Connecting wirelessly: How much speed will you loose vs hard wired to router?

Luckydog69

Just got Eircom Efibre high speed broadband installed this week. Very big difference in the download speeds... hard wired to router approx 47 mb/s, wifi speed varies from 20mb/s to 35mb/s. Spoke to Eircom broadband support and chap said you will loose 18 to 24 mb when your are connecting wirelessly, this seems a bit  excessive to me. I am on the "Up to 50mb" package. Distance of laptop to router would not exceed 4 metres. Thanks in advance for any replies.

Johnboy1951

Luckydog69 wrote: »

Just got Eircom Efibre high speed broadband installed this week. Very big difference in the download speeds... hard wired to router approx 47 mb/s, wifi speed varies from 20mb/s to 35mb/s. Spoke to Eircom broadband support and chap said you will loose 18 to 24 mb when your are connecting wirelessly, this seems a bit  excessive to me. I am on the "Up to 50mb" package. Distance of laptop to router would not exceed 4 metres. Thanks in advance for any replies.

It depends completely on your hardware and the distance .....  so if your wireless hardware is only capable of slower speeds then that is all you will get.
Wireless connections usually run at the speed of the slowest connected device.

I do not know what speed the Eircom supplied wireless router is capable of, but would check, in the first instance, what speed your PC wireless is capable of.

Luckydog69

Johnboy1951 wrote: »

It depends completely on your hardware and the distance .....  so if your wireless hardware is only capable of slower speeds then that is all you will get.
Wireless connections usually run at the speed of the slowest connected device.

I do not know what speed the Eircom supplied wireless router is capable of, but would check, in the first instance, what speed your PC wireless is capable of.

Thanks for the reply... upon further investigating: the speed of my wireless card in laptop is clocked at 58 Mbps ( Belarc Advisor), the router supplied is a Zyxel F1000 , doing a quick Google on this dosen't yield any specifications even from the manufactures website. Delving deeper I came across a post that indicated that this router is a custom made job based on another router from the same company! with a data transfer rate through wifi of 300 Mbps. Now on a couple of occasions when laptop is right beside router I did get a speed of 47 Mbps. But 99% of the time it is 18 to 24 Mbps. I did unplug cordless phone just in case it was interfering with signal but it was not. Its seems a strange on to me .. maybe atmospheric pressure is affecting the signal....Who Knows!

Johnboy1951

Luckydog69 wrote: »

Thanks for the reply... upon further investigating: the speed of my wireless card in laptop is clocked at 58 Mbps ( Belarc Advisor), the router supplied is a Zyxel F1000 , doing a quick Google on this dosen't yield any specifications even from the manufactures website. Delving deeper I came across a post that indicated that this router is a custom made job based on another router from the same company! with a data transfer rate through wifi of 300 Mbps. Now on a couple of occasions when laptop is right beside router I did get a speed of 47 Mbps. But 99% of the time it is 18 to 24 Mbps. I did unplug cordless phone just in case it was interfering with signal but it was not. Its seems a strange on to me .. maybe atmospheric pressure is affecting the signal....Who Knows!

There are lots of things that can interfere .....  as I mentioned distance; obstacles between the devices like walls; dect phones on the same or adjacent frequency; signal strength of the wireless transmitter on both devices; as well as the wireless capability of all devices connected .....  so when testing make sure only one device is connected and start close to the router and move away while testing.

You have shown that your laptop is capable of 47Mbps under ideal conditions ......  so expect that to drop as conditions change  ;)

eircom: Mark

Luckydog69 wrote: »

Thanks for the reply... upon further investigating: the speed of my wireless card in laptop is clocked at 58 Mbps ( Belarc Advisor), the router supplied is a Zyxel F1000 , doing a quick Google on this dosen't yield any specifications even from the manufactures website. Delving deeper I came across a post that indicated that this router is a custom made job based on another router from the same company! with a data transfer rate through wifi of 300 Mbps. Now on a couple of occasions when laptop is right beside router I did get a speed of 47 Mbps. But 99% of the time it is 18 to 24 Mbps. I did unplug cordless phone just in case it was interfering with signal but it was not. Its seems a strange on to me .. maybe atmospheric pressure is affecting the signal....Who Knows!

Hi Luckydog69


We are working on some online tutorials for efibre set up tips. That hopefully will be available soon in the meantime we have to refer these issues to broadband technical support to check directly on 1890 260 260.

If you want to give them a call.

Thanks, Mark