Why don't I get higher download speeds?

[Joeses]

Hello forum,

I've been having trouble trying to get my speeds up to where they should be, at 100mbit. I recently had WiFi but the highest speed I could reach was just below 30mbps.

I eventually decided to buy a pair of powerline adapters, NETGEAR XAV 5001. So I just installed them and so on but the speeds didn't change much at all. The increase was not special at all, just about 7-8 mbps.

Is this because that powerline adapters suck or what?

I mean, I was expecting a increase of the double of my previous or something, so I find it a bit surprising.

Thanks for any help!

Joe

 

[RealBeast]

Recall that a 100mbps (100 megabit) connection is not 100mBps (megabytes), which is what shows up in the transfer speed in Windows file transfers -- divide the bits number by 8 to get the possible bytes transfer rate.

Wifi at 30 megabytes per second isn't bad with any real distance.

Powerline adapters, particularly the ones that you got are generally okay, but they really only get anywhere near their top speed when on the SAME circuit breaker; pretty much in the same room. Between breakers speed drops and between panels it really drops. Also insure that you do not have either on a ground fault interrupt circuit or on a surge protector.

If you really want top speeds, like 100 megabytes per second, a wired CAT 5e gigabit network is the only current option.

 

[PhilFrisbie]

Just to be clear, 100 Mbps is the physical link speed. There is about 2 bits of overhead per byte in Ethernet, so the max data speed as closer to 1/10 the link speed. This also applies to wireless. . .