Super fast fibre, super slow WiFi

Ol!ver

Ol!ver

Ol!ver

Soldato
Joined
4 Oct 2003
Posts
7,444
Location
Sheffield, S.Yorks
HI folks. This has been driving me mad since we moved into a new (old) house a month ago, and I'm starting to lose my rag with it a bit. So here I am.

Background:
We've moved into a hold house. It's got proper walls, none of this cardboard stuff of the new-build that we moved out of. Everything's very, well, solid.

The good thing is that this house has Fibre. 80Mbps down, 20Mbps up. Over ethernet, it pretty munches maxes that out. All is well with the world.

WiFi is predictably a different story.

I've tried three routers. An Asus N17U N300 router, a TP-Link Archer C2 AC750 router and now the rather scary-looking Netgear Nighthawk R700 AC1900 router. And none of them have managed to get anywhere near 80Mbps. In fact, no matter whether I choose Wireless N, AC, 2.4Ghz or 5Ghz, I can't get anything above 50Mbps over WiFi, even when sat on top of the router.

I've gone through all the usual hoops of changing channels, and I've tried running the 5GHz AC on a different SSID with just my MacBook Pro connected and still no improvement.

I'm starting to suspect the MacBook Pro, but it's a 2015 13" with Retina display so I'm pretty sure it can handle WiFi faster than 50Mbps! It's all patched up, running the latest public build of macOS. I'm even tempted to update to the latest beta, but that seems a bit nuclear at this point.

All I have to test other than the Mac is a couple of iPads and phones, none of which are really suited to the job.

So, any thoughts? I'm happy to provide screenshots/settings if anyone needs them!
 
I would suspect the wall material is blocking the signal, try a powerline wifi adapter to the room you need wifi in.
Andi.
 
andicole0 said:
I would suspect the wall material is blocking the signal, try a powerline wifi adapter to the room you need wifi in.
Andi.
Click to expand...

That was my initial though, but even sat next to the router, I'm getting the same results.

Even sat a couple of rooms away, it's connecting at about 350Mbps. Sat next to it the Mac reports a connection of the max 1300Mbps.
 
You want to see if the bottleneck still exists internally between devices from a wired device to a WiFi device (copying large files between devices etc).
And i would also see if you can borrow another device to rule out your MBP, as three routers producing similar figures would point to that at fault.

Are you phones/iPads showing similar figures to your MBP?


Also worth doing a Google around El Capitan and WiFi/MTU fixes - i've seen it mentioned in the
 
You're never going to get 100% trying to match a cabled connection over wireless, you can reasonably expect around 80-85% depending on a number of different factors e.g. Electrical interference, getting 50Mbps over wireless from a 80Mbps connection is not that bad.
 
SC0TTRS said:
You're never going to get 100% trying to match a cabled connection over wireless, you can reasonably expect around 80-85% depending on a number of different factors e.g. Electrical interference, getting 50Mbps over wireless from a 80Mbps connection is not that bad.
Click to expand...

This. Also depends on the device you are using to connect with.
 
Have you even tested it with another device (not the macbook) or connected via Ethernet and performed the same tests? It sounds like you're using speedtest or something that tests the Internet speed rather than the WLAN. For all we know 50Mbps is the max throughput your connection gives you at the time you test it.
 
Rozzy85 said:
Have you even tested it with another device (not the macbook) or connected via Ethernet and performed the same tests? It sounds like you're using speedtest or something that tests the Internet speed rather than the WLAN. For all we know 50Mbps is the max throughput your connection gives you at the time you test it.
Click to expand...

This, copy a large file or something to give you a better idea on wifi speed.

Which MBP model is it? It could have a pants wifi card, even if it does support 5GHz wifi.
 
So, to answer some questions:

The MacBook connected via Ethernet pulls 80Mb down and obviously considerably more from my Synology. That's plugged into the router, so I know the link from there to the rest of the network is also fine.

As for whether the WLAN is capable of 80Mbps, see above.

The suggestion that getting 50Mbps over WiFi on an 80Mbps is to be expected is false, as the WiFi should be more than capable of pulling a lot more than 80Mbps from any source, including the Synology. It isn't doing, again suggesting WiFi is at fault.

The Mac is a 2015 13" MBP. Three antennas, usual MIMO gubbins. More than capable.

Tests over iOS and Android repeat thapp poor performance too.

Thanks all
 
Ol!ver said:
So, to answer some questions:

The MacBook connected via Ethernet pulls 80Mb down and obviously considerably more from my Synology. That's plugged into the router, so I know the link from there to the rest of the network is also fine.

As for whether the WLAN is capable of 80Mbps, see above.
Click to expand...

Ol!ver, are we talking about 80Mb Fibre speed provided by you're ISP? or internal file transfer speeds over a WiFi connection? as from what I've read from your original post, you're trying to achieve fibre internet speeds over 802.11 WiFi connection :confused:
 
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