C720 poor 5Ghz performance

isorashi

Was watching some Justified on Amazon last night and most of the time had a low-quality stream.  I noticed that Amazon said my bandwidth was low, so I hopped onto a speed test site to see what I got.  I have the 105 Mbps service from Comcast, but I was getting 20-25 Mbps down while using the 5Ghz band on my router.  At first I was pretty steamed that Comcast wasn't giving me the speeds I should get, but then I switched to the 2.4Ghz band and I was getting 50-60 Mbps down.  I did this test using a Ookla and Comcast's own speed test sites, with a few different locations for each site.

 

When I got up this morning I checked out my laptop (which also connects via wifi) and it was getting 50-60 Mbps down on both the 5Ghz and the 2.4Ghz bands.  Double-checked the chromebook and it was still slowing down while on the 5Ghz band.

 

What gives?  Any known issues?

philetus

Try downloading a Wifi scanner and see how crowded the channel is. You can change the router to a less crowded channel.

isorashi

Hi, thanks for your reply.

 

Channel congestion is not the issue.  I am actually the only person nearby that is running a network in the 5Ghz band.  The 2.4Ghz band, on the other hand, is pretty crowded by the signal from my network is much stronger here in my condo.

philetus

"Although 5GHz is technically faster, this may not show up in real-world performance. The 5GHz signal may have about half the range of 2.4GHz Wi-Fi, or less. Worse, 5GHz has more trouble penetrating solid objects such as walls and floors, as you have found."

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/askjack/2011/jul/28/wifi-internet-problems

billsey

It can also depend on the 5GHz configuration. It could be set for A mode instead of N or AC. A will be slower than N or AC. You probably want to have the router configured for N with a 40MHz bandwidth. That gives a theoritcal maximum of 300Mbps...