[SOLVED] Boosting signal or speed?

Sep 22, 2020
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Hi All,
I called my service provider and they said my wifi service is currently 30mb. They said I could upgrade to 100mb. My question is...does increasing to mb boost the wifi signal in my house or does it just speed up the transfer of data? Or both?
Thanks,
Dave
 
Solution
In general the speed and distance the signal goes is not related. People that try to combine the concepts is what makes things confusing.

The distance the signal goes is purely a matter of how much radio transmit power the router has...your end device though needs to be able to send signals back. Almost all routers transmit at the full legal power.

The data rate on wifi is a function of the data encoding. You can think of this as them having different method of stuffing bits into the radio signal. The actual power of the signal is the same but the amount of data can change based on the data encoding. So the speed the connection goes is mostly a function of the data encoding. This is the key difference between wifi...

kanewolf

Titan
Moderator
Hi All,
I called my service provider and they said my wifi service is currently 30mb. They said I could upgrade to 100mb. My question is...does increasing to mb boost the wifi signal in my house or does it just speed up the transfer of data? Or both?
Thanks,
Dave
Unknown. We need more information on your network.
Most people don't have WIFI as the link to the ISP. Do you live in a rural area ?
 
In general the speed and distance the signal goes is not related. People that try to combine the concepts is what makes things confusing.

The distance the signal goes is purely a matter of how much radio transmit power the router has...your end device though needs to be able to send signals back. Almost all routers transmit at the full legal power.

The data rate on wifi is a function of the data encoding. You can think of this as them having different method of stuffing bits into the radio signal. The actual power of the signal is the same but the amount of data can change based on the data encoding. So the speed the connection goes is mostly a function of the data encoding. This is the key difference between wifi routers. The newest methods attempt to pack more data into the signal.

What makes things slightly more confusing is you are now adding the internet speed into the question. Let say you have a really old router that can only do 802.11g encoding. You might get 25mbps on wifi. Now lets say you get a fancy fiber connection to your router. This would mean that the data from the ISP would go say at 1gbit but that is only between the ISP and the buffer in the router. The router would still transmit it to the end devices at 25mbps.

So in your case the signal will not go farther. The signal may or may not be faster depending on the maximum rates of your wifi radios in the router. If you plug in with a ethernet cable then you should get the full speed. Note if you were to get a internet speed above 100mbps you need to have 1gbit wan and lan ports in the router otherwise the port will limit it.
 
Solution
Sep 22, 2020
4
0
10
In general the speed and distance the signal goes is not related. People that try to combine the concepts is what makes things confusing.

So in your case the signal will not go farther. The signal may or may not be faster depending on the maximum rates of your wifi radios in the router. If you plug in with a ethernet cable then you should get the full speed. Note if you were to get a internet speed above 100mbps you need to have 1gbit wan and lan ports in the router otherwise the port will limit it.

Thanks for the explanation. I see on the spec sheet for my router that it does 802.11b/g/n/ac. So, if I get a router that does a higher coding would that increase the speed in which I get data?
 
You are likely going to have issues trying to find a different router. It appears you need a VDSL router and there are not a lot of those. It likely will make no difference the router you have already likely exceeds the abilities of your end devices. Most end devices only have 2 antenna so they can only run 2x2 mimo. This would be called 300 on 2.4g, That router has 2 antenna on 2.4 and 3 on 5g. Unless you have some very strange end devices that use 4 antenna it will do you no good to upgrade to a router that can do 4x4.

If you use 5g even with 2 antenna devices there is a very good chance you will get the 100mbps you pay your ISP for. Of course it all depends on your house and how much signal is being absorbed.