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I was going to suggest getting yourself an 802.11n router which uses the 5ghz frequency.

No interference from microwaves, cordless phones and other b/g wireless networks. The trade-off of the higher frequency can sometimes mean less range.

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If you're not already using it, try Mozilla Firefox. It tells you a lot more in the status bar. Not just a "connecting" "transferring" but exactly what its waiting for from exactly which sites. I've noticed that often it's the ads that slow sites down.

I also got rid of all toolbars as these cause quite a bit of traffic in themselves and can cause their own problems interfering with web pages.

I'm also using Google's Chrome - it still has trouble with some pages: not fully displaying and wheels spinning apparently waiting for more content. I try the same page in Firefox and it pulls in all the content quickly and accurately. Chrome can also chew up a lot of CPU for some content, a lot more than Firefox.

Firefox loads and renders pages faster than IE.

Hi,

I find your lack of understanding of Internet technology a bit worrying.

You don't say what speed wireless you're using. For example, If you're using 54 megabit/second you'll typically only get a throughput of something like 60%, i.e. about 30 megabit/second, because there's quite a lot of overhead on wireless - and that's when the wireless card is only a few feet away from the router. It'll drop to slower speeds as you move father away. So basically 54 megabit/second wireless is just a non-starter if you want 50 megabit/second throughput.

I raise this issue, because if you don't understand speed issues like this it seems that you're maybe not going to understand issues such as if you buy a Internet connection from Virgin media, you might only actually get a quarter of the speed they sell you, due to throttling once you download or upload a relatively small amount of data - Please see:



for the exact figures. I think this is a currently a huge issue with Internet in the UK.

My point being unless you understand the technology and the numbers, you're going to miss the stories. For example you might talk about Virgin's 20 megabit service, but really it's only a 192 kilobit service depending what you do with it (for some applications upload is just as important as download).

Virgin are trying to make out they're just punishing anti-social heavy users, but really the numbers they're talking about is quite small, as low as 200 megabytes, which is only about one fifth of a compressed movie, or say an hour or so watching iPlayer and an hour or so using Skype (which between a household isn't that much). Even on the expensive premium services you could get throttled by 75% just for sharing half a DVD with someone.

To add to what Darren has said in (5) the 802.11n device was mentioned previously in the blogs, and this was I believe the device that Virgin Media supply with the XXL service.

Of course there is a chance that due to the possibilities of interference/attenuation of signal from building that people with XXL and 802.11n (even when all bits of hardware co-operate) may not be able to sustain 50Mbps speeds.

For now XXL is free of any management, which given its a premium priced product on a new bit of network makes some sense. Of course this may change depending on things like take-up and usage of the product.

BTW the reason 802.11g (54Mbps) only ever gives a max of 20 to 25Mbps is not overheads, but that the 54Mbps is the max 27Mbps down, and max 27Mbps up added together.

Out of interest, what speed do you have the router set at? 145 or 300mbps? I don't think it can be set for both.
Is your XBOX360 live working?
For me, I have it all working using the router in 145Mbps, with WPA+WPA2 encryption set. This allows me to have my older 'g' devices connected but the 'n' devices connected at higher speeds. You mention you are getting 15-30mbps. Is this on your MAC? or a PC with the supplied 802.11N adapter from Virgin?
Just to ask the obvious, which speed test are you using as Virgin only list a few as sufficient to check for 50mbps speeds.

Hi Darren,

Check if your router is set to WPA2 PSK with AES encryption. This works well for me.

Another test would be to temporary remove wireless security and encryption and see how your router is performing.

I have seen an max of between 35-44Mbps, using WPA2 PSK with AES encryption on a fully optimised XP machine.

hi very interesting blog as i also had the 50meg install yesterday,and yes im getting around 47 meg hardwired but as i use wireless this is where my problems begin.im lucky if i get 20 meg using the supplied router/dongle,yes i have a new vaio laptop and i am quite close to the supplied router,i was told by the engineers and virgin technical support that they know of the problem and netgear are working on a fix,i was on the 20 meg up to yesterday and was getting 18 meg wirelessly using my n rated belkin n1 vision router and built in n rated laptop card so im not very impressed at the moment ,i really cant believe this wasnt tested before general release.i cant help thinking im paying for a premium service but not recieving premium quality but hopefully its all teething problems and will be resolved but im not holding my breath.

I don't understand the need of this topic. It's application/discussion is restricted to developed countries only.

In a country like India, we can get only 2MBps max. and that's the values in the Ads.

From my experiences, I just can add that, when it's wireless things like 'distance from router' matters.
And when it's hardwired ethernet cable, u will get the maximum speed out of a connection.

"I'm using an 802.11n wifi router with between 145Mbps and 300Mbps bandwidth depending on what setting I'm on."

the best speed I could wring out of an 802.11n connection in the same room between two PCs was about 50 Mbits/s with 90% of the testing over more realistic distances yielding less than 40 MBits/s.

The values you quote above are the over the air symbol rate and not the carried TCP/IP data rate.

If you're far enough away the wireless link will fall back to 802.11g speeds in any case.

Re: #5

Yeah you're right I'd only read this post (after clicking on a link from the news.bbc.co.uk frontpage) not any of your others. If you read this post nowhere do you mention what speed wireless you were using, it sounded like you were, at a guess, using 802.11g and then upgraded to .11n which fixed the problem. SImilarly I wasn't aware the service you were talking about was unthrottled. Sorry for my confusion.

I still think you should mention the throttling issue when describing these Internet services, e.g. a "50Mbps unthrottled unlimited connection" would be way better than a 50Mbps connection throttled in the same manner Virgin are using for the fast majority of their customers. Their 20Mbps is a premium service, the best most UK residents can get, and it still gets throttled by 75% including on the uplink which is only 768kbps in the first place (I assume you realise that in peer to peer services for every megabyte you download, someone else has to upload a megabyte). I admit "20M/768k 75% throttled" is a bit more of a mouthful than "20Mbps", but the devil is in the detail and this to me is the big issue, rather than whether you have to use a wired connection instead of wireless.

Personally I just expect wireless to be somewhat unreliable and slow if it's not pretty near the router. I wouldn't personally use it when benchmarking or downloading large quantities of data. I know other people that use wireless a lot use more than one access point (i.e router) across the house.

Re: #6

Thanks for the correction, TBH I wasn't 100% certain about it being down to overhead (just something someone told me), but did know you only get about 60%.