Virgin Broadband Slow Speed On Wifi

[Hans-solo 14]

I'm with virgin i have 100mbps broadband the router is in bedroom at on end of room pc at other i have a new tp link dongle 300mps and all I can get through wifi is 25 to 30 mbps on phone I get 110 mbps  if I move pc next to router and use ethernet I get over 100mbps is my dongle to blame or something wrong with router I should add this is second router we had to cure issue

[zach 234]

I spend good money on WiFi adaptors and try to avoid dongles where possible. Some are OK but a good PCI-E will do a much better job. I've found the upper range ASUS ones give the best speeds...downside is they are expensive! You also need to take into account the overhead on WiFi and things like walls, all these things lower the actual speed. You can't really compare your phone as that's probably using dual band AC, that would give better results.

 

I don't know what the WiFi is like on the new VM routers. It was very poor the last time I used them but that was over 10 years ago and things have moved on from then.

 

I'm sure you're not, but don't get mixed up with megabits and megabytes. 

If the PC has room and you have one, try a PCI-E WiFi adaptor

Check the WiFi settings in the router. Are they set to their best?

[whiteowl 54]

1 hour ago, zach said:

I spend good money on WiFi adaptors and try to avoid dongles where possible. Some are OK but a good PCI-E will do a much better job. I've found the upper range ASUS ones give the best speeds...downside is they are expensive! You also need to take into account the overhead on WiFi and things like walls, all these things lower the actual speed. You can't really compare your phone as that's probably using dual band AC, that would give better results.

 

I don't know what the WiFi is like on the new VM routers. It was very poor the last time I used them but that was over 10 years ago and things have moved on from then.

 

I'm sure you're not, but don't get mixed up with megabits and megabytes. 

If the PC has room and you have one, try a PCI-E WiFi adaptor

Check the WiFi settings in the router. Are they set to their best?

The new Superhub3 is better but still not fantastic. It covers my whole house but there are spots where it's a bit iffy.

 

When (the first) lockdown started I wanted to extend my wifi into my garden so I bought a Wavlink Wifi router and put the superhub into modem mode. This has no problem extending as far as I need. 

 

13 hours ago, Hans-solo said:

I'm with virgin i have 100mbps broadband the router is in bedroom at on end of room pc at other i have a new tp link dongle 300mps and all I can get through wifi is 25 to 30 mbps on phone I get 110 mbps  if I move pc next to router and use ethernet I get over 100mbps is my dongle to blame or something wrong with router I should add this is second router we had to cure issue

Apologies if I'm saying obvious things to you but a couple of considerations for WiFi are which band you are on and which channel.

 

Bands - there are generally 2 on modern modems, 2.4GHz and 5GHz. Most modern devices default to the 5Ghz band which is the faster one (my router allegedly does 867 Mbps on 5Ghz and 300 Mbps on 2.4GHz). However, the 2.4GHz band generally has a longer range which can be useful when it comes to connectivity issues. I split my WiFi into 2 networks, one on the 5GHz range and one on the 2.4GHz range and use whichever works best in the situation I am in.

This is a tutorial on how to do it (again, apologies if I'm teaching you to suck eggs)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQYtqzxQ2YI&ab_channel=SimUK

 

Channels - each WiFi network is on a channel and if you're in an area with many WiFi networks you can get some contention if you're on the same channel as other networks.

You can get apps on your phone to scan the channels to see which ones are in use and move your networks to ones that aren't being used by other networks in range.

Or you can just trial and error it  

https://www.virginmedia.com/help/virgin-media-changing-your-hubs-wireless-channel

 

Hope some of that helps.