I haven’t been dancing but I have been trying to figure out how to get homework network speeds up. We’ve got a Virgin connection which typically tests with a nominal rating of over 50 MB/s. That’s great but the important figure is not the speed from router to the network but from each individual device. We’ve been using a Google mesh network that we used in Oxford and have had set up here since not long after moved in. It was good but, for some reason, connection speeds have been feeling very sluggish lately – I even resorted to dragging an even older TP-Link Powerline system out (which has been a real boost for the wired connection into my Windows box).

The mesh connection has changed from strong to weak, even though we haven’t done any furniture moving or renovations that I would have expected to possibly affect. This evening, I did some speed tests and got a paltry 0.23 MB/s download speed from the same room as the upstairs mesh point. It turned out that just connecting straight to the Virgin hub (next to the downstairs mesh point) was a reasonable 24.8 MB/s. Other upstairs locations were slower than that, although still faster than the mesh network. On the other hand, connecting straight to the hub downstairs was giving speeds in the 50+ range: much better.

It turns out that the solution was to move the upstairs mesh point in downstairs in the living room. Now I’m getting 40MB/s+ speeds across the whole house which is perfectly acceptable for our needs. I’m still not sure why, and I’m still not sure that it will last, but it shows that sometimes it’s worth trying different locations to get better speeds.