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Hands-On Tech 280: Am I Getting True Gigabit Internet?
00:18:03
Gigabit Promises
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Coming up on Hands On Tech. Let's talk about WI Fi and why we just can't get the speeds we've been promised. Stay tuned. This is Twit. Hello and welcome to Hands On Tech. I am Micah Sargent and today we are taking a look at another delightful question. This one comes in from Al, Al from Reno. And I want to remind you all, if you'd like to get in touch, Hotwit TV is how you reach out. I'd love to hear your questions and I got to tell you, there's been a nice pattern of questions that I think apply to quite a few people. So let's take a look at Al's question and see what Al needs help with. Alrights in and says, hey Micah. Hi Al. I pay for gigabit Internet. I just ran a speed test on my phone and got 240 megab per second. My provider says everything checks out and points to the words up to in my plan. Am I being ripped off or is there a legitimate reason I'll never see the number I'm actually paying for? And where should I even be pointing the finger? The company? My router or my devices? Al from Reno, Nevada, Nevada to the, to the people in Nevada, they said. Did he just say Nevada? It's a great question Al. And as is my way these days, I'd like to start with kind of a short answer. The truth is that you're probably getting most of what you pay for. The problem Al, is let's go back. I pay for gigabit Internet. I just ran a speed test on my phone and got 240Mbps. Now Al, unless you have a very special phone that somehow has an ethernet port on it, I think that you were probably using wifi and so you're probably getting most of what you pay for. You just measured it through the two slowest links in the chain, you measured it through wifi and you measured it on a phone. So let's talk about why that's a problem. Well, the speed test that you did measured the weakest link, not your plan as a whole. The test result is the speed of the entire chain. So that means when you do a speed test you are testing the transfer ISP to the modem, to the router, to the WI fi, to your device's radio. And so any one of those, any one of those things, be it your isp, be it your modem, be it the router, be it the wifi and all of the stuff that's involved in that, I separate WI FI from router. Because it's not just the router's fault, it can be what WI fi availability there is in your home and then your device's own radio. You want all of those to be as fast as possible. And that is the number that's going to be the cap that you can possibly get. So if you test gigabit Internet on a phone over WI fi, it's like, it's like driving to, it's like driving to a school. And with the school in session, taking a race car and driving it through the school zone, you can only go, what is it, 20 miles per hour, 15 miles per hour. One of those, yeah, it could go faster, but it can't. And so the radar as it's measuring the speed of the car, it can only do 20, at most 240 Mbps on a phone. Honestly, if you're doing a speed test there, it's not bad. It's honestly a little decent, to be frank, and especially on a gigabit plan. Okay? Now when you're thinking about how you are, you know, measuring this and what you're doing and where you are in your home, you have to think of WI fi as sort of this shared scenario, okay? Because all of the devices in your home are taking turns talking to your router over WI fi and then passing that along the chain. It has to go through walls, it has to go from a distance. If your neighbors are nearby, the networks that they have may be interfering with yours. All of that stuff is going to eat throughput. So real world, actual real world WI fi almost never hits that connection max. This is where I would argue that Maybe, you know, ISPs could be a little bit more realistic about their speeds. But of course, they are incentivized to offer what appears to be higher or the speeds that they could theoretically get to. And it's kind of a back and forth, right? Because if everybody, if every ISP is saying, look, this is gigabit, then the one that goes, you know, although we are offering gigabit, we know that most people are going to look at this from their phones. And so we're going to be more realistic about it and say, you know, this is, this is a gigabit plan, but you'll probably get X speeds, right? They don't really have incentive to be that honest. And so that's, I mean, it's, again, they're still being honest, but it's sort of a gray area, right? They keep it in the Gray area. That's the up to part. And this is again all sorts of stuff that plays into this. Your device has limits. Older phones, older laptops have wifi radios that aren't even equipped to handle those gigabit speeds. And that's regardless of whether you have it plugged in via ethernet or not. If you don't have a device that can support those speeds, and again, as the case is with WI Fi, if you have a device that has an older WI FI chip, a WI Fi radio, then no, you're not going to get the speeds that you're looking for. And this is true too, which is that even if you were using that perfect setup, you're using the best possible ethernet cable for your situation. Gigabit ethernet actually delivers about 940Mbps of RAM, real throughput. That's because some of that needs to be used for networking overhead. Now I would argue that a really good again ISP is going to be mindful of that and would instead quote for you know, over a thousand megabits to try and, and get you as close as possible. I have on my network gigabit, gigabit fiber, and because I have eero, I have nightly speed tests of my network. And let me look at the state of my network over the past week. And when I look at that, I see 986Mbps down and 970 up. That's direct from the router itself. So if it's only ever able to do 986 Mbps down at the router, then as it's getting pushed out to other devices, some of that's going to get lost, some of that throughput is going to get lost. If you check out what we'll include in the show notes, there are a few nice guides that I used in kind of crafting the answer to your question, although. And one of those guides is the Speed Test HQ. So here's SpeedTest HQ and it talks about Wi Fi versus Ethernet and why Ethernet is faster, why it's lower latency and why the wonderful Burke, who is our engineering team here at TWiT, always tells people that they need to be on a wired connection because WI fi has latency, it has to get sent through the air. And so that's automatically going to cut down on things. And then we have another issue. Most people don't take the opportunity to purchase their own equipment. Most people use the equipment provided by the isp. Many people don't even know that you can opt to use your own equipment, but you can and doing so is helpful because there's a chance that you may have an older device on your network that is playing against or an older device at the core of your network rather that is playing against your possible speeds. So if you have gone in, say to your ISP website and you were previously on a 500Mbps plan and you updated to gigabit and that was the extent of it, then there's a chance that you might be leasing an older device that doesn't have as great of the support. So they might have the ability to process things at the gigabit up and down but. Or a lot of, in a lot of cases it's just down. But it doesn't necessarily mean that the WI fi router that's built in to this all in one device is going to provide you with the networking that you need. So be mindful of this as well. Al and check out your router. Again, you're not going to get. I'm sorry. It's highly unlikely you're going to see a gigabit on your speeds, but you could see some improvements. Let's take a quick break so I can tell you about this week's sponsor of hands on tech. It's Shopify. If you have been sitting on a business idea, well, stop sitting on it. Shopify makes it easy to turn it into a reality. Everything you need to start selling is included and ready from day one. Shopify Checkout helps people finish their purchase. It helps me finish my purchase and look when they come back. When I come back to that, that, that login page, when I come back to that, that purchase page, look there, all of my details are already saved. One tap and I'm all done. Because Shopify handles the setup and checkout, you have more time to focus on growing your business and the tools. Shopify powers millions of businesses worldwide. You know, household names like Mattel and Gymshark, two small businesses just getting started. When I see that Shopify option, I'm so excited because I know I'll have multiple payment options. But more importantly for me, as someone who's a bit of a package tracker, I love that there's integration there that lets me keep track of the purchase that I've made along the way. I know when it's ready to ship, I know when it's shipped, I know when it's out for delivery. And then I get that delightful item in the mail. And that is something that makes Shopify Stand out. I love being able to buy through Shopify. With Shopify, nothing stands between your idea and a real business. So go make it one. Start your free trial at shopify.com hot. Start your free trial at shopifY.com hot. All right, let's head back to the show. Thanks, Shopify. That said, if you are trying to figure out about being shorted somehow, you know, if you feel like there is a chance that you're being ripped off, there are some things that you can do to see how close it comes to gigabit Ethernet. Plug a computer directly into the router via an ethernet cable. You want Cat 5e to be written on that cable or better. So Cat 6, but Cat 5e or better, and then don't use Cat 7, pause other devices or shut them off. So what I mean is, don't let anything else on the network pull any sort of connection, just this one computer. So, you know, if you al you have family, tell them all, okay, in the next 15 minutes, nobody's able to use anything. I want to see all your devices and I want to make sure they're all powered off. And then go ahead and plug it in. Wired. Now, if you see a speed test again, check that you've got Ethernet connection, because a lot of these, you know, laptops are going to have a WI fi radio as well. You need to make sure that the system is using your wired connection. If it gets you into the 900Mbps range, then the ISP is delivering on what it says. It's. It's what it says on the tin. Your bottleneck is not the isp, it's the wifi or it's the devices. And, well, this is where I speak the good name of mesh networking. Because a modern router, especially in a sort of mesh setup, is something that's going to improve your speeds. That said, if Wired is also stuck low, now you have evidence for the isp. What I would do is if you see slow speeds, after you run this test with everything set up correctly, I want you to to make note of exactly how you're doing it. And I want you to do it over the course of a week, okay. And collect as much information as possible as you're doing it. It's a lot of work, I know, but you want to come with the receipts to the isp, okay? That means that you can say whenever they go, everything looks good on our end. You get to go, well, it doesn't look good on my end. And I've done the power cycling of the system and I've done this and check this out, I got records. And then you're able to talk about over the past week, you're not seeing the speeds that you would expect. There is a guide from Ting that walks through the process of doing a proper test of your network and it's Ting's guide on gigabit Internet and what you can expect from it. So if you scroll down to testing your speeds, it tells you what you need to do to get a more accurate test. Very helpful. And something that will make it so that you know what you're talking about and sound like you know what you're talking about when you reach out to the support team. We do have to talk about that. Up to language. Right. Up to gigabit speeds. It's honestly doing a lot of the, it's doing the legal work. It is, it's, it's the important aspect of that. But it's not really, or I shouldn't say it's. It's not purely a way for the company to protect itself. It's absolutely true that that is the case that if we give you this cap, you need to be able to work within that cap and you can get good speeds. But the ISP isn't controlling where your router is placed unless they tell you to put it somewhere else and you choose to listen to them. They're not controlling the radius of your radius and position of your device to the router. And they're not controlling your microwave oven. They're not controlling your neighbors connections. I mean they may be responsible for your neighbor's connections, but they're not making it so that the WI FI radio is blasting out and interrupting your signal. What they can control is the speed at the wall. And so since that's something that's within their control and not within yours, if you can show them that you've controlled all the other aspects minus the neighbor thing, you know, that's kind of to be expected. Again, that's over WI fi. So you're showing it via the wired and you're saying no, this is you. That wired test is kind of holding them accountable. So Al, love the question, but don't fire the ISP based on a phone over WI FI speed test because that number is more an indicator of what work you need to do to improve your home network. Start with the wired test. It'll tell you which side of the router has the problem. And if it says 940Mbps and the couch says 240Mbps. Well, you're spending your money and it is being used properly on isp. It's just that old router or the fact that you don't have enough signal in the home to provide faster speeds that you would expect. That said, again, 240 isn't bad. It's not bad. Some people would be pleased to have those speeds. So Al, thank you so much for taking the time to write in. Thank you for your question and thank you to those of you out there listening. I appreciate it. If you would like to ask questions, you can email me ho is how you get in touch. And I'll be back next week with another episode of Hands On Tech. Bye Bye.
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