Having to work mostly from home due to the coronavirus pandemic, I need a good stable internet connection for meetings via Microsoft Teams or WebEx. Recently, I found that my internet connection was rather poor so I checked the speed test, first with my ISP (BT) through their own speed test:
So that looks pretty good. However, any other speed tests available (including the BT wholesale test) give very different results:
I understand that BT measures the connection speeds between the exchange and my router, whereas the other tests measure the connection speeds between my device/laptop and the internet, so not strictly speaking the same thing, but there's a factor of 7x difference here!! What could be the reason and (more to the point) how do I get closer to the 50-70 Mbps that I should be getting?
My laptop is connected to the router via a TP-Link TL-WPA7510KIT powerline adapter. If I use a normal WiFi connection to the router, the download speed drops down to approx. 1 Mbps or lower, and I really struggle in online meetings. Unfortunately, my house only has one socket for the router so I can't change where it goes and I can't run an Ethernet cable from there to the various places in the house where we have connected devices. I do also have a WiFi range extender to extend the range of the router to the back of the house where the signal from the router is weak, but that makes no difference in terms of download speed whether I use the main router WiFi connection or the extended one.
Update
I have conducted more test by connecting my laptop directly to the router with an Ethernet cable, wirelessly to the router with the laptop right next to the router and also with the laptop in the "office" area of the house (much further away from the router), wirelessly to the extended network from the "office" area, and finally with a new Ethernet cable connected to the powerline adapter from the "office" area. The results are below (all measured with Ookla speed test):
- Direct ethernet connection to router (with new Ethernet cable): 70/17
- "close" WiFi connection to router: 18/17
- "far" WiFi connection to router: 7/9
- "far" WiFi connection to extended network: between 1 & 5/ between 2 & 6
- Ethernet connection to router via power adapter with new Ethernet cable: 67/17
So the outcome of all this is that the Ethernet cable I was using was crap, and at least I now have a workaround. It still doesn't explain the drop in download speed when moving from wired to WiFi connection, even when standing right next to the router.
