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Some people get rubbish speeds because the router is not upright!!

2

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  • spenderdave
    spenderdave Posts: 673
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    I did not watch the Watchdog program but did hear the item on R4 You and Yours earlier the same day. I was not impressed with what I heard. Virgin Cable is rather different to ADSL because all customers are very close to the green box at the end of the road and will be almost guaranteed to have a connection rate close to the 200Mbs or whatever they are quoted. Any slowdown is by definition due to capacity problems and general delays elsewhere in the internet. Nowhere was this even mentioned. Having said that, I feel sorry for the chap who could only get 55Mbs on his 200Mbs connection.... My 8Mbs ADSL from Sky is quite adequate for me.

    Yes, a lot of misinformation and we have a media who simply doesn't understand the technicalities.
  • phillw
    phillw Posts: 5,593
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    edited 8 July 2017 at 7:56AM
    Neil_Jones wrote: »
    Could swear I heard somewhere moving DECT phones from near a router could reduce interference or is this something

    Like all anecdotal evidence it's hard to know whether it's true or not.

    It may be that the specific phone and router that the author had were emitting & susceptible to interference (like the effect a mobile phone has when placed too close to a loud speaker). If you don't have those same products then you won't be able to duplicate the same results.

    First step would be to find out whether it's ethernet or wifi that is affected. It could be interference from a neighbours wifi, if you are in a particularly congested area. Switching to 5ghz can help as it can't travel as far and it's less common (although it is becoming more common).

    If ethernet is affected it is a good idea to rule out anything else in your house, no matter how irrelevant you think it might be (supposedly some people have a lamp that throws out enough interference to affect it). Then when you phone virgin you can tell them all the things you have tried.

    I recently had to help someone who had a laptop that kept turning off. When they handed it to me then it started working. When they put it back on their desk then it turned off. They were putting it on top of another laptop whose lid was closed, which was fooling the top laptop into thinking it's lid was closed. I suspect it uses small magnets and it could detect one nearby. I've never had a problem using a laptop placed on top of another laptop, but someone who had only had that one experience might have come up with any reason for why it wouldn't work.
  • brewerdave
    brewerdave Posts: 8,498
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    DECT phone next to router ? Mine is, and it has zero effect on wifi speeds.

    One of the problems (I suspect) with Virgin customers getting much slower speeds than actual line speed, will be down to the wifi adapter on the device accessing the network. Unless they have ac standard adapters,they won't be anywhere near capable of handling 200Mb/sec eg older 11g adapters top out at 54 mb/sec (and ,in practice,operate considerably slower).
    I've certainly seen this problem with a BT fibre customer who couldn't connect wirelessly. at the 77Mb/sec his router was showing - he had an old netbook with an 11n adapter set up incorrectly.:(
  • kwikbreaks
    kwikbreaks Posts: 9,187 Forumite
    The issue wasn't just WiFi related. It's a very common VM problem and relates to the way the technology works. The local bandwidth is fairly restricted - especially upstream.

    A single upstream channel can only carry 18Mbps and when I was on VM some years ago you only had two upstream channels shared between maybe a couple of hundred users. They may well be using more upstream channels now and certainly must be using more downstream because in my day it was only 4 downstreams each of which can carry 50Mbps and they are selling 300Mbps.

    So with (say) 8 downstream channels and 4 upstream your local pipe back to high capacity fibre is 400Mbps down and 72Mbps up shared between maybe 200 customers, When I was on cable the top package was 100Mbps and that was delivered on a local pipe of 200/36.

    IMO the problem is going to be torrenting. A couple of users seeding 24x7 can take a very big chunk out of the local upstream pipe leading to poor performance for all on it. VM used to throttle back heavy users but complaints to the ASA meant they could either stop throttling or stop advertising unlimited. They stopped the throttling.
  • wongataa wrote: »
    That shouldn't make much difference. Wi-Fi uses the 2.4GHz band. DECT phones in Europe use 1.9GHz so there shouldn't be interference.

    Radios don't need to be on the same frequency to interfere with each other.
  • wongataa
    wongataa Posts: 2,610
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    Neil_Jones wrote: »
    Hmm. Could swear I heard somewhere moving DECT phones from near a router could reduce interference or is this something I've dreamt up and took as fact? Wouldn't be the first time that's happened...
    In the US cordless phones use frequencies closer to Wi-Fi. I suspect that the reference you remember was out of the US where it is possible for cordless phones to interfere with Wi-Fi.
  • wongataa
    wongataa Posts: 2,610
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    jack_pott wrote: »
    Radios don't need to be on the same frequency to interfere with each other.
    They don't but in my experience 1.9GHz cordless phones do not interfere with 2.4GHz Wi-fi. My cordless phone is inches away from my router and there has never been issues.
  • kwikbreaks
    kwikbreaks Posts: 9,187 Forumite
    DECT 6.0 (1.9 GHz), 5.8 GHz or 900 MHz phones, commonly available today, do not use the 2.4 GHz band and thus do not interfere.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_2.4_GHz_radio_use

    There is a way that DECT phones or anything else using a switch mode power supply can mess up broadband but the interference occurs at the ADSL/VDSL frequencies not WiFi and is the noise that can be radiated by a faulty switch mode PSU.

    In any event there were many people on Watchdog complaining and it was a general speed complaint not just WiFi. It was even acknowledged by VM that the reason was over utilisation.
  • phillw
    phillw Posts: 5,593
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    kwikbreaks wrote: »
    In any event there were many people on Watchdog complaining and it was a general speed complaint not just WiFi. It was even acknowledged by VM that the reason was over utilisation.

    Utilisation could be the cause. However I went for a while planning on phoning up because I wasn't getting the 30mb/s free upgrade and still only getting 20mb/s. Then one day I noticed I was connected on 2.4ghz instead of 5ghz, when I corrected that then I got 30mb/s.

    I have no idea how I made that mistake as I had gotten a dual band router specifically to allow me to use 5ghz, but I guess I clicked on the wrong thing one day & never noticed. I should have known better but didn't.

    So do the basics in your house before phoning them up.
  • AlecEiffel
    AlecEiffel Posts: 874 Forumite
    My router is stood upright and earlier today I got a super fast 8kbps (yes kb not mb). Been having sporadic problems for months but this was a new low!!
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