If you have 200Mbps fibre, get a great router and use 5GHz Wi-Fi

Openserve launched its 200Mbps fibre wholesale product to Internet service providers in April 2018.
It offers consumers a peak download speed of 200Mbps and a peak upload speed of 100Mbps – doubling the previous highest speeds of 100Mbps down and 50Mbps up from the company.
As a MyBroadband journalist, it is a dismissible offence not to get the highest broadband speed you can at home, so I upgraded to 200Mbps as soon as my ISP allowed it.
After I received confirmation from my ISP that my line had been upgraded, however, there was a problem. My download speeds were the same as with my 100Mbps fibre line.
After a few tests it became apparent that the bottleneck was not in the line, but rather my router and its Wi-Fi connection.
New router
The low-end router which I was using had 10/100 Ethernet ports, which means it could only support speeds of up to 100Mbps over a cable.
Its Wi-Fi could also not support downlink speeds higher than 100Mbps, but upload speeds did exceed 50Mbps.
To remove this bandwidth bottleneck, I invested in an ASUS RT-AC88U dual-band gigabit Wi-Fi gaming router with MU-MIMO (multi-user, multiple-input, multiple-output technology).
It was worth it.
My peak download speed shot up to over 190Mbps over Wi-Fi, and my upload speed was around 90Mbps.
There was one caveat – I had to use 5GHz Wi-Fi to experience the peak speeds.
I tested the service over 2.4GHz and 5GHz Wi-Fi, and with 2.4GHz it was not possible to achieve speeds of higher than 100Mbps on my end devices.
So, if you upgrade to Openserve’s 200Mbps fibre service, buy a great router and use 5GHz Wi-Fi.
You may just waste your money, otherwise.
New router performance
Speed tests using my new router are shown below.