Forum Discussion
Upgraded to new modem, but same slow wifi issues remain
So i have 1GB service. Had service appointment today because slow wifi speeds for quite a while now, in range of 25mb/s to no connection at worst to 160ish mb/s at best. switched from T3200 to ne...
I might believe that if i had not witnessed speeds of nearly 700 mb/s on my iPhone standing right next to my router the time before this weekends social distance service call (i.e TELUS employee can’t enter house) when a TELUS technician came to look into why my system was performing poorly. After that i was getting speeds of 350-400 mb/s on my main floor (router is in basement) so i was pretty ecstatic.
That seemed to last a few weeks then service slowly degrade down to the current level.
When i look up high speed routers capable of transmitting greater than 1Mb/s, i wonder if something like that, purchased on my own, and connected by cable to the TELUS router, may be a possible solution. I know that the wired speed going into the fast router would be going at 1.3GB/s, so perhaps this higher speed router may boost my wifi speeds to the higher levels i have experienced (albeit briefly) in the recent past.
Are you sure that speed wasn't using multipath TCP? (It combines a wifi and cell connection and sends data over multiple paths) I have seen speed tests of ~800mbps when standing right next to an 802.11ax (Wi-Fi 6) router that costs $500+, but it's not very practical because you'll almost never actually see that speed. As far as I know Telus don't provide Wi-Fi 6 routers yet. If you're in a location that has any interference you're also unlikely to see such speed, and no amount of money will really fix that until Wi-Fi 6E devices are available in Canada.
To answer your questions (and thanks very much for replying and trying to help me understand whether this issue is solvable or not by the way 🙂 ) in order:
1. I did the same test both times with the same phone using the same process (fast.com). This only difference is last time had a T3200 and this time had switched over to the latest and greatest modem. But even prior to the modem switch, the speed over the wifi had degraded to the levels I am getting now with the new modem.
2. I enjoy webpages being able to load much quicker the way they do with super high speed. Plus if I am going to pay for 1GB service, I think getting at least half (say 500MB/s) on wifi is a reasonable expectation. Otherwise I think the users should be notified that wifi speeds will only be 20% to 30% of the cabled speed.
3. As for security, I use a VPN on certain devices (which I know reduces significantly) reduces the wifi speed. So I would like my wifi to be as high as possible prior to the VPN slowdown. Note that I don't use VPN on my phone or the other machines I test the VPN with when reporting wifi results.
So it sounds like there is a potential that I could get higher wifi speeds if I were to invest in a more expensive wifi router? Here are some that I have seen listed as the best of the best:
Do you think that one of these may help me?
Thanks again for your assistance.
- Is there anyone else with network expertise that thinks that going to a more expensive router may assist me in getting faster wifi speeds? I think the Telus technicians have likely done as much as they can to help me given the limitations of the equipment they are working with. So now I am just trying to educate myself and will purchase a faster router on my own if that will help the wifi speed in my house.
- This is just so frustrating! Just rebooted router and getting 71MB/s standing right next to it!
One other thing I only thought to mention after making this post: what is the end goal of having really high bandwidth over your wifi? The speeds you have are way more than enough for streaming video, for example. Have you noticed websites are slow to load or something? Although somewhat improved by HTTP/2 multiplexing requests over a single connection, loading websites can sometimes involve establishing hundreds of connections to different IP addresses. The limitation for something like that is generally latency and not raw throughput, and speed tests don't generally cover that kind of thing. They might contain a ping test, but I don't think they're generally a realistic measure of normal household traffic and how well the overall network performs.
Another thing to consider with Wi-Fi is security. Some of the router manufacturers might make routers capable of high speed test results when standing next to their wifi routers, but have abysmal track histories for patching vulnerabilities. Some others provide regular updates but might not be quite as fast for speed tests. On the other hand, new security features can sometimes cause problems. WPA3, while not perfect, does have some improvements over WPA2. Although WPA3 is supposed to allow existing WPA2 devices to connect, some poorly made devices don't currently work even when WPA3-transition mode is enabled.
