Why is my internet speed not at its full potential?

Question

My current internet package is for speeds up to 150 Mbps yet when I conduct an internet speed test online it only goes up to around 80 Mbps. I am using a triband ASUS router which is capable of much more than 150 Mbps so I know that's not slowing it down and my computer is always connected to the 5 Ghz connection. My internet provider is Cox and I live in the San Diego, CA area. I'm using a computer desktop but still connected wirelessly using an adapter.

Answer 1

Sir, your question is wrong on so many levels, it is clear that you have been duped by some marketing.

Let's go over this:

My current internet package is for speeds up to 150 Mbps

Yeah, yeah. Where I live, the cable company (Comcast) is known for advertising a maximum rate, although not everyone can actually get that rate. I've listened to their radio advertisements boasting about the speed, and then the other quick-speaking "fine print" guy verbalizes things like "speed not available in all areas. Maximum speed not guaranteed."

Phone companies' have been known to be far more honest (at least with DSL).

My internet provider is Cox

Oh, ouch. That sounds like cable. A technology that can have higher theoretical speeds, but seems to have the effect that when a subscriber base gets fairly large in a certain area, speeds tend to get notably slower than the maximum theoretical (and frequently advertised) speed, at least in that area.

** disclaimer: I do NOT work for the phone companies, nor do I have any biased reason to interest to favor their product.

yet when I conduct an internet speed test online it only goes up to around 80 Mbps.

Well, this could be the speed test site. What happens if you do a speed test to another machine on your local network? How about to the "default gateway" address of your ISP?

I also certainly hope your "speed test" site isn't based on a web page showing some sort of graphics with spedometers. Those things are notoriously inaccurate, in part because many ISPs cheat by using special rules that try to bump up speeds for certain types of traffic to those locations (at the cost of other locations).

I am using a triband ASUS router

Triband? Uh oh. To me, that sounds like Wi-Fi. You're not expecting Wi-Fi to be at fully advertised speeds, are you?

the 5 Ghz connection

Uh oh. You are. Remember what I said about cable companies? Multiply that for Wi-Fi speeds. You are NOT going to get the advertised speeds for a Wi-Fi connection. You CAN'T.

The speeds advertised for Wi-Fi connection have been known to involve raw communicated data: how many bits are transmitted. I've read, in a college text book, that sometimes the advertised Wi-Fi speeds have had more to do with how quickly information moves through the air. That is, the advertised speed had to do with the actual speed of the transmission in the air, which may be faster than the speed at which the devices are able to get bits into the air (or processing the information in the air waves to recognize individual bits). This did not mean that the equipment could actually physically communicate at that many bits.

But, even ignoring that discrepancy, there's more hits you're going to end up taking. To keep things simple, I'm going to pretend that you live in an ideal environment: on the moon. That way, you have minimal interference from other signals penetrating the air waves. (Oh, wait. Maybe the moon doesn't have air with which to penetrate air waves. Okay, I am going to pretend like you live on the more ideal planet of Venus, and pretend like massive volcanic activity and deadly atmosphere and storms... oh, nevermind.) I will just assume you're on Earth, but for the sake of convenience, I'm going to just ignore the impact of interference. Hopefully you live on a mountain top in Switzerland, Japan, or South America, where I've heard that inventors of wireless standards have actually obtained superior results (like longer range when going from mountain top to mountain top).

First of all, you have the Wi-Fi protocol. This involves using the CSMA:CA (Carrier Select, Multiple Access, collision avoidance protocol), which seeks to reduce the need to re-broadcast by being even less risky than CSMA:CD (Carrier Select, Multiple Access, collision detection protocol used by Ethernet). CSMA:CA is so conservative because re-transmitting tends to be more expensive (in terms of speed) with Wi-Fi than Ethernet.

What? You haven't heard of CSMA:CA? That could be because it is a fundamental protocol that is built into Wi-Fi (and likewise CSMA:CD is built into common wired Ethernet communications), and doesn't have a lot of configuration needed, so software generally doesn't show you a bunch of options. But the hardware does engage in such a protocol.

Besides the standards related to OSI Layer 1 (physical communications), you have the OSI Layer 2 frames, which transmit information like which MAC-48 address you are communicating with. So, that is some additional cause for overhead encountered by using a common standard like Wi-Fi.

Then, were you planning on communicating with the Internet protocol? Well, that's going to introduce some overhead.

Then, were you planning on communicating with ICMP (used by "ping"), Traceroute (UDP or ICMP), or TCP? Well, that's going to cause you some additional overhead.

Or, were you going to try to transmit data with a common file transfer protocol, such as HTTP (or FTP, or SMB which is more frequently referred to as "Windows File Sharing")? That's even more overhead. (HTTPS is even more overhead than HTTP.)

There is no way you're going to get your full 450Mbps on a direct Wi-Fi connection with all those multiple layers of overhead. Oh, and if you're also going to have overhead of communicating to a "default gateway" so that you can communicate with your Internet service provider, then you're going to have even more overhead.

To summarize: Don't trust the numbers to be precisely accurate. Don't ever do that. (Especially don't do that with Wi-Fi, which may be subject to "interference" in the air waves.) Well, it probably is safe to say that 450Mbps equipment is likely superior than 150Mbps equipment and definitely faster than 54Mbps equipment which actually is likely to be better than equipment using one of the even-older 11Mbps standards. So, higher numbers may actually correlate with more advanced designs or other factors that may get you higher relative speeds. But don't expect to do file transfers at the number of bits per second that shows up with those numbers. Just don't do it.

Signed, a member of TEITPABaMNUiM. (Ooh... that failed terribly bad. So much for my thoughts of founding a group by that name. "Trained, Experienced IT Professional Against Broken and Misleading Numbers Used in Marketing" just doesn't have the same ring to it as MADD.)