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So I'm thinking of increasing my Internet connection by 40 Mbit/s, also doubling it. This is because in the furthest corners in my apartment I have 1 Mbit/s. So when I increase will I get 41 Mbit/s or 2 Mbit/s in those areas?

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    I don't understand this at all, there must be some hidden variables you don't mention. What do you mean by "increasing my internet"? Is that the listed speed from your ISP? And "furthest corner", are you using WiFi? What kind of wifi setup do you have? Is the wifi router supplied by your ISP?
    – pipe
    Oct 2, 2018 at 8:07
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    I'm more curious how big your apartment is and what kind of WiFi gear you have that you're only getting 1mb in the 'furthest reaches' .. I think you need to get whatever gear my neighbors have since I have no problem getting their signal in the far reaches of my house (or the park across the street for that matter).
    – txtechhelp
    Oct 2, 2018 at 18:02
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    @txtechhelp It's quite common actually. We had one where the signal was lost completely 20 feet laterally 1 floor up. Our current one gets less than 1Mbps at a similar distance. Maybe it is the difference between old and/or cheap equipment as opposed to new and expensive equipment. Our WiFi, by the way, is rated much higher and we get much higher when standing next to it. But it is very slow and choppy farther away.\
    – Loduwijk
    Oct 2, 2018 at 18:38
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    Interference from neighbors will wreak havoc with your speeds in apartment buildings. There are too many competing access points in such spaces.
    – Brian
    Oct 2, 2018 at 20:31
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    Get a Cat5 cable (or Cat6/7) and run it from your router to that furthest corner. Cat5 patch cables are readily available in lengths of 30m/100ft (and you can connect two 30m cables with a special female-female Cat5/6/7 connector to get up to 60m (the limit for patch cables)). There are flat Cat6 cables available with can run under the carpet, but these are mechanically fragile and break easily. If your computer in the far corner has no wired network socket, you can set up a Wifi Access Point at the end of the cable. Or just move your router to a more central location in your appertment.
    – Klaws
    Oct 3, 2018 at 7:27

4 Answers 4

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If you increase your WAN speed, your WiFi will stay the same bottleneck it is now. To improve speed "in the furthest corners" you need to improve WiFi connectivity first.

Your water tap is somewhat clogged. It won't matter if you double the cross section of the pipe to the waterworks, until you fix the tap. Similar situation.

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    The water analogy doesn't truly work as doubling the water pressure would indeed double the amount of water flowing from the tap.
    – JonathanReez
    Oct 2, 2018 at 5:55
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    @JonathanReez How do you double the pressure? I'm talking about doubling the pipe. You don't get double voltage just by using a thicker wire to your electric outlet. Similarly you don't get double pressure just by using a thicker pipe.
    – Kamil Maciorowski
    Oct 2, 2018 at 6:10
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    If you don't like the water example, imagine you want a really strong 100 link chain. The supplies you can buy (for whatever contrived reason you prefer) are 25 titanium links, 50 stainless steel links, and 25 rusty iron links. After you put your chain together you notice it breaks rather easily, you don't go upgrade the steal links to titanium while still maintaining the rusty iron links.
    – Dean MacGregor
    Oct 2, 2018 at 19:34
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    Just something to note, when picking a different package from your ISP they will often provide a different router as well (in those cases where you are provided with a modem and/or router). It's normally not a good sales tactic for an ISP to upsell a client if they won't notice a difference, but it definitely depends on the country. With my ISP you have to choose manually between two modem+routers, but the highest speed package (250 Mb/s supposedly) doesn't offer the "standard modem+router" as an option (not sure about the second highest option (100 Mb/s) ).
    – David Mulder
    Oct 3, 2018 at 11:29
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    The analogy (while correct) seems to be less than perfect (at first glance). Taking a stab at it, OP is effectively asking that if the highway expands to have more lanes, whether he's then going to be able to drive faster on the road between the highway and his house.
    – Flater
    Oct 3, 2018 at 11:52
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Just for clarity there are two links / connections here, not one:

  1. From your ISP to your house.
    • It has bandwidth of 40 Mbit/s
  2. From your router to the WiFi device(s) "in the furthest corners of your apartment"
    • It has bandwidth of 1 Mbit/s

The bottleneck here is link #2.

Doubling the speed of link #1 will not affect link #2 at all, unless you reduce it to less than the speed of link #2 (at which point, link #1 will become the bottleneck).

Think of it like pipes (as per Kamil's answer), or roads...

A highway / motorway might have 3 lanes in each direction, while a back road will have one lane for both directions with passing places. You can't get more cars down that back road by making the motorway leading up to it larger.

connection topology

In this situation you want to look into moving your WiFi access point (often built into the router), or if that isn't possible, look into getting WiFi range extenders. Another option could be to purchase high gain antenna(s), but please check that the router or device has removable antennas first.

You could also look into using Powerline adapters and a WiFi access point to provide a more localised service at the far end of your appartment.

If the 40 Mbit/s connection is adequate for everything you need, there is no reason to upgrade that link - it won't help with this problem. If you have been advised that it will help, then unfortunately that advice was incorrect.

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    Then, there's the tinfoil hat theory: tomsguide.com/us/aluminum-foil-wi-fi-extension,news-26097.html
    – K7AAY
    Oct 1, 2018 at 21:20
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    @Attie high-gains antennas may lead to your radiated power exceeding the allowed limits, depending on the TX power setting, the frequency, and the region.
    – jcaron
    Oct 1, 2018 at 23:51
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    @PeterL No. increasing transmit power would work for broadcast, like TV, but wifi is not a broadcast it's 2-directional communication. You need to increase power to the router wifi antenna AND to your phone wifi antenna just the same. Otherwise, your phone will hear the router, but the router won't hear back. If you're thinking about high-gain antenna, it could help because the gain works for both transmit and receive. But this gain doesn't come for free - high gain vs low-gain antennae is sniper vs shotgun. You get more power when you aim it well, but then you sidestep and you get even less.
    – Agent_L
    Oct 2, 2018 at 7:19
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    @jcaron: Only TX power setting can exceed allowed limits. High gain antennas can never exceed limits because you can never get over unity gain (you cannot even get unity gain). If a manufacturer sets the TX power setting above legal limits with the expectation that antenna loss will reduce detected radiated power it would still be illegal
    – slebetman
    Oct 3, 2018 at 3:50
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    @slebetman In many regions (such as Europe), it's the EIRP that is limited. So if you increase the antenna gain, you increase the EIRP, and have to reduce the radio's TX power to stay within limits (20 dBm/100 mW EIRP in EU for the 2.4 GHz band). Rules may be different in other regions.
    – jcaron
    Oct 3, 2018 at 8:01
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Headline (deceptive, please update) answer : Yes

Qualified answer, no.

Regardless of the "backwater bandwidth" endured in the farthest corners of the house, the "consumable" bandwidth will actually double. At the modem or MAC you have the potential to see 40Mb/s down. Further, peer to peer on the house network you should be seeing 100Mb/s for Cat5e and 1Gb/s on Cat6. If you have to share any broadcast domain (including WiFi) that will obviously degrade performance.

But no, if you are getting 1Mb/s now, that is a limit.

For Wifi, run ethernet to a second AP, and use high gain antennas, get rid of, and do not use repeaters, they are half duplex and extend range at a terrible cost to bandwidth. Find the clearest channel you can, your neighbours may be swamping you.

If these are workstations, consider WiFi to ethernet bridges, and place antennas at ceiling level.

If you can't do this,or can't run cable at a minimum use an external high gain antenna and place it/them high up.

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To answer your question, it increases mostly rationally (the latter) - if you imagine it as waves bouncing around your house, an increase by 20% just means that the signal is 20% stronger to get through walls, etc. What it is near the router means nothing, since it still has to travel through the air!

However, this is not perfect either, as when it travels we can't imagine that no energy is absorbed by the surroundings, but the absorption doesn't increase rationally. So I'd estimate it would go from around 1mbps to 1.8mbps, although it may vary.

It may just be wiser to consider wireless boosters; they're only $20-30 (depending on what router and ISP you use) or buying a better router. Increasing what comes out of the socket may be useful to some extent, but it's a waste of money compared to buying a stronger router, which will not increase your maximum internet speed (i.e when you are next to the router, the speed will be the same as before), but it will extend the range in which the signal is usable. TPLink makes good ones for $70; they generally have 4+ 3-axis flexible antennas, meaning you can push the signal in multiple directions.

Hope this helped.

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    Internet Boosters are snake oil. Please do not suggest that anyone actually spend money on software, that claims to increase your download speeds, the magicial software unicorns you describe do not exist.
    – Ramhound
    Oct 1, 2018 at 19:36
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    I mean physical boosters, which have super-strong receivers and re-transmit signal. We got a pair and they work fine; you can hook them up with Ethernet-in from the router, and they just act as a second transmitter. See: amazon.co.uk/dp/B005O7ZUPE/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_9ROSBb4RBTWQF (this is an expensive one, but you can find perfectly functional ones for around £15 on eBay or Amazon).
    – Geza Kerecsenyi
    Oct 1, 2018 at 21:02
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    Your first two paragraphs are incorrect. They would only be increasing the connection speed at the access point. Without signal boosters, the strength of the wireless signal would still the be exact same at the furthest corners, therefore not improving upload/download speeds.
    – DrZoo
    Oct 1, 2018 at 21:22
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    It won't increase though. Increasing the bandwidth you're allowed from your network to your ISP's network doesn't increase the voltage going to your router's antenna. Furthermore, what's near the router does matter, since radio doesn't perfectly penetrate everything - a clear line-of-sight between router & client will be vastly better than one through a dozen plaster walls suffused with varying kinds of conduit & wiring. The router is 100% not transmitting at 20mbps, it's transmitting at ~2.4 or ~5 GHz, and changing the traffic your router can send/receive from the ISP doesn't change that.
    – Delioth
    Oct 1, 2018 at 21:40
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    @Acccumulation - Nearly every item on that page is either a “Range Extenders” or a “network extender”. The author originally suggested a “internet booster” they later modified their answer to clarify what they meant.
    – Ramhound
    Oct 1, 2018 at 22:13

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