What they don't make clear about 1 gig broadband

[stevepsandy]

Recently upgraded to 1 gig broadband but although speed to hub is good (1068-1144), speed from hub to device is significantly lower. For example, my modern Dell laptop only runs up to 480 Mbps max. Equally, my wife's modern Huawei laptop runs up to approx 500 Mbps. Devices which only use 2.4ghz band are even slower. Also, if the PowerAV network devices are rated under 1000Mbps then no way that the full Hub speeds can be gained.

I have seen comments on here about Xbox getting 800Mbps and apparently the latest iPhone versions can also access close to the 1 gig optimum but, in order to get the benefit of this upgrade, do I now need to spend a fortune on high end gaming laptops? Otherwise, can anyone tell me what the derived benefits are of having this upgrade?

The speed measurements were taken using SamKnows, which seems to be the de facto standard, although not the test provider recommended by VM (Ooka?).

[jbrennand]

One advantage of the 1GB service is that.... now you can have 2 devices simultaneously downloading at 500Mbps. If you upgraded from 500... they would only get 250 each on that package ... and so on.

The Hub4 has wifi5 and so will never get more than ~600 on wifi - you need wifi6 equipment for that. VM will supply that when the Hub5 is released - possibly sometime this year as it on soft release at the moment. It also has a 2,.5GB ethernet port that will allow a little faster Ethernet connection speed over the Hub4

[stevepsandy]

Thanks for the heads up John, I had worked out that several devices would run better overall but as I have an AV wired network for general use,  connected by Cat8 cable (probable overkill), together with NAS storage, wanted to be sure of getting the benefit of the additional cost. Sounds like Hub 5 will help. 

Also have VM360 and Maxit TV package but not yet UHD! Cheers

[bally12345]

Was you expecting 1Gbps over wifi? Your best option is for those speed to stick to wired connection as long as your devices support it but as far as over wifi is concerned you will need a devices that are capable of 802.11AX to get higher throughput.

However the benefit of it is, you can have 3 devices run at 300mbps at the same time with some bandwidth to spare for other things like IoT devices.

[stevepsandy]

The Dell laptop is actually wired directly to the Hub4 and the cable is less than 2 metres. The reason the Dell doesn't receive the full speed is down to the hardware on the laptop - it's a well known issue and not particularly straightforward to fix.

As to speed over wi-fi, the Huawei does indeed receive up to 500 Mbps.  We would use VoIP but VM charge far too much for the privilege!

[carl_pearce]

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@stevepsandy wrote:

The Dell laptop is actually wired directly to the Hub4 and the cable is less than 2 metres. The reason the Dell doesn't receive the full speed is down to the hardware on the laptop - it's a well known issue and not particularly straightforward to fix.

As to speed over wi-fi, the Huawei does indeed receive up to 500 Mbps.  We would use VoIP but VM charge far too much for the privilege!

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It's certainly possible with the correct kit (I upgraded a laptop from WiFi 5 to WiFi 6 for around £20, and use my own WiFi 6 router and bonding two ethernet ports with additional kit between the HUB and my router):

[GrKl]

could you please let us know the details? thanks. 

[stevepsandy]

Thanks but the discussion thread has clarified the situation. Essentially, a 1 gig broadband connection supplies 1 gig download speed spread across all connected devices. For example, of I have 3 laptops connected to my network, then depending on the laptops own hardware capabilities, my download speeds will be around 300mbps per device.

It's as much to do with VM marketing as anything else - were it ever different!