Wifi vs ethernet

I just signed up with Vodafone broadband after painful years with TalkTalk.

The new contract promised a minimum download speed of 35mbps. In fact, using a wifi connection, I'm only getting 17mbps.

Got in touch with Vodafone. They told me to connect the router to my laptop with an ethernet cable and recheck the speed. Sure enough, it jumped up to 36mbps.

I wasn't entirely satisfied. After all, I can't connect all my other devices (smart TV etc) via ethernet cables. But they said their promise was to deliver 35mbps to the router, not to my actual wifi-based home network.

So two questions:

1. Their promise of 35mbps did not specify the use of an ethernet cable rather than wifi. So am I justified in thinking that they have welshed on the promise?

2. Can I do anything to get the wifi system up to the speed that's arriving at the router?

I'd be grateful if anyone can answer these questions. Thanks.

1. The adverts used to say sync and now say 'to the router' i.e. guarantee is not even with an Ethernet cable but the connection speed between router and street cabinet.

2. Yes, fit an extra wireless access point, closer to where your wifi devices are.

First though recommend running a speed test via https://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest for both the Ethernet and Wi-Fi device and post the resulting links, reason being I have a niggly feeling that the 36 Mbps you say might be the report from the router itself rather than a through put figure.

The Vodafone router is pants for wifi (its a budget model), just buy a decent router such as the TP Link VR900v2 and Bob's yer uncle

Edited by deleted (Thu 29-Nov-18 11:47:47)

Since adding a bridge modem in front, thus removing modem work from the Vodafone router it has been stable and if you split the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz SSID it is not too bad, i.e. seems fairly normal for an ISP dual band router.

Suspect running VDSL2 modem and Wi-Fi in the same box taxed the CPU/memory making for more issues.

Thanks for replying.

As you suggested, I've just run the speed test again:

36.9 Mbps via ethernet
15.3 Mbps via wifi

The laptop (from which I've run the speed test) is on the same desk as the router i.e. less than 2 feet away.

How can one tell if the speeds are being reported from the router rather than a throughput figure?

That difference is unreasonably large. You might want to try the 2.4 and the 5 GHz signals separately.

Speed test? Which speed test? If ours then it is browser through cable or WiFi to our servers in a data centre.

If you are seeing a speed drop off over Wi-Fi from 36.9 to 15.3 Mbps over a distance of a couple of feet then something is wrong, what speed does the Wi-Fi say it is connecting at and is it using 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz bands?

Those are almost certainly the actual throughput figures and not sync/max achievable.

Were there obtained from the TBB speedtest? and if so, post a links to teh results.

Found the speed tests

http://tbb.st/1543488748140632255 and then via Wi-Fi http://tbb.st/1543488816811276255

What OS and age/processor? It may the laptop has a single Wi-Fi antenna and is not brilliant in its own right, the single download speeds are not actually that different, suggesting maybe single antenna rather than a modern laptop with good Wi-Fi chipset. That the multiple download is actually worse points towards maybe duff Wi-Fi chipset as in was never that great anyway, or is just in need of driver updates.

To know if its laptop or the Vodafone router, it is go somewhere where the Wi-Fi is known to be fast or bring a known good laptop to your network for testing.

I would also suggest trying a wireless test from maybe 3-5 metres away. Right up close could, in certain cases, cause the receiver to be swamped/overloaded. A quick check could easily rule that in/out.