Shocking wireless connection between iMac and my TG582n

Has anyone experienced poor wireless speeds between a Mac and the TG582 router (this one supplied by Plusnet)?

My specs are a mid-2010 iMac with a wireless 802.11n connection. Service is FTTC up to 76mb with an estimated speed of 55mb. I rarely get higher than 30mb, often 20-25mb on various speed tests.

This evening I was getting this shocking throughput. I initially thought it was Plusnet so posted a comment on that thread. Was advised to plug the Mac directly into the router and run this speedtest again. This time it jumped to this.

After spending months thinking Plusnet was to blame it turns out to be my wireless connection. Keeping the Mac wired to the router is a bit impractical, but is the Mac the weak link in the chain or the router?

In reply to a post by dwr:

but is the Mac the weak link in the chain or the router?

Can't talk about the router, but I've never had any problem with any of my Macs over wireless� but it's always a dubious way to run a speedtest.

Have you checked for nearby WiFi using the same channel? (iStumbler is handy for seeing them)

I can detect up to a couple of dozen networks in the evening� they don't usually cause me any problem, but I now use 5GHz on everything that knows about it, no others within range.



edit- typo

Edited by billford (Thu 03-Apr-14 21:11:17)

Do you have any other wireless devices that are not n-capable?

Have an iPad 2 and a iPhone 5. Not sure what their wireless specs are?

I can get about 24mb running the ookla speedtest on the phone, but on the wired iMac it's just maxed out at 57mb.

Starting to suspect it could be the router

I already have iStumber

I had already moved over to channel 13 as that was the furthest I could get away from the reported wireless networks in my vicinity.

It could well be the router?

In reply to a post by dwr:

It could well be the router?

It certainly could be, but the only way to be sure is to try another one!

It's always a good idea to have a spare anyway

I would expect more from both devices.

The router is probably the culprit - on FTTC I would suggest replacing and if going to spend any money getting a dual band router makes sense since the iPhone5 supports it

We have a web based tester that works on iPad http://labs.thinkbroadband.com/ispa which you can then share. The graphs can reveal some indications about the health of a connection

Thanks for the link. Just ran the test using my iPad and this was the result: [img]http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/button/13965...[/img]\ }"]

I don't suppose you could recommend or point me in the direction of some recommended routers?

Edited by deleted (Thu 03-Apr-14 22:48:04)

Asus rt-n66u far from cheap but a good few people on here use it.

Lower priced and slower wireless but probably more than enough for your speeds is the Asus rt-n56u

These both work as ethernet routers behind the white Openreach VDSL2 modem

I have not checked; but Channel 13 is close to the top end of the band, so there may be some limiting aspect coming in to play.

As others have suggested previously, try Channel 11 or lower; or Auto.