Fibre broadband faster speed options.

Boohoo

Hello.
I was on 6mb normal broadband and on Monday i upgraded to Sky fibre 38mb.
I know i am still in the 10 day line testing stage.
My router is connected to the master socket but it is over 20 years old and no seperate broadband socket. My computer is upstairs and i have sky wireless tv connector in the lounge and i have a freesat box in same room as pc which is connected to the router using a 54mbps powerline. The pc has a G rated wireless pci card.
Today i done a speed test on the pc and the most download was 19mb. I done the same on a laptop that has N rated wireless card and the speeds were the same. Went 3 foot away from the router and done another test on laptop and exact same speeds.
Hooked laptop to the router using lan cable and the speeds were 37.5mbps down and 9.5mbps up.
Is the Sky black hub limited to 19mbps download speed?
Wouls getting a new wireless card make any difference or will using a powerline for the pc be worth it.

GunJack

you'll always see much lower speedtests over wifi than wired, just a fact of life and physics. A new wifi card/dongle may help, but certainly not guaranteed...

wongataa

Wi-Fi has lower max speeds than wired networks. If the powerline adaptors are fast enough and use wired connections at each end then you will get faster results on the speed tests.

19Mbps is not much below the fastest you can physically get out of Wi-Fi G connection so that connection is maxing out your Wi-Fi link..

AJXX

Perhaps investigate a new router or network card?

I'm on Infinity 2 with a BT HH5 - Our wired speed is 50-52 Mbps and has been since Infinity was installed roughly 2 years ago.

All our wireless devices (in a large-ish house) get at least 40-45 Mpbs at the furthest distance from the router (so a loss of only roughly 5-7 Mbps compared to wired) - and closer to the router have no issue matching the full wired speed of 50-52 Mbps

I've also got a couple of 2006 onwards iMacs which have no issue getting 40-45 Mbps despite their age.

Boohoo

I don't think i am able to use a new router with Sky fibre as its against T&C but i could with normal broadband. There is a way with piggybacking with another router.
Sky's black router is not the best for wireless signal.
I don't really want to spend money on a new card and find out it is still the same.
I have thought about powerlines but as i have a pair already i dont think you can get them to work with the new ones. If i could then that would be great if not i will have to have a pair for the pc upstair and a pair for the freesat box upstairs.

kwikbreaks

If your powerline adapters are different standards and won't play nicely together then trying to run two separate pairs is likely to fail as there will be mutual interference.

Exactly what router kit do you have? Didn't Sky provide a new one? I thought they issued a VDSL hub these days and that should have halfway decent wireless - at least good enough to cope with 38Mbps fibre reasonably well providing the equipment used with it is N standard.

Old G wifi kit won't be good enough and nor will powerline adapters less than 200Mbps as the headline figures with them are pretty highly hyped.


===

Ah - if it is this one it seems it's a bit poor on WiFi..

Wireless performance from the Sky Hub’s 2.4GHz network was disappointing. When testing it with our laptop's integrated 802.11n adaptor, we only saw 13.5Mbit/s at 10m range and 2.6Mbit/s at 25m. Even at just 1m distance from the router we only saw 20.3Mbit/s. This isn’t quite the worst performance we’ve seen, but it’s certainly very disappointing. The lack of full-speed Gigabit Ethernet ports on the router means you'll never be able to get more than 100Mbit/s, even when running a cable.

Sky has quickly been left behind by its ISP rivals when it comes to supplied routers. The Sky Hub is light on features and has poor performance, so is ripe for an upgrade.

searchlight123

i upgraded to sky fibre around 6 months ago.
on their normal unlimited broadband on wifi i was getting around 9mb download.
on their fibre with wifi i get an average of 33mb download. it doesn't go up significantly if i connect with ethernet cable. i have the standard glossy black sky hub that i had for non fibre broadband and they told me it was their latest one and fine for fibre, and so it is proving.

have you tried powering off your router and re powering it back on. i tend to remember when i was first connected i only got around 20mb but as soon as i did the re-powering it increased to 33mb instantly.
worth a try?

Boohoo

kwikbreaks i was with Sky broadband and upgraded to fibre when i got a deal from them. Didn't get a new router as its the same as one you have looked at and you can see what it says about poor wifi.


tonygold my router stats were 39998 and 9999 when set up yesterday and there are the same today. I never did turn it off yesterday. I have in the past found with sky that turning off the router puts back to a 10 day line management and that can be a pain.

RumRat

Boohoo wrote: »

I don't think i am able to use a new router with Sky fibre as its against T&C but i could with normal broadband. There is a way with piggybacking with another router.
Sky's black router is not the best for wireless signal.
I don't really want to spend money on a new card and find out it is still the same.
I have thought about powerlines but as i have a pair already i dont think you can get them to work with the new ones. If i could then that would be great if not i will have to have a pair for the pc upstair and a pair for the freesat box upstairs.

Many people do change the fibre router from Sky (regardles of T&Cs), but, it takes a bit of tweaking. It's not over difficult to do, but would depend on how worth it you thought it was.
IMO it's just another reason not to indulge in anything Sky related. Best fix would be to wait out your contract and change supplier...;)

kwikbreaks

tonygold wrote: »

have you tried powering off your router and re powering it back on. i tend to remember when i was first connected i only got around 20mb but as soon as i did the re-powering it increased to 33mb instantly.
worth a try?

The OP says he is already getting the correct speed over ethernet. The issue is how to overcome poor WiFi performance. If it is against the T&C to use a different router then probably the easiest WiFi option would be to buy a decent WiFi access point and use that for WiFi rather than the WiFi from the Sky Hub itself. The G adapter would still need replacing.

takman

I have a BT Home Hub 5 with a 74 Mbit connection speed. I can get this full speed on devices that have Wifi-AC chips in them. But it's a lot cheaper to just install a wired network for devices that don't need to be moved than upgrade Wifi cards.