New Internet

we have been using T-Mobile dongles for our internet ... 4 people = £60 per month ... and after a few days, you have used your monthly allowance and cannot watch youtube etc, but can still surf the net

had Virgin media installed this morning ... 100mb speed for just over £30 per month ... (the guy tested it and said we have 104MB speed ) .... a huge difference in speed vs the dongle

 

just tested mine on speedtest.net ... mine is slow as my laptop is old (Dell Latitude) ... but it's a lot faster than the T-Mobile dongle ... I get 16.2Mbps

my son built his own gaming computer and he is directly connected to the Virgin router via cable ....

he says that as far he knows, wifi is limited to 54Mb ... he gets the full 104Mb directly connected to the router

 

Dongles will always be slower because its a radio signal.

 

wifi isn't exactly limited, but of course wireless network kit (both the router and your network card) have limitations. At our work, we have a wireless setup and a wired setup. The wireless router is capable of 300Mb, but we found that when it was set to that, we got so many intermittent outages it wasn't worth it, so we throttled it to 50 odd, and its its been fine since.

Think of the wave of the modulated signal. At comparative low frequency it is a long wave, and is can therefore take quite a battering from stray noise and yet still be roughly the same shape. As the frequency gets higher, the length of the wave gets shorter, so a pulse of stray noise distorting it makes up a much greater percentage of the wave, and therefore is more likely to render it useless, forcing the router to resend, start queuing, exceed the max queue length, time out, and drop the connection.