When doubling Internet connection speed, will my effective in-house bandwidth also double?

networking wireless-networking internet bandwidth

9,387

Solution 1

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.

Solution 2

Just for clarity there are two links / connections here, not one:

From your ISP to your house.
- It has bandwidth of 40 Mbit/s
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.

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.

9,387

Pearsponge

Updated on September 18, 2022

Comments

Pearsponge over 1 year

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?
- Admin over 5 years
  
  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?
- Admin over 5 years
  
  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).
- Admin over 5 years
  
  @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.\
- Admin over 5 years
  
  Interference from neighbors will wreak havoc with your speeds in apartment buildings. There are too many competing access points in such spaces.
- Admin over 5 years
  
  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.
- Admin over 5 years
  
  Without any more information about the internal network structure this is unanswerable. Voting to close as unclear.
Ramhound over 5 years

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.
Geza Kerecsenyi over 5 years

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).
K7AAY over 5 years

Then, there's the tinfoil hat theory: tomsguide.com/us/aluminum-foil-wi-fi-extension,news-26097.ht‌ml
DrZoo over 5 years

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.
Geza Kerecsenyi over 5 years

But the waves are absorbed rationally to the energy? Regardless, ATQ! All this about bottlenecks; the question is how does internet speed increase, and I explained it... correctly.
Geza Kerecsenyi over 5 years

WiFi is radio. Radio is waves. Waves are energetic disturbances. And according to the first law of thermodynamics, energy cannot just 'disappear'. Yes, the WiFi speed would not double fully, but it still will increase. What most people don't seem to understand is that there isn't a router bottleneck - the router is transmitting at 20mbps - but it doesn't reach some parts of the flat.
Ramhound over 5 years

@GezaKerecsenyi You original suggestion was to use an internet booster, how was I supposed to know what you actually meant, was to use a network extender? The comparison to a unicorn was a metaphor, to indicate internet boosters, do not actually exist. A network extender would reduce the bandwidth by half.
Delioth over 5 years

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.
Ramhound over 5 years

@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.
PeterL over 5 years

would increasing the power to the antenna potentially help? Although this runs into regulatory concerns depending on the location and power.
Attie over 5 years

Potentially, or getting a high-gain antenna... if your devices have removable antennae. I've update my answer.
jcaron over 5 years

@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.
JonathanReez over 5 years

The water analogy doesn't truly work as doubling the water pressure would indeed double the amount of water flowing from the tap.
Kamil Maciorowski over 5 years

@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.
Agent_L over 5 years

@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.
Sampo Sarrala - codidact.org over 5 years

it could also be wifi channel fight if theres a lot of ap's nearby but getting stronger signal should still make it better
Dean MacGregor over 5 years

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.
slebetman over 5 years

@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
jcaron over 5 years

@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.
David Mulder over 5 years

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) ).
Flater over 5 years

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.
Robin Whittleton over 5 years

Powerline adaptors can also work well as a way of extending wifi.
Attie over 5 years

@RobinWhittleton - indeed. I've added it to my answer, thanks
Michael over 5 years

@Flater Good analogy, although depending on his ISP speeds, the analogy may actually be the reverse (for instance my ISP speeds are slower than my WiFi speed even to the far part of my house) which breaks the analogy as people aren't used to having a freeway outside their house which connects to a main surface street that everybody uses.
Flater over 5 years

@Michael In the furthest corners in my apartment I have 1 Mbit/s indirectly implies that OP's speeds are considerably better in the center of their apartment. OP also mentions going from 40Mbps to 80Mbps, clearly more than the 1Mbps they experience in the corner of their apartment. That means it's a local issue, not a slow ISP issue.
Admin over 5 years

The amount of bandwidth available at the router does not affect the strength of a wireless signal. They're completely uncorrelated.