cable is the way to go.

Note that high speed makes essentially no difference for actual gaming (although it speeds up the initial installation of new games and patches for existing ones) : it's much more beneficial to reduce latency.

[derekac56]

Thanks for the replies. Bloody predictive text..lol. I know zip about these things past 3 pin plug to be honest. But does beg the question why I bother paying for something that I'll never get full benefit of? Good marketing I imagine! I wondered if it was because we have an old granite house spread over 4 floors trying to run a pc, 4 x.boxes, 4 ps5's and various tablets and phones etc was the problem....

[TimmyBGood]

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@derekac56 wrote:

But does beg the question why I bother paying for something that I'll never get full benefit of? Good marketing I imagine! 

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500Mbs and gigabit broadband are intended to give multiple devices in simultaneous use 'enough' bandwidth to each do what they need to do without impinging on each other: for example a household having several UHD video streams going while also permitting a gamer and someone working from home. 

Any individual device only uses a small fraction of the potential connection.

[Chrisee]

@derekac56 having what sounds to be a super houee is a large part of the problem as granite is not wifi friendly. Powerline networking can work though to getcsignal to different floors..

Regretfully Sky's marketing department's knowledge of the physics of broadband is not great.