Virgin have upgraded me to 100MB broadband - but to use it I need to be able to receive 5GHz. My tablet does but my laptop and desktop won't. The limitation seems to be the WLAN Card.
Could I get a plug in USB WiFi dongle thing that will receive 5GHz - or will this merely find another bottleneck?
Fortunately the Vigin Hub outputs 2.4GHz as well so I am no worse off.
I doubt you would notice the difference most of the time.
I've have both 5G and 2.4 G WiFi and would be hard pressed to spot the difference in speed unless I measured it. It isn't unusual for there to be
5 or more machines using the internet at the same time here. I've often got a couple running then there is the family.I do prefer wired connections for fixed machines, including TV and other media devices. I wired the house with Cat6 cable to all habitable rooms some years back.
The size and construction of the house requires several Wifi points to get get coverage, 5G doesn't like solid walls. With careful choice of channels I avoid interference.
5GHz, being a totally different frequency to 2.4GHz, requires different hardware - it's a newer standard, so 5GHz kit is usually backwardly compatible to the older stuff, but obviously not vice-versa.
But the frequency doesn't tell you the speed. The standard being used does that bit.
802.11B was the original (to all intents and purposes). 11Mbit. Used to be just fine, but you can see how it might be a limitation these days... 802.11G is the usual default these days. 54Mbit. Woo. Except... 801.11N is your most modern 2.4GHz - 300Mbit! And it's also on 5GHz... 2.4GHz is crowded in urban areas - lots of interference from the neighbours routers. 5GHz is currently much less crowded, not least because nobody's really using it yet, but also because it's shorter range and doesn't penetrate walls as well.You can get 100Mbit max from your broadband. Great. But... Unless you're actually doing huge downloads, you won't notice the difference between
54Mbit and 100Mbit - stuff will just be there. Now.Not that you'll actually get either 54Mbit anyway.
Basically, ignore the frequency, unless you can see a LOT of wireless networks. If you're on 802.11N on your laptop/desktop, you'll notice no difference. If you're on 802.11G, you might, but it'll be negligible unless you're downloading huge stuff.
Thanks to both of you. I feel happier about my 2.4GHz now and will accept it as is.
Or, to put it another way - you bastard. I hate you. Can I please have your 100Mbit connection in exchange for mine, 1.5Mbit on a good day? Wireless speed is much less of an issue on this, I promise you...
Where on earth are you, Bass Rock?
There should be a law against such cruel and unnatural punishment.
As others have said, 5GHz is usually less crowded.
However, 5GHz is more easily stopped by solid objects like walls (even drywalls can attenuate significantly.
If you can get reasonable line of sight from the base to the device (through one single brick wall max, as a rule) you should get excellent connectivity - better than 2.4GHz.
However, I can also noticed that some of my 5GHz devices do not work as well as they same device in 2.4GHz mode.
Half a mile from Wales.
I had 50Mbit at my old house. It was near Watford. I'm most certainly up on the exchange.
Is fibre promised for your area in the future or are you connected direct to the exchange? We've been promised fibre for about the last 2 years, no sign of it happening as yet. We get 6.5 down and 0.75 up at the mo (ADSL+). My mobile reception (4G) puts the landline to shame, at times I get
65 down and 4 or more up. If THREE would allow unlimited tethering I'd ditch the landline.
Adrian's summary is pretty good. The big problem is 2.4 GHz is over crowding in urban areas. Add to that the marketing speak for Wireless N (802.11n) of "up to" 300 Mbps isn't 300 Mbps full duplex user data through put but 150 Mbps up, 150 Mbps down raw link speed, if there is a clear, non-overlapping, channel adjacent to the one it reports to be using. This clear channel may have to be above the reported one but not sure about that. You then have to take off from that 150 Mbps (if you can get that in the real world not just on the bench in a lab) overheads for link error correction, the TCP/IP overhead, etc.
Lots of places in the country have such speeds. The village 2 km away and 6 km from the exchange was the same or worse until the FTTC became live yesterday.
Quite, ADSL2 only here at 3 km from the exchnage but we get a stable sync speed of 6 Mbps which is right at the maximum a line that long can be expected to support. We are connected via a cabinet, a cabinet that went live 2 weeks ago but it's at the exchange, too far away to give any significant speed increase.
But the really cruel bit is that the fibre cable (probably a 96 core fibre cable) feeding the cabinet down in the village passes in a duct under our forecourt, 10' (ten feet) from the front door. There is even a chamber through which the fibre duct, and all the village POTS lines, pass through in the grass 15 yds up the road.
Similar speeds exist on the outskirts of Henley and in various other smaller rural villages not that far from the metropolis.
It hinges on the age and state of the cabling and distance to the exchange. It is generally bad to be on the wrong side of a watercourse.
Be glad you haven't got any corroded aluminium in the signal path - then you can be down to 256k or so on a good day.
According to SamKnows, all 500 subscribers are direct to the (sub)exchange, just over 2km away straight-line. The wet string doesn't come in a straight line, of course. Oh, and there's a big river in the way.
The main exchange (in the town over the border, which makes for all sorts of "not our problem" shenanigans usually) was upgraded this year, and our sub-exchange is promised by the end of the year. Everybody on the exchange is promised at least 2Mbit - we're actually fairly lucky compared to many. Some don't even get anything, and are still on dial-up.
Welcome to the late '90s.
We don't have a mobile signal. On any network. For voice, let alone data.
There is a local line-of-sight wireless broadband setup, bouncing off church towers and barns - but somebody put some wobbly-upwards land with a heck of a lot of rather large trees between us and the village's bounce point. There's talk of those trees coming down - but there's also talk that the wireless isn't all it's cracked up to be.
Oh, and what I didn't mention was 802.11AC. It's fairly newly finalised, but kit is out there. Faster. MUCH faster. Gigabit. 5GHz only.
Depends on your viewpoint, currently being visited by grandchildren into streaming videos, they are clocking up to 5G a day on my 10G a month account. Ouch! A 56K connection seems very desirable!
Oh dear, that is abysmal for your area. So much for our government claiming that the UK will have the best broadband in Europe then.
They can claim it. Just won't be true.
But not likely to be achieved in practice via a USB2 port.
Oh, absolutely. USB3, though...
As one bit gets faster, something else becomes the bottleneck. Every single time.
My SH2 is in modem mode, so can't speak for that, but I have the router set to use the same SSID for both bands so the laptop and phone both switch between 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz automatically. Mostly they choose to use 5Ghz, unless I go outside, but sometimes they will choose 2.4Ghz based on signal quality...
I have some extra ESSIDs that force 5GHz and I noticed that whilst my laptop can get a huge speed boost, it actually works *worse* when my Samsung Note 3 is on 5GHz than when I let it pick 2.4
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