Slow iPhone wifi speeds- please help

[Muttley]

Hi guys,

I need some advice please (sorry about all the images):

My setup:
Huawei B315 LTE Router (Telkom LTE Uncapped), connected to TP Link WA901ND 450Mbps Wireless Access Point. The access point is about 2 meters away from the router. Average speedtest results on laptop/s via wifi is 65 - 75mb/s down and 8 mb/s up. Best possible wifi speedtest results on iPhone 6 (IOS 9.3.3) or iPhone SE (IOS 9.3.2) is 45mb/s down and 8mb/s up. These results are achieved regardless if I stand next to the access point or if I'm in another room.

My place is 65m2 and surrounded by neighbours with wifi.

I've used inSSIDER Home to check my wifi channel congestion and have changed it to the least congested channel and also changed the channel width from auto to 40MHz.

I did read somewhere that the max speed on an iPhone 6, connected via 802.11N (like me) is 45mb/s.

I can't understand how router is rated at 450mb/s yet Wifi Sweetspots averages 60mb/s....
Would I need to buy an 802.11ac router to achieve higher speeds on my iPhones?

Screenshots below:

inSSIDer:


Wifi Sweetspots:


iPhone 6:


Laptop:


Any help would be great

 

[IguBu]

Couple of things..

Those speedtests are measuring via LTE - and the iphone screenshot especially shows quite bad connection - honestly getting around 45Mbps on a mobile device is not bad - the reason the Notebook is higher: The Notebook's wifi supports MIMO - which uses more "channels" to bump the speed - Iphone6 doesn't support it - the newer "S" models do - quite a lot of info on the www about it.

2nd Issue: your router is only " LTE" - not "LTE-A (Advanced)" - and I doubt you will get Telkom LTE-A coverage -it's very sketchy at the moment - so you are limited towards 80Mbps on LTE anyways... LTE-A could push you to about 150 - but in the real world few people see this..

About the Upload speed of around 8Mbit..thats what the ISP is giving you - if you need faster uploads, the only option is Fibre.

To test the theoretical speed of your TP Link - you need to transfer some files between two devices on the same wifi network - just keep in mind that 450Mbps = +-50MBytes / second - so unless you are running SSD drives on both source and target you are unlikely to see that speed. Good old spinning notebook drives will max out at around 25-30MBytes/second.

The same applies to a speedtest - your LTE connection might be "able" to offer speeds that burst, but the servers being used to test thousands of simultaneous connections load balance the speed of the underlying storage.

Perhaps try a few other sites - saix.net, speedtest.mybroadband.co.za etc.. but around 70Mbps is about as fast as you'll get, and the Iphone6 maxes around 45Mbps... perhaps get a buddy with a new Iphone 6 S, or another high end phone that supports the newer AC standards and MIMO.

.

 

[Muttley]

Couple of things..

Those speedtests are measuring via LTE - and the iphone screenshot especially shows quite bad connection - honestly getting around 45Mbps on a mobile device is not bad - the reason the Notebook is higher: The Notebook's wifi supports MIMO - which uses more "channels" to bump the speed - Iphone6 doesn't support it - the newer "S" models do - quite a lot of info on the www about it.

2nd Issue: your router is only " LTE" - not "LTE-A (Advanced)" - and I doubt you will get Telkom LTE-A coverage -it's very sketchy at the moment - so you are limited towards 80Mbps on LTE anyways... LTE-A could push you to about 150 - but in the real world few people see this..

About the Upload speed of around 8Mbit..thats what the ISP is giving you - if you need faster uploads, the only option is Fibre.

To test the theoretical speed of your TP Link - you need to transfer some files between two devices on the same wifi network - just keep in mind that 450Mbps = +-50MBytes / second - so unless you are running SSD drives on both source and target you are unlikely to see that speed. Good old spinning notebook drives will max out at around 25-30MBytes/second.

The same applies to a speedtest - your LTE connection might be "able" to offer speeds that burst, but the servers being used to test thousands of simultaneous connections load balance the speed of the underlying storage.

Perhaps try a few other sites - saix.net, speedtest.mybroadband.co.za etc.. but around 70Mbps is about as fast as you'll get, and the Iphone6 maxes around 45Mbps... perhaps get a buddy with a new Iphone 6 S, or another high end phone that supports the newer AC standards and MIMO.

.

Hey,

Thanks so much for the response!

A few things which I'd like to add which further add's to my confusion:

Last year I did a Speedtest at the Lucerne train station in Switzerland and achieved this on my iPhone 6:


How was this possible over public wifi?

Back to the local performance, I also tried speed tests on my wife's iPhone SE which has MIMO and yet the results were the same as my phone...

I can usually download (from a premium download site like uploaded.net) at 7 -8 MiB/s and the LTE is quite consistent.

If I had to splurge on a 802.11ac AP, would this improve things?

 

[IguBu]

Apologies I was away for quite a while

I'm going to assume that in Luzern there was "non mimo" wifi that offered fast access. The Mimo comes into play with newer base stations that offer higher number of simultaneous connections. Out of interest you can even get 1Gbit wifi

AC as far as I read was just a newer tech that again offered both 2.4 and 5 ghz bands - so more density per area or more devices to the same access point/router. Short answer is nope - would not improve it dramatically.

Just to re mention - the 65Mb is more likely what Telkom gives you. No ISP will offer more via LTE in SA. Fibre- yes no problem.

B

 

[Muttley]

Apologies I was away for quite a while

I'm going to assume that in Luzern there was "non mimo" wifi that offered fast access. The Mimo comes into play with newer base stations that offer higher number of simultaneous connections. Out of interest you can even get 1Gbit wifi

AC as far as I read was just a newer tech that again offered both 2.4 and 5 ghz bands - so more density per area or more devices to the same access point/router. Short answer is nope - would not improve it dramatically.

B

Thanks for this..

I landed up buying a new access point (Unifi AC AP Lite)----- performance is epic- see my signature.
Same phone