We got our fully fibre-optic internet connection fitted and activated today. The engineer arrived promptly, just after 8am, and despite the previous engineers making his job more difficult by fitting the connection point in an awkward spot he managed to finish everything within an hour and a half.
Before they left, the engineer ran a speed test on the line, and it reported a maximum speed of roughly 940Mbps in both directions. For comparison, our previous “half fibre” maxed out at around 63Mbps down/30ish up. So 900+Mbps is the confirmed upper bounds we can expect (in theory), and in line with what the ISP is promising.
In reality, things have varied wildly from device to device. I should note here that the engineer’s test was done over ethernet, and all our devices are WiFi-only. Most are up to WiFi 5 (AC) standards, but we do have a few still on the older WiFi N.
My iPhone 12 posts results anywhere between 350-575Mbps down. My older 9″ iPad Pro gets around 230-305Mbps down. My creaking, old, desktop PC was getting 44Mbps until I remembered I had a WiFi AC USB adapter I could use to upgrade the internal N adapter – at which point it started getting around 141-215Mbps. Curiously, both the iPad and desktop get upload results up to around 120Mbps higher than their respective download speeds. My work laptop (which is more or less on top of my desktop) gets around 450-475Mbps in both directions.
This isn’t intended to be a “first world problems” moaning post about not getting the absolute maximum speed. I know WiFi is much slower than a wired connection, and I know that different factorsaffect the speed an individual device. Rather this is just me noting how surprised I was to see such a large discrepancy between devices of broadly similar capability – many of which are sat right next to each other as they’re being tested.