Chai's Blog

I upgrad­ed my fibre inter­net to Fibre Ultra, tech­ni­cal­ly called Giga­bit fibre which has the adver­tised speeds of 900 Mbps down and 500 Mbps up.

First, some back­sto­ry.

My first fibre con­nec­tion I got in 2018 was sol­id (Fibre 100 — 100 Mbps down and 20 Mbps up). After some time I grew unhap­py with the puny 20 Mbps upload speed. I felt uplink could be bet­ter and so I upgrad­ed in 2019 to Fibre 200 which dou­bled the down­load speed, but odd­ly enough it did not change the upload speed. So I saw no point in pay­ing extra just to improve only the down­load speed. I down­grad­ed back to Fibre 100 to save mon­ey.

Fast for­ward to this April. A dis­cus­sion on Bill Ben­net­t’s blog made me look­out for oth­er offer­ings with high­er upload speeds. After doing the price math, I set­tled for Fibre Ultra from Skin­ny.

Fibre Ultra is sup­posed to get me 900 Mbps down and 500 Mbps up. It does, but only on the eth­er­net. And I don’t like cables. On WiFi, I get only 300 to 400 Mbps down and 400 Mbps up. Nev­er­the­less, now the down­link is about 4 times and uplink is a whop­ping 20 times what it was. That itself is amaz­ing!

But I felt like I am not mak­ing the most of the down­link. While I did not expect to get all 900 Mbps down, I hoped to get at least 600- 700 Mbps. I wrote to Skin­ny and am dis­ap­point­ed by their response:

I gen­er­al­ly like the cus­tomer ser­vice of Skin­ny (one of the rea­sons I moved to them), but I was­n’t impressed by this spe­cif­ic advice esp. the note about the hard­ware. As a pro­fes­sion­al trou­bleshoot­er, I checked and played with the WiFi router set­tings, and tabled it for lat­er since I could­n’t find that elu­sive set­ting that could bump up the down­load speed to 500+ Mbps.

As luck would have it, yes­ter­day Bill pub­lished anoth­er blog post in which he clar­i­fied:

if you con­nect to, say, Speedtest, from a home com­put­er con­nect­ed to giga­bit fibre but linked to your broad­band port via Wi-fi and noth­ing else is run­ning you might see speeds of 300Mbps to 400Mbps on a good day. Some con­nec­tions will be slow­er.

I like to think of it this way: Giga­bit fibre is faster, so the bot­tle­neck moves to the Wi-fi net­work.

Sigh! Now at least I know that I am not miss­ing out any router set­tings. Thanks again, Bill! You saved me a lot of time.

I feel bet­ter now know­ing that I could­n’t have done any­thing to make the most of my inter­net con­nec­tion, oth­er than per­haps plug­ging in eth­er­net, which I am not going to do. Around 400 Mbps both ways is still pret­ty awe­some as it is!