HELIOS 300 Slow Internet

Acrid said:

Apparently you don't know how WiFi works that's the funniest thing I've seen all day.... 50mbs up LOL 
I mean, didn't you see that he said his wife already gets 100+???

Let's first define terms. People tend to talk about "how fast" their wireless connection is or its "speed". What they typically mean is the number that Windows reports in its Wireless Network Connection Status window as shown below.

This number is only distantly related to the actual throughput of your wireless connection. What it shows is the link rate of the connection. Link rate is also referred to as PHY (or physical layer) rate, which is the maximum rate that bits can theoretically move across the network link.

Throughput has many definitions, but I like Wikipedia's:

In communication networks, such as Ethernet or [Wi-Fi], throughput or network throughput is the average rate of successful message delivery over a communication channel. (emphasis mine)

In wireless communication, there are two main mechanisms working against successful delivery of the email, web page, YouTube video or game controller movement (the "message" in the above definition) you want. First, there are lots of bits used for communicating information other than the actual data you are trying to send or receive, or overhead. Then there is the inherent unreliability of a wireless connection causing data to be resent, i.e. retransmission.

Both of these mechanisms use bandwidth that otherwise would be available to you. The result is that you are lucky if your actual usable throughput is half the "speed" that Windows shows you. To restate and oversimplify, "speed" is what is theoretically possible, "throughput" is what you actually get to use.