Full fibre & wifi

Hi
If whenever I can order full fibre in the town I live in, is it worth getting full fibre if using mostly WiFi (as suppose to Ethernet) ? Lastly will anything more then 500mbps be wasted on WiFi ?
Thanks

In reply to a post by wy2k:

Lastly will anything more then 500mbps be wasted on WiFi ?

....well possibly yes. Depends on your home? layout, number of access points, which WiFI standard your access points and devices use. Whether the APs are direct cabled or meshed. Lots of variables. But it can be quite challenging to reliably and consistently get far in excess of 600-800 Mbps of real throughput over WiFi. In a lot of cases a lot less.

The real question is are your devices and your user experience really going to dramatically differ if you're getting 300Mbps or 800 Mbps - over WiFi that is. Might be different if your doing regular large file transfers or something - but in which case you'd be hopefully using a cabled connection.

Well I live in a small 1 bed flat with 32 other 1-3 bed flats.
Apart from my games console*, all my other devices TV, laptop & phone etc are WiFi only. *Obviously I do the most downloading on this new games/updates etc

In reply to a post by wy2k:

Hi
If whenever I can order full fibre in the town I live in, is it worth getting full fibre if using mostly WiFi (as suppose to Ethernet) ? Lastly will anything more then 500mbps be wasted on WiFi ?
Thanks

My phone don;lt get very high speeds on Wi-Fi, lucky to get over 200Mb/s, but when doing a speed test with Wi-fi on the Mac mini, which is in the room above the Router, I get around 450-500Mb/s. If it is worth it for you depends on what speeds you get now, if you need the faster speeds. If you are on even the top FTTC speed, you are going to get better speed with fibre and as I found out, providers are doing better deals with FTTP than with FTTC.

For my use case, 500Mbps was the sweet spot. If it had only been 10% more each month to go to 1Gbps then I would have done that, but it would have been a 38% increase (£32 to £44 with Lit) which while I could use in certain circumstances, most of the time it would only have been obvious in a speed test.

Full fibre - yes, it is more reliable and can deliver higher throughput when there is high demand.

Will 500Mbps or greater be wasted? From what you say - potentially, just depends on your access points. From you second post, I would say 300Mbps would do, or even 150Mbps. Game updates - yes they may take a while longer, but how big are they? On 150Mbps 150MB - 10 seconds, 1.5 GB 100 seconds, 15GB - 15 minutes.


I am actually about to have a 75Mbps Full Fibre installed ...

Thanks for the help so far.
I just thought when I can full fibre it would be best to go for 500mbps otherwise what's the point of upgrading cos you can get the lower speeds on fttc non full fibre

Reliability comes into it - also cost!

The line I am moving gets a full 80Mbps on FTTC, moving to FTTB custs the cost overall and occasional copper line issues will disappear. I could put 150/300/500 on there but it is not needed, and in fact a 40Mbps product would be fine too!

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

My phone don;lt get very high speeds on Wi-Fi, lucky to get over 200Mb/s, but when doing a speed test with Wi-fi on the Mac mini, which is in the room above the Router, I get around 450-500Mb/s.

Is that with your router, or the ISP supplied router? Isn't your Mac Mini WiFi 6E capable? If your phone isn't WiFi 6 then not worth worrying, as WiFi 5 is going to be the 200 or so. (More than sufficient on a phone!).

I have a WiFi 6 router and WiFi 6E capable laptop, and a NAS connected to Gigabit wired. I can use over 700 Mbps over the link. (My internet connection is slower).

For wifi devices I limit the speed anyway. Any 2.4Ghz devices are going to be pretty limited and these tend to be IoT types these day so it is fine.
For 5Ghz I limit the channel width to 40Mhz which gets me around 300mbit and has decent range.
I have two Unifi APs to cover the whole house and garden so range is more important for me than outright speed and this is fast enough for just about anything. IOS updates might take a little longer to download but so what?

I do see from network scans routers from the likes of Sky with 160Mhz channel widths probably so customers don't complain that they are getting slow speeds.

I was given a wifi6 router from Swish but haven't used it. It did give a full 1gbit when they were testing over wifi.