Download speed is half of my plan?

[RonnieGroves]

Download speed should be 80.00 mbps. 
I only receive that in the kitchen where my main hub is?

every other room in the house is lucky to receive 40.00mbps and have 2 wifi discs in them? 
I have complained several times and explained an engineer will have to come and correct this as it is clearly a fault yet nothing has been done to correct this matter?

[Christopher_G]

Hi @RonnieGroves

Welcome to the community.

I know you mentioned our broadband team said an engineer will need to come out. Did you book an appointment with them?

Chris

[Mustrum]

@RonnieGroves  no ISP will guarantee full speeds over Wi-Fi.

Are you having issues with your service? 

[WS1995]

@RonnieGroves Wouldn't necessarily say it's a fault. Download speeds are always estimates and are "UP TO" because they can never guarantee you will always get that speed.

I assume you are on WiFi? Simply because where the hub is you will always get the strongest signal, the moment you move further away, speed drops dramatically, especially if there are brick walls between the connecting device and the hub.

WiFi range extenders sometimes help, but they need a strong connection themselves to the hub in order to therefore provide the full speed to the room that they are in.

I've had issues over the years, although our broadband is with a different provider, we are on a 350Mbps down and 35 up service, in many of the rooms furthest away from the hub, we'd be lucky to get 50-60Mbps. I've always got full speed in my room but that's because I directly connect to the hub using Ethernet, which does not suffer from interference and is a more reliable and faster connection as there is no packet loss.

We solved the problem by purchasing a home Mesh WiFi system (Netgear Orbi), although it's expensive it does the trick and works wonders, in the furthest bedroom from the hub, which is sat next to the Orbi Router, where previously we would never get any WiFi connection at all, we are able to get between 250-350Mbps on WiFi.

I assume the device you are using in the room in question is WiFi only? A good way to test it would be to connect an ethernet cable to the hub, from the device (if you can) and perform a speed test - you should then get full speed, if you do, that demonstrates your HUB is getting full speed but the wireless signal in the property isn't at it's full potential, as it often never is due to the nature of WiFi.

Many people confuse "Download speed" thinking it means that they should get "Up to 80 Mbps down to their device".. it's not the case whatsoever. A download speed actually means "80Mbps download to the hub". Any devices connected using an Ethernet connection to said hub would likely get the full 80, any devices wirelessly connected, will get less, the further away you are from the hub, the slower the wireless connection is. 

The discs you mention will help, but they still won't be able to provide 100% of the speed throughput typically unless they are directly connected to the hub using a wired connection, because with WiFi there is always going to be interference from other devices, a small amount of packet loss, etc, obstructions such as walls, which block the signal significantly, all of these factors impact the speed the client device receives.

[XRaySpeX]

Welcome to EE's Home Broadband Forum.

If you would like help with your BB speed or connection issues, please would you carry out the following steps for starters, which will enable us to diagnose the problem and advise you further. Do not restart your router to do these tests:

1. Post your full router stats:

• For a BrightBox: login and go to Advanced Settings/ System/ DSL Status. Also post 'System Uptime' from top of System Log page.
• For a SmartHub: login and go to Advanced Settings/ Technical Log/ Information. Obscure your names & any numbers in the BB Username & also the SSIDs.

Full router stats are key to any speed & connection issues.

2. Try a wired speedtest, using an Ethernet cable supplied with the router, here http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest.html . Click on the "Results Page" button at the bottom of the graph you first see and then copy to here just the "Link to this result:" link that you see below the next main graph.

3. What does BT Wholesale Broadband Availability Checker estimate for your phone number? Post just the whole table and the line above it, blanking out your phone number. If it doesn't recognise your phone number or you don't have one, use the Address Checker, not the Postcode Checker.

[pip11]

If you are getting 80Mb at the hub then there is nothing wrong with your connection and the engineer would not be able to do anything. Wireless issues are yours not the ISP's as there are so many things that can affect wireless in different environments.

[WS1995]

@pip11 In essence, a much shorter version of what I said.

Well explained.

For this exact reason, ISP's can never guarantee you will get a certain speed in any particular room at any given distance from the hub, simply because there are so many factors involved in WiFi signal and none of these factors are in the control of the ISP (in this case, EE).

The only control that the ISP has is the quality of the kit they send out, whilst I can't comment on this particular case, ISP's normally send out cheap routers or hubs that don't broadcast the signal effectively, to keep cost down, this has got better over the years and the routers or hubs of today are better than the ones from the early-late 2000's.

That said, this factor is not usually the overriding one, the main factors include distance from the hub, obstructions, the type of wall (dry wall, walls consisting of both breeze blocks and bricks or walls with metal in them). Other factors include the layout of your house and where you position the hub, ideally it should be in the most central point of the house, so that it can broadcast effectively in both lateral directions. 

In my case, the hub is located on the far side of the house, hence why we always got poor signal coverage in the other end prior to purchasing and installing a mesh system.

If the issue is with speed to each room, or each device - there is nothing EE can do about that and it is most definitely not a fault on their part or with the service.

If the issue is the hub not getting the full speed you pay for, consistently, then this is most certainly something EE can deal with, and may well be their fault.

[pip11]

@WS1995I've always found a short concise answer on a help forum is best otherwise it can become a "tl:dr" situation and leaves the OP non the wiser.

As speeds  at the hub are within spec there is nothing an engineer nor the ISP can do.

The OP can try siting the discs in different places to see if that changes the result.

[WS1995]

@pip11 Fair point.

Maybe i'm just odd. You can bet that if someone's taking the time out of their day to write a lengthy post on a forum, or written an article about it on a webpage, with the intention of helping or advising others for no gain, i'm reading that post, whether it's two lines or two pages.

It always amazes me how common the misconception of download speeds being referred to as "Megabytes per second" and not "bits" and also people that think that they should get the full speed on their wireless device. I spent several years working initially in telecoms and then in IT support for private schools across the country, travelling around to cover numerous schools. This was pretty common unfortunately.

[mikeliuk]

Hi @WS1995 ,

I think the OP is very lucky to get the measured bandwidth at the hub as many people fall short of the advertised "up to" headline bandwidth even at the hub.

I've actually had service providers mis-speak in megabytes to me even when I nudge them that they mean megabits. 😂 (It seems to result from the abbreviation "meg" when the person on the phone is trying but failing at being more exact.)