Broadband speed and attached devices

Delta Skies

Delta Skies

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I'm on a 20mb/s Sky Broadband package and can have sometimes into double figures of attached devices to the router. Some of them will be fairly static like an iPad sat doing nothing others will be getting hammered e.g. my lad downloading netflix, etc. Things keep going really slowly which at times can be painful. I can see the list of attached devices from the router admin page but does anyone know any way of working out which device is taking the bandwidth at anyone time?
 
Not sure if you can do that using the Sky router.

We have had similar problems where our kids suck up all the bandwidth. I ended up buying a more flexible router and can now assign priority to devices (QOS).
 
If it is wifi slowing down, are all devices connected wifi n band or are any old wifi g ones.

If the router is not a dual band router then I think when a wifi g band connects to it all devices slow down to wifi g.
 
Got an email from Virgin Media telling me I could have a free upgrade on my broadband, so I phone 'em up and they confirm I could uprgade from 100 meg to 150 meg for free .
So what happened ?
The following day , I do a speedtest and , yes 155 Mbps , but now it has dropped to 30 Mbps and been like that for days!
Prior to all this I was getting 90Mbps consistently.
I might ring 'em back to get a downgrade !
Grrrrr!
 
Thanks chaps for the replies. I'm getting decent (as advertised) speeds coming into the house but struggling between router and devices. @sep9001 - I've got the standard Sky single band router and a mixture of old and new devices so I think I need to investigate a dual band router which at first glance don't appear overly expensive.
 
Generally, the answer is simple. It's not the devices connected to the router - it's the kids connected to the house.... I think you've just proved the rule!
 
Wireless comes in many 'flavours' and is subject to many outside interferences such as bluetooth and all manner of neighbourhood influences. To counter this lots of error corrections are employed, each adding their own overhead of 'time/bandwidth'.

EDIT - you might want to consider selecting a different wireless channel on your router if that's possible
 
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boliston said:
I have noticed that wireless is always a lot slower than wired

wireless:
1201335776.png


wired:
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Not here, but then I have a decent wireless access point. Looks like you are using a different server in the two cases too which also might affect it.

Nice low ping time though - must be co-located with whatever is running the other end of the speedtest.
 
boliston said:
I have noticed that wireless is always a lot slower than wired

wireless:
1201335776.png


wired:
Click to expand...
Two very different servers you are testing against. In order to compare I would suggest you fix to one server to eliminate that part.
 
Boilston - are you on a wireless G network or are you on a wireless N network with wireless G devices on?
 
Dale_tem said:
Boilston - are you on a wireless G network or are you on a wireless N network with wireless G devices on?
Click to expand...
my router says 130mb/s wlan speed but as i dont really use my phone to browse much at home i will not loose any sleep over being limited to 47mb/s on my phone as everything else is wired.
 
First test. Try switching all the other wireless devices off and then re-test wireless bandwidth.
I don't think many wireless-N capable access points these days will slow down when a wireless a/b/g device is connected. If you post the model number of the sky router, then I/we can probably find out.

Another easy test is installing an app like Wi-Fi analyser on your phone and see which other Wi-Fi networks in your locality are using the same channel. You can then switch your wireless access point to the least congested channel.

You could also try adding another wireless access point on a different channel and distribute devices across the two wireless access points. Or change the router for a dual band one and push 5GHz capable devices onto the 5GHz band.
 
Thanks for the reply Daniel. I will give this a go. The app sounds worth while as well. I can't decide whether the slowness happened after I installed a NAS drive or maybe after getting Netflix. Either way we have loads of devices connected.

I've therefore decided to go down the dual band router path and started investigating the specs. Given that two of us have Macbooks which can use 802.11ac then my attention has been diverted selfishly towards a compatible router. I was quite keen on one of these (TP-Link Archer C7) but then realised it doesn't have a built in modem like it's bigger brothers (Archer D5 & Archer D7).

Would you know if I could use a C7 with my existing Sky modem/router and, if so, do I (or should I) turn the wireless off on that box when adding the new router on?
 
No need to worry about having an all in one solution. I've got one broadband modem/router (Billion) and three more wireless access points throughout our property (in addition to power line Ethernet) to provide connectivity.

I'm keeping the N band on a particular ssid name and the G on another ssid.
 
If your wireless access points are multi-modal there's no need to isolate devices by wireless capability.
There's no reason why you can't use the C7, connecting it via ethernet to your existing hub.
 
Cheers Daniel. Someone pointed out at work that Sky might not allow you to connect your own modem router in. After phone call to them they said I can it's just they won't support me which is fair enough. I got less of a clear answer when I asked about where support stops if I pugged a route in to their Hub box.

I did find out though that they are bringing out a dual band router in May so it might be worth me bearing with things until then and seeing what deal I can get from them.
 
Just stumbled across this as I'm having terrible issues with Sky, seemingly to do with the wireless but I went out and paid £250 for an apple time capsule with a 2TB drive in it, the purpose being that I thought other devices in the house were causing interference and I'm in a 3 storey house and the sky wireless wasn't good at reaching the top floor.

So, the time capsule is connected by Ethernet to the sky hub, and that is now pushing a 5GHz network round the house... And still its crap!
I notice my Dropbox update will just drop its connection quite often and when using safari it goes so slow, so I spoke to sky again and they told me the problem was the time capsule, which got me slightly irate as the whole reason I bought the thing was because the wireless from the sky hub was so bad in the first place, so how could this now be the problem!

I have 7 devices in my house connected to the 5GHz network, of which 6 are apple and one is android, so when I was reading about issues with Yosemite I can dismiss that as the android suffers too.
Sky are adamant the connection is stable and doesn't drop, so I'm at my wits end now and considering going back to BT when infinity comes my way!
 
Paulmack said:
Just stumbled across this as I'm having terrible issues with Sky, seemingly to do with the wireless but I went out and paid £250 for an apple time capsule with a 2TB drive in it, the purpose being that I thought other devices in the house were causing interference and I'm in a 3 storey house and the sky wireless wasn't good at reaching the top floor.

So, the time capsule is connected by Ethernet to the sky hub, and that is now pushing a 5GHz network round the house... And still its crap!
I notice my Dropbox update will just drop its connection quite often and when using safari it goes so slow, so I spoke to sky again and they told me the problem was the time capsule, which got me slightly irate as the whole reason I bought the thing was because the wireless from the sky hub was so bad in the first place, so how could this now be the problem!

I have 7 devices in my house connected to the 5GHz network, of which 6 are apple and one is android, so when I was reading about issues with Yosemite I can dismiss that as the android suffers too.
Sky are adamant the connection is stable and doesn't drop, so I'm at my wits end now and considering going back to BT when infinity comes my way!
Click to expand...
I had the same setup for a while and it worked fine so if it is an issue with the time capsule it's a one off not a compatibility issue.

SkyHubs are very poor both for wired and wireless speeds, I just use mine for internet connectivity now. All my internal traffic/routing is covered off with Cisco routers and switches
 
Delta Skies said:
Cheers Daniel. Someone pointed out at work that Sky might not allow you to connect your own modem router in. After phone call to them they said I can it's just they won't support me which is fair enough. I got less of a clear answer when I asked about where support stops if I pugged a route in to their Hub box.

I did find out though that they are bringing out a dual band router in May so it might be worth me bearing with things until then and seeing what deal I can get from them.
Click to expand...

Their routers are useless so I'd expect the next one will be, just get another router and connect it up to the SkyHub, and switch off all the DHCP and wireless access on the sky hub end.
 
mjScall said:
Their routers are useless so I'd expect the next one will be, just get another router and connect it up to the SkyHub, and switch off all the DHCP and wireless access on the sky hub end.
Click to expand...

What will turning off the DHCP do? I just have my time capsule wired to the hub and use that for wireless but I'm still struggling at times... pulling my hair out with it now
 
Turning off the DHCP on the sky hub just leaves it with the sole purpose of being the gateway to the internet, so you can reboot it without having any impact at all on your internal network, the DHCP won't affect internet speeds I just find it a neater solution to have that service provided by the 'good' router.

I have toyed with the idea of just getting rid of the sky box altogether as sky support is as much use as a chocolate fireguard anyway so I wouldn't miss it, and i could always plug it back in if i really need them to come out.

I've extracted the password from the DHCP discovery packets (really simple to do), only thing stopping me at the minute is the effort of recabling everything!
 
I'm on Virgin, but only use their router as an access point, with a dual band router. This gives you the flexibility to get a router with the software you want to manage the connection etc. A router that can take this software is powerful http://www.dd-wrt.com/site/index
 
I haven't used ISP provided hardware for ages other than as a modem (and I use dedicated modems now as I find that better). Just buy yourself a decent router (Asus RT-N66U or -AC66U would be my choice as the wireless is superb) and then either run DD-WRT (as suggested above) or live with the supplied UI. Asus even advertise support for DD-WRT: http://www.asus.com/us/site/routers/DD-WRT/

One thing I have learned is it is worth spending a bit on network infrastructure (I run managed gigabit switches, dedicated Asus N66U as an access point and pfSense firewall for ISP connectivity at home). If you don't you will be forever solving problems with it.
 
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