Slow Wifi on iPhone 3G

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binarysolo

13 posts

Geek

#25304 18-Aug-2008 10:56

Has anyone else with an iPhone 3G been experiencing unusually slow speeds across Wifi? I seem to be getting good 3G speeds, but Wifi at home is incredibly slow. I first noticed this when comparing loading speeds on YouTube between my computer on a wired connection, and my iPhone on the same connection across Wifi.

Doing a few rough speed tests, I've noticed my computer's wired speed is approx 4k kbps, while testing out the Wifi speed over a few days it is consistently recording at 1.3k kbps. There's nothing wrong with my wireless router as far as I can tell.

drdanick

102 posts

Master Geek

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#157665 18-Aug-2008 11:17

Ok, I've run some tests and I only get about 900kb/s down and 455kb/s up. Youtube is not really working at all, I believe this to be the fact that it is not optimised for NZ customers (we may be downloading off the US server rather than the Asia server, which is what we usually get our youtube from in this country.).

I don't think you can do anything about the wifi speeds, I think it's about as fast as the iPhone can do. I get about 450kb/s down on 3G, so It does atleast offer some improvements.

Oh, My eee pc gets 9700kb/s down and 1500kb/s up over WiFi, that's about full speed.

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psychrn

1610 posts

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#157669 18-Aug-2008 11:23

Funnily I have noticed a big difference in watching videos on You Tube.
On the wifi network it is very stop start and what I do is press the right arrow. When it stops playing wait untill vis=deo loads in the background then press play again.

Now on the 3G network it "streams" as it should. With no hesitation whatsover

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drdanick

102 posts

Master Geek

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#157674 18-Aug-2008 11:32

Now on the 3G network it "streams" as it should. With no hesitation whatsover

Very odd, I ran a speed test on 3G and I got only half the speed of wifi. Maybe it'll only use the asia servers when over 3G perhaps? If so it looks like the apple programmers have got some serious work ahead. I never liked those guys.

Incorrect speling should be punnished!!!

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binarysolo

13 posts

Geek

#157677 18-Aug-2008 11:40

psychrn: Funnily I have noticed a big difference in watching videos on You Tube.
On the wifi network it is very stop start and what I do is press the right arrow. When it stops playing wait untill vis=deo loads in the background then press play again.

Now on the 3G network it "streams" as it should. With no hesitation whatsover

I've noticed the same. Over 3G it starts playing within a couple of seconds and loads faster than it plays, similar to my connection on my desktop. On wifi though, completely different story. It can take up to 5 minutes to load a 3 minute clip. Strange because although my wifi speed is only 1.3 kbps, my 3G is actually about the same on 1.2 kbps on average.

I did a quick google search, and it seems like it may be a known problem? Some are saying it's a hardware issue to do with the 3G chip and how well it receives signals, but also that Apple may potentially be working on a software fix for it... doesn't make sense to me.

Edit: It seems the 3G chip issue is something different. Some are experience very poor 3G reception potentially due to issues with the 3G chip receiver. The slow loading of YouTube is also an issue lots of other people are having, but there isn't talk of a fix for it yet..

scottatron

22 posts

Geek

#157699 18-Aug-2008 13:05

I'm seeing pretty abysmal wifi performance on my iphone 3g as well.

Testing the latency & download speeds with http://i.dslr.net/tinyspeedtest.html shows my 3g speeds at around 110kbps-300kbps in good areas, with consistent ping times or around ~500ms.

The same test on wifi shows irregular ping times ranging from ~200ms to 1.5s, and my download speeds rarely get over 200kbps.

Running the same test on my macbook pro gives also gives consistent ping times and downloads speeds ranging from 1400-3000kbps.

While I wouldn't necessarily expect the iphone's wifi chip to perform quite as well as the airport in my mbp, I would hope for much better performance than the 3g connection.

Really hope this can be fixed via firmware updates.

bobclick

1 post

Wannabe Geek

#159813 26-Aug-2008 10:39

If I set my home wifi router to 802.1b wpa encryption I get up to 1.5 Mbits/sec, on b/g and wep I only get about 140Kbits/sec. I use Truphone to call out so I need fast wifi. I tried iphonespeedcheck.com using a clients wireless n with wep and I only got 46Kbits/sec, useless for Truphone calls. I'm in Australia. I have an iPhone 3G from the USA locked to AT&T so I only use wifi where I can get it at the moment. Even on my specially set up home wifi YouTube videos won't stream on the iPhone 3G. Also if you wait for them to load into cache, when the bar gets to the end it clears the cache if you don't catch it just before it finishes loading. Hey I've 16GB of ram, why doesn't it let me save the video into memory as with a web photo. Wireless Dell laptops get about 5Mbits/sec from my home wireless router (My ADSL plan is up to 8Mbits/sec). Thanks to someone I can't remember for the suggestion to try 802.1b with wpa.