Download speed differences on fibre broadband

searchlight123

I'm with Sky on fibre and recently received the free upgrade to their max service which on the face of it has made no difference to my download speeds measured on speedtest.net. I'm getting around 36mb on average.

Couple of questions. If I measure my download on the same app installed on my wireless firestick 4k I get around 58mb, but I get only 36mb on my Samsung tablet and around 32mb on my HP laptop. All tests done near the router. Is it that the firestick has a speed advantage over my other devices?

Also, if I plug my laptop in to the router via ethernet cable I get around 70mb. I suppose my question is, can I improve the wireles performance of my tablet and laptop?

I have tried changing the router channel but this made no difference.
Many thanks.

DoaM

Wireless performance depends on many factors. One of the main ones is the frequency being used ...what Channel numbers do the various devices use to connect to the router? If the Firestick is using channel 40+ then it's using the 5GHz frequency - this tends to be a) quieter (less congestion, which is a throughput killer), and b) allows faster speeds.

You can look at what channels your WiFi networks are using (versus neighbouring networks) and adjust them to use quieter channels. That might help. inSSIDer and the like can help with such analysis.

neilmcl

tonygold wrote: »

I'm with Sky on fibre and recently received the free upgrade to their max service which on the face of it has made no difference to my download speeds measured on speedtest.net. I'm getting around 36mb on average.

Couple of questions. If I measure my download on the same app installed on my wireless firestick 4k I get around 58mb, but I get only 36mb on my Samsung tablet and around 32mb on my HP laptop. All tests done near the router. Is it that the firestick has a speed advantage over my other devices?

Also, if I plug my laptop in to the router via ethernet cable I get around 70mb. I suppose my question is, can I improve the wireles performance of my tablet and laptop?

I have tried changing the router channel but this made no difference.
Many thanks.

I'm glad you brought this up as I just checked mine and I'm also connected at the higher 74Mbps speed now but running a few speed tests on my laptop and I'm only getting around the mid 20s download whereas I regularly was getting around 37Mbps on a 5Ghz connection. I'll need to keep an eye on this.

neilmcl

A quick update to my post above. As I mentioned my laptop is using a 5Ghz connection via a USB wireless adapter as my office has pretty poor coverage when using it's internal 2.4Ghz wifi card but I just did a bit of an experiment to see what speeds I would get on the laptop's own wifi card so removed the adapter, switched on the internal wifi and ran a test and sure enough it was about the same around 27Mbps. I then plugged the adapter back in and re-ran the speed test and it suddenly shot up to 68Mbps which is what I would expect it to be.

Not sure what's happened but it seems the adapter must've been running at 2.4Ghz for some reason.

DoaM

Sounds like the internal adapter was turned on rather than the external one.

techquest

What router model is it?
Has it got the latest firmware update?
Needless to say the speed performance increase of the plugged in laptop is obvious.

Dandytf

tonygold wrote: »

I'm with Sky on fibre and recently received the free upgrade to their max service which on the face of it has made no difference to my download speeds measured on speedtest.net. I'm getting around 36mb on average.

Couple of questions. If I measure my download on the same app installed on my wireless firestick 4k I get around 58mb, but I get only 36mb on my Samsung tablet and around 32mb on my HP laptop. All tests done near the router. Is it that the firestick has a speed advantage over my other devices?

Also, if I plug my laptop in to the router via ethernet cable I get around 70mb. I suppose my question is, can I improve the wireles performance of my tablet and laptop?

I have tried changing the router channel but this made no difference.
Many thanks.

Use an App which shows you which wireless channel you are using.
I don't currently have http://192.168.0.1/ open to show you the Roy router log in where you can check which channel sis et e.g. I'm currently 11
An app should show you of your WiFi channel is being used by other users possibly neighbours and you can choose another channel via the router log in page I have mentioned. Upto70 via Fibre is excellent I get upto 63 via ipad/iPhone.windows 13 laptop
What you get via Fibre tells you the Fibre speed is being fed correctly.

searchlight123

thanks for replies.
when i go into my router stats it shows channel being used is set to auto (i am using the glossy black sky hub router). i have tried the various channels (1,6 and 11 were recommended) but it made no difference.

interested to read in the above posts that my firestick may be connecting over 5gHz (hence the higher speeds), but my other devices over 2.4gHz - how do i change that so that my laptop and tablet etc connect via 5gHz?

just run another ookla speedtest on the wireless HP laptop and my ping is a constant 7ms my download is 28Mbps and my upload is 18Mbps.

many thanks for any advice given.

searchlight123

i have checked my sky hub and as it is not a 'Q' hub i believe it only runs on the 2.4gHz band.

i have downloaded inSSider but it is double dutch to me. it shows loads of SSID's which i presume are neighbour's routers. all (inluding mine) show they are on channel 1, 6 or 11.
my signal dBm is -50. doesn't mean anything to me!!

Gloomendoom

tonygold wrote: »

i have checked my sky hub and as it is not a 'Q' hub i believe it only runs on the 2.4gHz band.

i have downloaded inSSider but it is double dutch to me. it shows loads of SSID's which i presume are neighbour's routers. all (inluding mine) show they are on channel 1, 6 or 11.
my signal dBm is -50. doesn't mean anything to me!!

Change your channels to ones that none of your neighbours are using or, if that isn't possible, ones that have the weakest signal.

neilmcl

tonygold wrote: »

thanks for replies.
when i go into my router stats it shows channel being used is set to auto (i am using the glossy black sky hub router). i have tried the various channels (1,6 and 11 were recommended) but it made no difference.

interested to read in the above posts that my firestick may be connecting over 5gHz (hence the higher speeds), but my other devices over 2.4gHz - how do i change that so that my laptop and tablet etc connect via 5gHz?

just run another ookla speedtest on the wireless HP laptop and my ping is a constant 7ms my download is 28Mbps and my upload is 18Mbps.

many thanks for any advice given.

The chances are your other devices don't support 5Ghz on their own so you'd need to get an adapter for the laptop. I have one similar to this - https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B072FJS5MT/ref=oh_aui_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1