Broadband Fibre FAST!! But not as fast as what I was expecting!

tallmansix

I watched the full video, almost certainly your PC is now limiting the web page loading. Can you provide a full spec for your PC including:
1. Processor eg Intel i5-8300H 4.0Ghz (full code number plus Ghz)
2. Ram eg 16GB
3. Disk type SSD / spinny disk
Wireless or ethernet? If wireless, what wireless card is your PC using, latest WPA2 encryption is a heavy processing load.
What is your router / Wifi access point - many ISP provided ones are pretty low spec.Are you using 2.4ghx or 5ghz wifi?
Also - use an adblocker to speed up commercial pages

matelodave

Have you actually done a speed test - try different providers, like Ookla, BT, Speedof.me etc to see if you are getting the speed that you are expecting.

I get 76mbit/s over my FTTP connection and using 5ghz wifi, that's what I get at my computer but if I use 2.4ghz wifi it drops down to about 50mbit/s (even if I stand next to the router). If your wifi doesn't give you the speed that your connection is providing then try connecting your computer directly to the router with an ethernet cable.

If I download stuff it can be pretty fast or quite slow depending where it comes from, in the same way as some websites are a lot faster loading than others.

Don't forget that these servers are dotted all over the world and data does not actually move at the speed of light, even down optical fibres (whatever anyone tells you). Even the light gets slowed down when travelling through fibre. (I spent 30 years working and developing both national and international  fibre networks). Data is sent in small packets which are interleaved with other packets so there's a finite delay in assembling the packets, routing them around the network  via hundreds of equipment nodes and then sorting them out when you receive them  The delay is even more apparent if it comes via satellite. You are sharing bandwidth and server space at the same time as billions of other people.

Chino

matelodave said:

and data does not actually move at the speed of light, even down optical fibres (whatever anyone tells you).

Who, apart from you, implied that it did?

phillw

Consecca said:

Reading the newer responses, has led me to ask more precise questions than what I had orginally started with.
Is there a way i can manually increase wifi speed or will that not make a difference, given what @matelodave
has mentioned above. Or what factors of my internal computer spec might possibly be contributing to what appears to be "slower internet"? 

Whether there is anything you can do will depend on what is causing it to be slower than you expected.
Wifi is generally slower than Ethernet, but a decent router and Wifi adapter should allow you to go faster than 100mb/s.
If your computer is low on memory, or has a slow hard drive or slow cpu then that could slow it down.
Without knowing exactly what your issue is it's going to be really difficult for someone to know if you need to buy new equipment or whether you need to accept it's as fast as you can get.
I just upgraded to fibre today and I had to uninstall a piece of software called smartbyte that dell installs on windows pcs, which tries to be clever and limits the speed of some applications so that video streaming etc doesn't get interrupted. I have no idea if there is anything like that on the mac.

phillw

matelodave said:

Don't forget that these servers are dotted all over the world and data does not actually move at the speed of light, even down optical fibres (whatever anyone tells you). Even the light gets slowed down when travelling through fibre. (I spent 30 years working and developing both national and international  fibre networks).

The light by definition travels at the speed of light through fibre, but as you know that isn't the "speed of light in a vacuum" as fibre is not a vacuum. Even air slows light down.
But the speed the light travels isn't particularly relevant to the data throughput, electricity has always moved the same speed down an ethernet cable but there are 1mb, 10mb, 100mb, 1gb & 10gb standards.

Roland_Sausage

Although it is marketed as "faster" or a "speed upgrade", what you have actually received is a capacity upgrade. Here is an analogy that might be useful.

Think of a tall building, a sky scraper with a narrow pipe, (maybe the diameter of your typical indoor plumbing) running from top to bottom. Someone stands on the roof and pours a thimbleful of water down the pipe. There is not much water in a thimble, so the whole amount will fit into the pipe. There will be a slight delay for the water to be received at the bottom as the water travels down the pipe. This thimbleful of water is your web page and the travel time is the latency.

Now let's increase the size of the pipe. Make it say 20 times wider. Pour the thimble full of water down again. Will it get to the bottom any faster? No because the capacity of the original pipe was already adequate for it and the water is still subject to the travel time.

Now repeat the experiment but this time pour a bath tub full of water down the pipes. This is a 4K movie download.

On the narrow, pipe, there is clearly going to be capacity issues and it will take a long time to empty the entire bath tub down the pipe as the pipe can only take so much water at a time. On the much wider pipe it is going to go down the pipe much quicker.

One thing that will not change with the higher capacity pipe is the time the water takes to travel down it. From the moment the first drop is poured until it is received at the bottom is going to similar be due to the pipe length, but overall the bathtub will empty much faster.

When you factor in stuff like the guy tipping the water down (the remote server) getting sore arms and having to divide his attention between tipping water down hundreds of different pipes simultaneously, you can see why it might not always make a difference.

So basically that is what you now have. A higher capacity pipe and not a faster pipe.