Ofcom serves up an extra helping of airwaves for Wi-Fi Ofcom plans to open up an extra sub-band to Blighty's Wi-Fi users, allowing the transmission of large amounts of data as well faster download speeds. The regulator claims that would improve the quality of service, especially for applications that need more internet capacity, such as high-definition video. Routers in the UK …
Surely the speed of the broadband connection is a determining factor. My phone happily lets me that I have 72 Meg to the router - but I know that the router tops out at about 34 on the broadband link.
If memory serves, the laptop claims 54 - but again that's really immaterial. There's an effective BT bottleneck between me and the outside world.
Until we reach this heady height of 100 Meg broadband or better then wireless fits the category of "Good Enough".
Disclaimer: I don't do gaming and the most arduous streaming is stuff like iPlayer and some Amazon Prime. They cope with the lack of wires.
Streaming and gaming are almost nothing in terms of traffic. A handful of Mbps at most. Latency affects them more, possibly, but you wouldn't be using wifi if you cared THAT much about latency anyway (that said, I game CS:GO and others over a Wifi link and have a consistent 10-15 ping to anything in Europe).
Storage, like in-home NAS / backup devices, etc. are MUCH more likely to flood your wifi. Copying a terabyte of data to any kind of backup devices is going to hurt over Wifi.
The problem is not Internet services in general. Wifi is shared, so you're sharing your 54Mbps with all the other devices connected to your router, or interfering with its channels. 54Mbps is the ABSOLUTE MAXIMUM on standard 802.11g, for all devices connected collectively to a single SSID.
But upgrade to 802.11n or 802.11ac and you can have a lot more.interference, people online, idle devices sharing the band etc. and still pull more than you would on 802.11g. That lee-way also means your latency improves because, well, it can just retransmit quicker if there's an error, etc. there's interference, more quiet channels to hop to, and so on.
Your broadband is certainly a driver, though. I have 75Mbps Internet and thus I chose to wire 1Gbps connections and provide 802.11n at minimum because otherwise you can't take full advantage of it. But it's far from the biggest cause of slowdown because of old wifi.
But to be honest, you know what makes the biggest difference to me? I bought a really decent router (Draytek Vigor) that can do proper QoS and then I push a modem-mode cable router into that. The QoS means that my gaming takes priority over my girlfriend's movie streaming, from the Internet connection to the wireless network, and so her streaming doesn't increase my ping in any way. Compared to the stock ISP router, or even an old 802.11g without QoS, the connection feels many times faster because of things like that. Just simple stuff like "DNS / HTTP is next highest priority after realtime traffic". Your web pages load quicker while file-sharing, file-transfer, email, etc. take just-as-long but don't get first dibs on the bandwidth. Hell, I even tweaked the wireless network settings so the ChromeCast gets limited bandwidth because it was trying to suck up all sorts and you could spot it on the network as a bit of a hog (both wireless to move your requested streams from your local devices, to Internet when you told it to stream something direct - e.g. streaming iPlayer makes the ChromeCast request the iPlayer stream itself!).
The router did such a good job, that I bought its partner wifi device to cover wifi over the garden etc. Because that can talk the same QoS settings, etc. with zero configuration it's much better than any-random-repeater could manage and the two devices can ramp up or down their wifi in co-operation to ensure you have the best connection wherever you are in the house.
And my SamKnows broadband monitoring box tells me that I can hit 75Mbps no problem at all. The Vigor router is capable of multi-gigabit on the internals, something not all routers can manage, so if I upgrade and/or add on ADSL2, VDSL, 4G or other Internet lines (it's capable of doing all simultaneously and sharing the load), it has the back-end to cope.
What people see at the bottlenecks aren't. Wifi's bottleneck is channel-sharing, something Ethernet doesn't generally suffer from (unless you run large switches over 1Gb backbones, etc.), and interference. More channels help solve both of those. Your perceived internet connection speed, though, is really the bottleneck of "junk travelling over my network that I hadn't considered or filtered and which slows down the multiple connections required to be created to browse a simple webpage" along with "disk speed of the computer running the browser cache" (believe it or not). Most other things barely matter to the home user.
I once tripled a school's Internet speed by putting in a hand-made Linux firewall and webfilter (basically an old office machine, two network cards, reformatted to Slackware Linux, IPTables, plus NAT rules, plus Squid). Filtered out all the broadcast stuff and junk going out to the Internet that didn't really need to. Prioritised some things over others. Cached everything possible on the web. Plugged it all back into the exact same modem / connection it was always on previously. Triple speed. It got me the job, in fact, because the head (who was very techy for a head) thought it was just hyperbole but he ran the numbers (and speed tests) himself and couldn't deny it.
If your email is a second late, nobody cares.
If your bulk download takes a minute longer, nobody cares.
If your overnight backup takes an hour longer, nobody cares.
But if the the web pages feel fast and get priority, people care. They have 20 tabs up and expect clicked links to load FAST.
And if the VoIP cuts out or goes glitchy or clicks, people kick up a major fuss.
In actual fact, the things you want to go faster are usually the tiniest part of the traffic but require fast-handling, whereas the things that take up all your bandwidth you don't care about and can be slowed down quite happily. And rarely are you ever maxing out a connection for more than a few seconds.
"Surely the speed of the broadband connection is a determining factor."
Not neccessarily. I've got a fairly consistent 200Mbps down from Virgin none of my wireless devices can fully take advantage of that for one reason or another be it signal strength or just the chipsets in the devices, my laptop's built in WiFi is actually only 802.11n 150Mbps compliant.
Cat6 to my PCs gets me the full 200Mbps to all of those wired connections though.
Ethernet cable is rated for 100m lengths. Cat5-e will do gigabit extremely comfortably over the distances in domestic properties.
Best to put the cable in conduits so it can be upgraded. Or don't worry about it because you won't be getting gigabit internet in the UK in your lifetime.
@Phil W
I can only dream of 200 Mbps... :-( Rather strangely, Virgin seem disinclined to extend their network to the smaller villages.
Which brings us back to my original point. Wireless is good enough in the situation where there is an immediate speedbump on the next hop.
I can fully agree that the use of cable makes blinding sense if you've got that 200 Meg next hop but for now, for me, pulling cable simply does not deliver an acceptable return on the effort (or cost).
Perhaps I need to return to massivelySerial's opening post and conclude that I must not be all that serious about speed.....
That is what separates the tech literate from the tech illiterate
Most nerds worth their salt would have their main PCs connected with Ethernet whilst saving the precious WiFi Bandwidth for truly mobile items like laptops and phones.
The only excuse is that they are either too lazy or don't want cables everywhere but that's the iPhone generation for you.
I'm not sure how this makes much difference unless you are on cable or fibre.
If the WiFi is the bottle neck, then a few more 5GHz channels won't solve it. Propagation / Range is poor at 5GHz.
How do existing router/Airpoints and clients use these channels? If they can use them, they probably already are, as almost no-one buys a gadget and then checks that its spectrum usage is Ofcom compliant.
If no existing gear has them, and the Chinese add them for UK, won't everyone else, not supposed to have them, use them. Has Ofcom heard of ITU, EBU, EU, FCC etc?
So I'm bemused by this announcement.
The French have had a slightly different set of available channels on 2.4GHz for many years. Probably since standardisation of 802.11b.
Wireless APs have a 'which country are you in' drop down box. Along with a suitable disclaimer. ISPs will provision routers anyway, so the country code will be pre-set for the unwashed masses.
The international market is truly no barrier to this.
Propagation / Range is poor at 5GHz.
I've never found 5GHz to be any more problematic than 2.4Ghz for indoor networking. Yes if you really are pushing the cell boundaries - which you can be with outdoor networks, there is a difference. But at sub 10m - which seems to be typical there is little difference and in fact some office environments due to the differing signal scattering have seen coverage improvements...
Try having the router or AP in a different room. 5GHz goes through brick walls in much the same way as mice do.
Solved that problem for a farm house with 2 foot thick stone walls: put the AP in the attic and used directional antennas installed in the ceiling - just like the typical office deployment (mind you modern offices tend to have steel in the floors rather than wood so you can't use this approach to have a single AP serve multiple floors).
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