Broadband Speed

[Doug99]

Hi All.
My home laptop is detecting only 50Mbs WiFi download, whilst my son's 'very expensive' gaming laptop is detecting the expected 500Mbs.
Hard wiring the laptop to the router doesn't increase the speed.
What component within my cheaper laptop manages the wifi and limits my download speed?
My Samsung GalaxyJ6 smartphone is also only detecting the slower speed.
Cheers All

 

[Mottie]

500mbs? Is that the Virgin super fast cable service?

 

[Doug99]

500mbs? Is that the Virgin super fast cable service?

Yes - My lad is chuffed he can see 500Mbs for his gaming, but I can only detect 50Mbs -

 

[Mottie]

Yes - My lad is chuffed

I bet he is! There’s 'free' WiFi at the cafe at one of the remote country parks we go to. Pretty useless and I checked the speed the other day - 0.21mbs. They’d be very happy with your 50mbs!

 

[Lucid]

What component within my cheaper laptop manages the wifi and limits my download speed?

It's the wireless card.

There are various Wi-Fi speed standards: b/g/n/ac. Wireless ac goes up to a theoretical max that's faster than wired gigabit Ethernet (1000mbps). To do this requires a router at the same standard.

The wireless card is only part of the story. In your laptop there'll be a single aerial. In devices that support higher speeds there'll be two or possibly even four aerials. This works a bit like a motorway versus a single carriageway road. When you can't move more traffic by going faster, you add more lanes instead.

There are a few catches with wireless ac and its higher speeds though. Even if you both had high-speed gaming laptops, you might not both be able to connect to the router at 600mbps at the same time.
Your router can probably serve you with wireless N and your son with wireless ac at the same time. However, if you both had the faster ac-supporting devices then you might find that you have to share some portion of the 500mbps rather than getting that speed each. Much of this is hardware dependent.To be any more specific would require knowing the router's capabilities.
50mbps is about 4x more than you need to maintain 4K UHD streaming from Netflix or Amazon.