How to improve our home wifi - upgrade the T3200 modem?

[JayBea]

Well, I've been dreading trying to tackle this problem because it has been going on for so long.

I'm guessing it is worse because we have 4 people at home, working from home now.

We have a T3200 modem with one booster pack to help the basement suite dwellers with their wifi. We are also on a fibre optic line.

Altogether we probably have 20 devices that connect to wifi, but definitely not all at once. 90 percent are Apple products. We are fortunate to have lots of space in the house to all have our own rooms to work in, but the wifi has a bit far to reach the offices.

Frustratingly, for the people in the house trying to work and earn a living, the wifi will cut out at critical moments, like a Zoom meeting.

I just connected my laptop (at 11 am) with an ethernet cable to the modem to do a speed test and we got ping 1; download 92.7 and upload 92.8 for a 300mb service contract. I've had worse results in the evenings, but using wifi connection.

I tried getting another booster pack to help the upstairs offices, but I think it made it worse so it is now packaged up waiting to be returned to Telus.

Is the only answer to have 2 residential lines with booster packs? - which we can't really afford - or would upgrading the modem to something more powerful help? I read in a forum a while ago (lost the link) that the T3200 doesn't work with Apple products really well.

I realize this is an issue with congestion - the house next door to us also has 4-5 people working from home.

Thanks for any suggestions. I'm almost ready to see what Shaw or Rogers is like, which would probably not be any better.

[xray]

When testing with your laptop make sure your Ethernet cable is capable of gigabit speeds. Not all are, especially older ones. You need all 8 pins connected for gigbit otherwise it's 100mb. Also make sure your laptop's Ethernet adapter is gigabit. Not all are.

Did you do a speed test from the T3200M? Log on to the router to do so.

[JayBea]

Thanks for your reply. My laptop is a 2 year old MacBook Pro, so hopefully the laptop is ok. I checked the cable and it is Ethernet Cat5e with 8 pins. I'm using an Apple adapter to connect from my laptop USB port.

I didn't log on to the router to do the speed test, so I'll try that next. thx.

[xray · Accepted solution]

Have a look at this thread which goes through the steps for isolating where the problem might be.

https://forum.telus.com/t5/Internet-Home-Phone/Considering-switching-back-to-shaw-need-some-advice/t...

[JayBea]

Thank you - a good thread of info.

I'll work on some of the suggestions.