NBP - Speed issues

[FCBC12]

Parents recently got fibre installed to their home through the National Broadband Plan (NBP) - service provider is Vodafone. The box is located in the middle of the house (standard size traditional dormer). Speed in that room is superb (400MB+), however speed drops dramatically outside of that room, to no more than 15MB. I suspect the walls are interfering but its the dramatic drop off in speed that is most concerning.

Has anyone else experienced this issue, and is there a solution?

 

[Zenith63]

Wifi traditionally used the 2.4GHz frequency band, which is fairly good at getting through walls. However only a handful of devices can use 2.4GHz before it gets ‘full’ and becomes slow, so Wifi has been moving to 5GHz which allows for far more devices to communicate and at much higher speeds, but 5GHz doesn’t go nearly as far and really suffers with walls.

If you have access to the router you could have a look at the settings and try disabling 5GHz. Now the flip side is you will no longer get 400Mb/s in that room, it might drop to 50Mb/s, but you should see that 50 available more broadly throughout the house. If there are no other houses nearby using 2.4GHz this will work well. The other option, which is the better solution but comes with some cost, would be to add some more wireless access points around the house using 5GHz - this will give you the higher speed advantages of 5GHz more widely spread. This could be achieved with some network cables run to other rooms and access points plugged in, or using Ethernet-over-Power devices with Wi-Fi built in, or ‘mesh’ access points which connect to each other over wireless to get signal back to the main router.

 

[odyssey06]

With my VM 'hub' router I was able to setup two wifi channels, one on 5GHz and one on 2.4GHz. Naming them accordingly.

So in areas close to the router I connect on 5GHz and for distant devices on 2.4GHz.

Worth exploring if your router supports this.

 

[Leo]

The Vodafone fibre routers are dual 2.4 & 5GHz. I'd advise switching off the WiF on the router and using a mesh system, something like the TP-Link Deco, Asus ZenWifi, or Netgear Orbi systems.

I've a 3 unit Deco system with the 3 access points hard wired back to the router and it works really well all over the house.

 

[NoRegretsCoyote]

Wifi traditionally used the 2.4GHz frequency band, which is fairly good at getting through walls. However only a handful of devices can use 2.4GHz before it gets ‘full’ and becomes slow, so Wifi has been moving to 5GHz which allows for far more devices to communicate and at much higher speeds, but 5GHz doesn’t go nearly as far and really suffers with walls.

I have a similar problem and run parallel 2.4 GHz and 5GHz networks from the same router. The lower frequency is much better and getting to a certain room.

The downside is that things like smart speakers, casting to TV, assistants, etc, demand that all devices are on the same network.

 

[Blackrock1]

Parents recently got fibre installed to their home through the National Broadband Plan (NBP) - service provider is Vodafone. The box is located in the middle of the house (standard size traditional dormer). Speed in that room is superb (400MB+), however speed drops dramatically outside of that room, to no more than 15MB. I suspect the walls are interfering but its the dramatic drop off in speed that is most concerning.

Has anyone else experienced this issue, and is there a solution?

Yes as the others have pointed out, you have a wifi issue not an internet speed issue, best way to address it is with additional access points, or you could also use powerline adapters to other locations in the house (or maybe your house has ethernet cabling already?)