Speeds

I live in a rural area and broadband on the phone lines is woefully inadequate. For over 4 years, I have been receiving broadband from a local company wirelessly at a speed of 32 MBPS both down and up.

Because the house is spread out, I have had a mesh wifi system (TP-Link Deco M5) for the past 2 years and that has worked well. The speed loss from unit to unit was ±10% so when the gateway was showing 32 MBPS, the first unit might be ± 27 and the third around 24. I regarded this as a normal rate of loss and didn’t think much of it.

On this system, the speed at the Gateway would decline in the evening and the ensuing loss in the satellite units also reduced pretty much on a pro rata basis. I attributed this loss of speed to more users online with limited bandwidth capability, again I regarded it as normal.

From the end of October, I converted to a Fibre to the Home connection and now receive 500 MBPS at the gateway, both down and up. However, the loss between the mesh wifi units is severe, about 85% to the first satellite and another 20% to the second. Even at the primary unit, I lose ± 15% on wifi over a wired connection.

This also seems to be even more pronounced in the evening when the loss is 90%. The evening loss cannot be attributed to more users as the gateway delivery is still 500 MBPS. It is brand new infrastructure and undoubtedly has substantial excess capacity

Now for the most part I can live with this. I seem to be able to stream (even UHD content) and in the abnormal event that I have to move big files, I can do so on a wired connection at the gateway.

The one exception and annoyance is downloading media content to my Sky Q box which cannot be done at the gateway (different floors) and moved due to the design of Sky Q. They still take a long time to download.

Can someone explain why there is such a more severe loss of speed (and further losses in the evening) on a superfast connection when compared to my experience on a slower connection and, more importantly, advise if there is a solution.

I have tried moving the Deco units around (the primary has to stay where it is as that is the source of the external connection) but moved them back as this seemed to be best. I have two other mesh wifi systems operating (Sonos and Sky Q) and have tested it with both of these shut down with no noticeable impact.

I have referred the matter to TP-Link who have done an online diagnosis and attribute the issue to anomalies in my house. This does not explain the discrepancy with my historical experience.

The advertised max transfer rate of the Deco M5 is 867 Mbps which sounds great at first, but reality of wireless figures then enters the domain.

Around half the speed is lost due to error prevention/handling and transport layers etc so best you can expect is around the 400 Mbps mark,

There may also be interference from other wireless networks, which slow things down further.

In short if you want to see closer to the 500 Mbps you may want to use faster units, though around 500 Mbps is generally the best WiFi will manage unless you start using newer WiFi 6 kit and have client devices that support WiFi 6.

Ethernet will beat the WiFi so consider where possible running extension wiring so devices can see gateway type speeds.

It's one of the reasons I haven't bothered to upgrade above 150Mb/s. I am not planning to run wired cables and I do have a wireless mesh but whilst it might possibly cope up to 300Mb/s I don't expect it to be able to make good use of the connection above that.

Of course we also don't know how close the OPs wireless mesh points are. It may be they are too far from the hub to get even close to their max speeds and so moving them closer to the hub and having a denser mesh could make it better.

Thanks for your input. Not what I wanted to hear but I will do some homework as to whether there is a better system. The main problems are the sky downloads and a second TV whcic is on the second hop. I can get buffering on that one.

In reply to a post by boutells:

The main problems are the sky downloads and a second TV whcic is on the second hop. I can get buffering on that one.

As you have 3 mesh systems operating in the same home, perhaps they are conflicting, which would reduce total speeds.

SkyQ will have its own mesh system, this will be a series of Q boxes and boosters. If it's downloading slowly Sky would need to issue an engineer, as most likely the problem is the sky Q mesh needs more boosters / hard wiring in places (worst case). You need Sky to issue a TV engineer for this. The SkyQ should not be using your DECO Mesh at all, so this isn't part of the problem.