Ah, you succumbed to Pandora WiFi Solutions then. What can go wrong?!

Good start so far - it works

2.5Mb down in the favoured room.
Will be trying more window ledges

In a West facing window, which I assumed would be rubbish
11.5Mb

That's pretty low download rates. You must be getting the square root of bugger-all signal there.

On four bars, we get about 30Mbps.

London has better internet services than in the sticks.

We live in East Devon and I just checked mine, download is 64mbps and upload 12.1mbps, tested from iPad, going over WiFi to router. It’s copper from house to box about 200m down road. Service provider is Vodafone. It will be optical from exchange/switch to the box.

I would say we are in the sticks, small village/town, people in Exeter would often come into Apple and complain about poor WiFi and broadband saying it was the Apple gear at fault, actually it was very rarely a failure of kit.

The problem with big cities is the volume of people in one area all trying to hook onto the same broadband infrastructure at the same time, this issue has become worse over recent years with increased data demand, movie, tv and music streaming at higher res, and more users. One reason fibre optic is being slung in everywhere is to support 4K/5k tv and seen as an opportunity to make money by charging for it. We are even about to get it in the sticks.

The other issue is in highly dense urban sites is multiple WiFi signals(radio frequencies) for multiple users clashing with each other which causes causes errors and slows data transmission due to more error checking.

The WiFi issue is not dissimilar to being in the middle of London and being unable to get a mobile phone signal, it’s very rarely anything to do with the signal strength, the real issue is that the network is saturated and you are being bounced off the nearby mobile phone repeaters/masts as its bandwidth is already maxed out. Your phone in these situations may latch onto a much more distant mast/repeater, but then the signal strength will be lower. I’m sure most people have experienced 4g dropping to 3G and then even lower, this is often the infrastructure being overloaded so it try to turn the metaphorical data tap down for each user to allow more on the mobile infrastructure.

This actually happens at switches/phone exchanges, each switch toady is effectively a computer and the software on it has the capability to load balance for each line to a distribution box and for each individual phone line. This is more commonly known as throttling, the trouble is if you get a low volume user like your granny who does not use it much, will get shut down to a low bandwidth and then when she tries to video call her grandson the service is rubbish, it will only improve if she streams more data regularly and her bandwidth is increased by the software.

So this stuff is not straight forward and there are lots of aspects that can affect how good your broadband and WiFi is.

I thought that they said 5km was about the limit

Such variable results from Speedtest, see below

What is the best speed tester ?
Is there other info I need ?

I'm digging further as this is making little sense.

Will check this laptop won't connect via cable and probably change to another laptop
Close everything else. Reboot
What else ?


Three speeds from Speedtest. Router static for all on a window ledge, corner of the lounge
24Mb Download- 6.20am
16 - 6.30am
53 Ping / 33 Download / 5 Upload - 6.40am
38 / 21 / 4 - 6.50am
54 / 4.7 / 4.2 - 7.00am
41 / 34 / 4.5 - 7.10
36 / 11.4 / 3.9 - 7.20
40 / 32 / 4 -7.21
65 / 8.63 / 3.62 - 10.10am

This is the Three mobile broadband connection

Cable direct to Three router didn't work on normal Laptop as expected.

Bring 2nd laptop from upstairs.
Connect to Three mobile router
Get in
Automatically connected to the makers website ZTE. This didn't happen on the other laptop
Asks me for their password.
Still no internet.

Connecting via the Plusnet router to do this

Typical day at the IT coalface for me