Question Basic wireless networking question

[RickVS]

I have 300 Mb Internet coming into the house with a 1 Gb router. My hard wired PC gets 300 Mb however my wireless Chromebook one floor lower only gets about 70 Mb from the router which causes surfing to lag. The signal strength coming from the router is a strong signal so I don't see how I can improve on that. Is there something that I can do to improve my Chromebook speeds? I thought about a repeater but I already have a strong signal. Would that really help? Thanks.

 

[kanewolf]

I have 300 Mb Internet coming into the house with a 1 Gb router. My hard wired PC gets 300 Mb however my wireless Chromebook one floor lower only gets about 70 Mb from the router which causes surfing to lag. The signal strength coming from the router is a strong signal so I don't see how I can improve on that. Is there something that I can do to improve my Chromebook speeds? I thought about a repeater but I already have a strong signal. Would that really help? Thanks.

WIFI is a two way street. You might RECEIVE a good signal, but can't transmit a strong signal back.

 

[bill001g]

70mbps is more than enough for almost every internet usage. It might be though you are getting lots of packet loss.

The speed difference number though are what you would see if the main pc was using the 5g radio and the laptop the 2.4g. Try to force both to use the 5g radio...this is why using different SSID for 2.4 and 5 is recommended. Many routers use the same SSID for both and the PC will not always pick the "best".

Note if you are already running 5g it might run better on the 2.4g even if it gets lower speedtest numbers. You might get less packet loss.

Large bandwidth is really only used for downloading large files. You do not need much over 30mbps to watch even 4k netflix and most other application take far less.

 

[JohnMGotts]

What do you get when you're close to the router?

 

[gggplaya]

70mbps is plenty, that's not causing lag on your chromebook.

Chromebook's are generally made extremely cheaply. They're designed to be cheaper than windows laptops. They likely cut costs on the internal antenna design and transceiver. You might be able to connect to the wifi router just fine, but the transmit from the chromebook might not be able to transmit with enough power to connect back with a solid connection. Normally I would test this by moving files between computers on the internal network, but chromeOS might make that hard to do.

You might want to consider powerline or a MOCA bridge to your router.