Spark won't allow me to use 5G Broadband at my Greenlane house but my phone gets excellent 5G there

Forums › Spark New Zealand (including Skinny and BigPipe) › Spark won't allow me to use 5G Broadband at my Greenlane house but my phone gets excellent 5G there

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alanwalp

10 posts

Wannabe Geek

#3327225 3-Jan-2025 12:06

I have checked all the Airport Express units and they are all the same which is 802.11n second generation, so they should all be able to do approx 100/100. They all have exactly the same network and wifi settings.

The Airport Express directly connected to the router is giving 100/100 wifi speed.

The other 2 x Airport Express units after the switch are giving 16/12 and 10/10.

It seems I am losing some speed either:

The Sky modem/router port going to the switch doesn't allow 100/100 ?
The cable between the router and switch is slowing the speed - it is labelled as cat6 ?
The switch is slowing the speed ? It has cat5e patch cables.
The cable from switch to Airport Express is slowing the speed, these are cat 5e ?

Next step is I'm planning to buy an ethernet adapter for my macbook so I can test the speed on either side of the switch and see where the bottleneck is. (The mesh extender suggested above looks good thanks, and reasonably priced, so I might go for that, but I guess I'm keen to see whether there is a wiring bottleneck first as I will still need to use the wired ethernet and switch with the mesh extender as our house has a lot of concrete so wifi extenders aren't great). Feel free to suggest other advice for me. THANKS!

RunningMan

8912 posts

Uber Geek

#3327264 3-Jan-2025 13:42

How about just moving the AEs around temporarily to rule out a config error with the slow ones. Presumably they are all configured in bridge mode?

SomeoneSomewhere

1784 posts

Uber Geek

Lifetime subscriber

#3327274 3-Jan-2025 14:39

alanwalp:

I have checked all the Airport Express units and they are all the same which is 802.11n second generation, so they should all be able to do approx 100/100. They all have exactly the same network and wifi settings.

The Airport Express directly connected to the router is giving 100/100 wifi speed.

The other 2 x Airport Express units after the switch are giving 16/12 and 10/10.

It seems I am losing some speed either:

The Sky modem/router port going to the switch doesn't allow 100/100 ?
The cable between the router and switch is slowing the speed - it is labelled as cat6 ?
The switch is slowing the speed ? It has cat5e patch cables.
The cable from switch to Airport Express is slowing the speed, these are cat 5e ?

Next step is I'm planning to buy an ethernet adapter for my macbook so I can test the speed on either side of the switch and see where the bottleneck is. (The mesh extender suggested above looks good thanks, and reasonably priced, so I might go for that, but I guess I'm keen to see whether there is a wiring bottleneck first as I will still need to use the wired ethernet and switch with the mesh extender as our house has a lot of concrete so wifi extenders aren't great). Feel free to suggest other advice for me. THANKS!

Ethernet is generally either 10, 100, 1000 (or faster). There is no in between. If you're getting 16, it shouldn't be ethernet's fault that you're not getting mid-90s unless there's other transfers happening on the same cable.

Is it possible that the WAPs are configured to 11g only?

RunningMan

8912 posts

Uber Geek

#3327280 3-Jan-2025 15:16

SomeoneSomewhere:

Is it possible that the WAPs are configured to 11g only?

The model the OP has is the same form factor as the previous gen which was 11b/g only so it's conceivable one actually isn't 11n. Swapping the the physical APs around though will show if it's an AP issue or something else though.

richms

28050 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#3327282 3-Jan-2025 15:32

wireless is a shared spectrum and when you are running gear with ancient slow modulations like this, you will get very little data over the times that the channel is free and available.

With 802.11ac and 802.11ax they will get a whole lot more thru in the small slots that are available.

There is also the chance that you have fallen back to 2.4 GHz as the speeds are the same, and the congestion on that band in urban areas is so bad that often you cant even stream music over it.

The ones performing worse are probably where they can see more transmissions from your neighbors so have to wait more for the channels to be free.

Richard rich.ms

alanwalp

10 posts

Wannabe Geek

#3327509 4-Jan-2025 17:38

Final update (I hope!)

On investigation, I found:

The switch had a max speed of 100/100.
The way the switch was wired was slowing the speed to about 15/10 for some reason, I'm not sure exactly why but it may have been because the incoming ethernet wires were also connected into the phone for VOIP and perhaps this wiring was setup wrong and was reducing the speed somewhat because when I bypassed the "ADSL" I/O it seemed to speed up the switch to 100/100.

I have now

Bought the suggested TP-link AC1200 Wi-Fi to replace the Airport Express units.
Bought a new switch that runs at 1000/1000.

After installing the new switch, I now get

880/500 via ethernet throughout the house
650/450 via the TP-link wifi units
and the old airport express units are now giving me 100/100

So, happy days! Thanks so much to all those who made suggestions during this process, for a newbie like me it was super-helpful and got us to an excellent outcome!

Cheers, Happy New Year and all the best wishes for 2025 for you all!

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