Hands-On Tech 280 Transcript

Please be advised that this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word-for-word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-free version of the show.

Mikah Sargent [00:00:00]:
Coming up on Hands-On Tech, let's talk about Wi-Fi and why we just can't get the speeds we've been promised. Stay tuned. Hello and welcome to Hands-On Tech. I am Micah Sargent, and today we are taking a look at another delightful question. This one comes in from Al, Al from Reno. And I want to remind you all, if you'd like to get in touch, hot@twit.tv is how you reach out. I'd love to hear your questions, and I gotta tell you, there's been a nice pattern of questions that I think apply to quite a few people.

Mikah Sargent [00:00:44]:
So let's take a look at Al's question and see what Al needs help with. Al writes in and says, hey Micah. Hi Al. I pay for gigabit internet. I just ran a speed test on my phone and got 240 megabits per second. My provider says everything checks out and points to the words up to in my plan. Am I being ripped off, or is there a legitimate reason I'll never see the number I'm actually paying for? And where should I even be pointing the finger? The company, my router, or my devices? Al from Reno, Nevada. Nevada.

Mikah Sargent [00:01:21]:
To the people in Nevada, they said, did he just say Nevada? It's a great question, Al, and as is my way these days, I'd like to start with kind of a short answer. The truth is that you're probably getting most of what you pay for. The problem, Al, is— let's go back. I pay for gigabit internet. I just ran a speed test on my phone and got 240 megabits per second. Now, Al, unless you have a very special phone that somehow has an Ethernet port on it, I think that you were probably using Wi-Fi. And so you're probably getting most of what you pay for. You just measured it through the 2 slowest links in the chain.

Mikah Sargent [00:02:03]:
You measured it through Wi-Fi and you measured it on a phone. So let's talk about why that's a problem. Well, the speed test that you did measured the weakest link, not your plan as a whole. The test result is the speed of the entire chain. So that means When you do a speed test, you are testing the transfer ISP to the modem, to the router, to the Wi-Fi, to your device's radio. And so any one of those, any one of those things, be it your ISP, be it your modem, be it the router, be it the Wi-Fi and all of the stuff that's involved in that. I separate Wi-Fi from router because it's not just the router's fault. It can be what Wi-Fi availability there is in your home.

Mikah Sargent [00:02:52]:
And then your device's own radio. You want all of those to be as fast as possible, and that is the number that's going to be the cap that you can possibly get. So if you test gigabit internet on a phone over Wi-Fi, it's like— It's like driving to— it's like driving to a school And with the school in session, taking a race car and driving it through the, uh, the, the school zone. You can only go, what is it, 20 miles per hour, 15 miles per hour, one of those? Yeah, it could go faster, but it can't. And so the radar, as it's measuring the speed of the car, it can only do 20 at most. 240 megabits per second on a phone. Honestly, if you're doing a speed test there, it's not bad. It's honestly a little decent, to be frank, and especially on a gigabit plan.

Mikah Sargent [00:03:53]:
Okay, now when you're thinking about how you are, you know, measuring this and what you're doing and where you are in your home, you have to think of Wi-Fi as sort of this shared scenario. Okay, because. All of the devices in your home are taking turns talking to your router over Wi-Fi and then passing that along the chain. It has to go through walls. It has to go from a distance. If your neighbors are nearby, the networks that they have may be interfering with yours. All of that stuff is going to eat throughput. So Real-world, actual real-world Wi-Fi almost never hits that connection max.

Mikah Sargent [00:04:44]:
This is where I would argue that maybe, you know, ISPs could be a little bit more realistic about their speeds. But of course, they are incentivized to offer what appears to be higher, or the speeds that they could theoretically get to. And it's kind of a back and forth, right? Because if everybody, if every ISP is saying, look, this is gigabit, then the one that goes, you know, although we are offering gigabit, we know that most people are going to look at this from their phones. And so we're going to be more realistic about it and say, you know, this is a gigabit plan, but you'll probably get X speeds, right? They don't really have incentive to be that honest. And so that's, I mean, it's, again, they're still being honest. But it's sort of a gray area, right? They keep it in that gray area. That's the up to part. And this is, again, all sorts of stuff that plays into this.

Mikah Sargent [00:05:41]:
Your device has limits. Older phones, older laptops have Wi-Fi radios that aren't even equipped to handle those gigabit speeds. And that's regardless of whether you have it plugged in via Ethernet or not. If you don't have a device that can support those speeds, And again, as the case is with Wi-Fi, if you have a device that has an older Wi-Fi chip, a Wi-Fi radio, then no, you're not going to get the speeds that you're looking for. And this is true too, which is that even if you were using that perfect setup, you're using the best possible Ethernet cable for your situation, Gigabit Ethernet actually delivers about 940 megabits per second of real throughput. That's because some of that needs to be used for networking overhead. Now, I would argue that a really good, again, ISP is going to be mindful of that and would instead quote for, you know, over 1,000 megabits to try and get you as close as possible. I have on my network gigabit Gigabit fiber.

Mikah Sargent [00:06:55]:
And because I have Eero, I have nightly speed tests of my network. And let me look at the state of my network over the past week. And when I look at that, I see 986 megabits per second down. And 970 up. That's direct from the router itself. So if it's only ever able to do 986 megabits per second down at the router, then as it's getting pushed out to other devices, some of that's going to get lost. Some of that throughput's going to get lost. If you check out— we'll include it in the show notes— there are a few nice guides that I used in kind of crafting the answer to your question, Al.

Mikah Sargent [00:07:53]:
And whoa, one of those guides is the Speed Test HQ. So here's Speed Test HQ, and it talks about Wi-Fi versus Ethernet and why Ethernet is faster, why it's lower latency, and why the wonderful Burke, who is our engineering team here at Twit, always tells people that they need to be on a wired network. Wired connection because Wi-Fi has latency. It has to get sent through the air. And so that's automatically going to cut down on things. And then we have another issue. Most people don't take the opportunity to purchase their own equipment. Most people use the equipment provided by the ISP.

Mikah Sargent [00:08:47]:
Many people don't even know that you can opt to use your own equipment, but you can. And doing so is helpful because there's a chance that you may have an older device on your network that is playing against— or an older device at the core of your network, rather, that is playing against your possible speeds. So if you have gone in, say, to your ISP website and you were previously on a 500 megabit per second plan and you updated to gigabit and that was the extent of it, then there's a chance that you might be leasing an older device that doesn't have as great of the support. So they might have the ability to process things at the gigabit up and down, but— or a lot of— in a lot of cases it's just down, but But it doesn't necessarily mean that the Wi-Fi router that's built into this all-in-one device is going to provide you with the networking that you need. So be mindful of this as well, Al, and check out your router. Again, you're not going to get— I'm sorry, you're not— it's highly unlikely you're going to see a gigabit on your speeds, but you could see some improvements. That said, if you are trying to figure out about being shorted somehow, you know, if you feel like there is a chance that you're being ripped off, there are some things that you can do. to see how close it comes to Gigabit Ethernet.

Mikah Sargent [00:10:16]:
Plug a computer directly into the router via an Ethernet cable. You want Cat5e to be written on that cable or better, so Cat6, but Cat5e or better, and then don't use Cat7. Pause other devices or shut them off. So what I mean is don't let anything else on the network pull any sort of connection, just this one computer. So, you know, if you, Al, you have family, tell them all, okay, in the next 15 minutes, nobody's able to use anything. I want to see all your devices and I want to make sure they're all powered off. And then go ahead and plug it in wired. Now, if you see a speed test, again, check that you've got Ethernet connection because a lot of these laptops are going to have a Wi-Fi radio as well.

Mikah Sargent [00:11:08]:
You need to make sure that the system is using your wired connection, if it gets you into the 900 megabits per second range, then the ISP is delivering on what it says it's— what it says on the tin. Your bottleneck is not the ISP, it's the Wi-Fi or it's the devices. And well, this is where I speak the good name of mesh networking because a modern router, especially in a sort of mesh setup, is something that's going to improve your speeds. That said, if wired is also stuck low, now you have evidence for the ISP. What I would do is if you see slow speeds after you run this test with everything set up correctly, I want you to, to make note of exactly how you're doing it, and I want you to do it over the course of a week, okay? Okay. And collect as much information as possible as you're doing it. It's a lot of work, I know, but you want to come with the receipts to the ISP, okay? That means that you can say, whenever they go, everything looks good on our end, you get to go, well, it doesn't look good on my end. And I've done the power cycling of the system and I've done this and check this out, I've got records.

Mikah Sargent [00:12:33]:
And then you're able to talk about over the past week, you're not seeing the speeds that you would expect. Uh, there is a guide from Ting that walks through the process of doing a proper test of your network, and it's Ting's guide on gigabit internet and what you can expect from it. So if you scroll down to testing your speeds, it tells you what you need to do to get a more accurate test. test. Very helpful and something that will make it so that you know what you're talking about and sound like you know what you're talking about when you reach out to the support team. Um, we do have to talk about that up to language, right? Up to gigabit speeds. It's honestly doing a lot of, um, the, the, the— it's doing the legal work. It is.

Mikah Sargent [00:13:28]:
It's, it's the important aspect of that, but it's not really Or I shouldn't say it's not purely a way for the company to protect itself. It's absolutely true that that is the case, that if we give you this cap, you need to be able to work within that cap and you can get good speeds, but the ISP isn't controlling where your router is placed unless they tell you to put it somewhere else and you choose to listen to them. They're not controlling the radius of your— radius and position of your device to the router. They're not controlling your microwave oven. They're not controlling your neighbor's connections. I mean, they may be responsible for your neighbor's connections, but they're not making it so that the Wi-Fi radio is blasting out and interrupting your signal. What they can control is the speed at the wall. And so since that's something that's within their control and not within yours, If you can show them that you've controlled all the other aspects minus the neighbor thing, you know, that's kind of to be expected.

Mikah Sargent [00:14:36]:
Again, that's over Wi-Fi, so you're showing it via the wired and you're saying, no, this is you. That wired test is kind of holding them accountable. So, Al, love the question, but don't fire the ISP based on a phone over Wi-Fi speed test because that number Is more an indicator of what work you need to do to improve your home network. Start with the wired test. It'll tell you which side of the router has the problem. And if it says 940 megabits per second and the couch says 240 megabits per second, well, you're spending your money and it is being used properly on ISP. it's just that old router or the fact that you don't have, um, enough signal in the home to provide faster speeds that you would expect. That said, again, 240 isn't bad.

Mikah Sargent [00:15:42]:
It's not bad. Uh, some people would be pleased to have those speeds. So, Al, thank you so much, uh, for taking the time to write in. Thank you for your question. And thank you to those of you out there listening. I appreciate it. If you would like to ask questions, you can email me. hot@twit.tv is how you get in touch.

Mikah Sargent [00:16:05]:
And I'll be back next week with another episode of Hands-On Tech. Bye-bye.