GIGABIT INTERNET Get the speeds you're paying for

Is your premium internet service not racing along like it should? Darien Graham-Smith goes in search of faster downloads on every device

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Home broadband is getting faster and faster. Many ISPs are now offering gigabit home internet connections in urban areas, and some go even faster. Community Fibre has one package that goes all the way up to 3Gbits/sec (communityfibre.co.uk). We’ve come a long way since 56Kbits/sec dial-up.

But while the idea of an ultra-fast internet connection is appealing, once you’ve had the service installed you may find you’re not getting the speeds you expect. That’s probably because the infrastructure inside your home isn’t fast enough to let your devices get the full bandwidth of your internet line. On these pages we’ll find out why – and what you can do about it.

The woe of Wi-Fi

When you order a gigabit-class internet service, you can be fairly confident the line will run at the advertised speed as far as your router. But if you connect a client device to that router via Wi-Fi, you’ll probably see much slower download speeds than the advertised headline rate. The simple fact is that not many Wi-Fi setups are fast enough to handle gigabit connections.

Now hold on, you might say: my wireless router should be way faster than my internet service. And it’s true that almost all modern routers are advertised as supporting multigigabit speeds. The A-Listed Netgear Nighthawk RAXE300 (see issue 341, p68) goes as high as 7.8Gbits/sec.

Unfortunately, these ratings are misleading. For one thing, they refer to total bandwidth across the 2.4GHz and 5GHz radio bands, plus the 6GHz band in the case of Wi-Fi 6E and Wi-Fi 7 routers. Your devices, however, will connect on only one of these frequencies, so only a portion of that bandwidth will be available to them.