Temporarily I am using a WiFi connection via a router that is about 100 feet away. The basic connection is about 5 Mb via AT&T phone lines. My download speed is about 2.5 Mb but upload is only around 200k in multiple tests. Why would upload be so slow compared to download? Can I do anything to improve this such as a WiFi booster of some sort? Is the distance to the router the problem?
This is mainly a problem when I try to login to work and use remote desktop, sometimes it’s so slow it’s not useable. Normal web surfing is OK but youtube videos don’t work well, too much pausing.
Honestly, that’s pretty decent performance considering the distance you are talking about. The further away from a WiFi access point you are, the slower it’s going to get. Remember, the things are just radios broadcasting at fairly low power in unlicensed bands. If you want to improve performance you could get closer, or if you have access to the AP you could up it’s power…or get a better antenna for your WiFi device. Other than that you are probably out of luck, though as I said, you are actually getting fairly decent performance for a WiFi connection at 100 feet (even if you have clear LOS to the device), depending on what type of AP we are talking here and how powerful the signal is.
With those speeds your remote desktop (terminal) session shouldn’t be that bad, frankly, so maybe it’s something else going on.
Thats also typical of most ISP’s for example my comcast business class for my shop is 42megabit down and 7 megabit up, sorry I missed that it was upload differential, I thought you were having the common megabit/megabyte discrepancy.
As above, this is normal. Most consumer broadband connections are asymmetric - download speeds are much faster than uploads by design. That’s because most of what you’re doing is downloading. It’s a function of your internet connection, not local wifi.
When you say youtube videos are slow, do you mean you’re watching them over remote desktop? I’m not surprised they’d be slow in that case.
Just as a reference point, and since for a change I’m actually at home, I did some speed testing with my iPad here. Sitting in my bedroom down the hall from my access point I’m getting 3521.434 kbps (or about 3.5 mb/s) download and 645.680 kbps upload with a 189.76 ms latency and I’m running full out on my YouTube videos and HBO to go connection. When I test down stairs out on my back deck I’m getting only 2235 kbps download and 325.453 kbps upload with a 224.83 ms latency…and I’m still running full out on both YouTube and HBO to go. Testing using my LogMeIn program from the laptop I have almost no latency getting to my work computer and running just about any application. These speeds aren’t all that much better than what you noted in your OP…and even at the slower speed I’m not even close to being 100 feet away (more like 30-40 feet max from the AP, though obviously the structure of my house is blocking the signal to a degree).
Three people hitting the router via WiFi at the same time is going to slow it down right? That’s another issue we have now. I will also check with work to see if they might know why my remote desktop is so slow.
I hope to get my own connection soon but my options for that are not very good , right now the best I can get is 784k via AT&T. I didn’t know they offered rates that slow and still call it “high speed” I guess it’s better than dial up.
Much better than dial-up based on the numbers you gave in the OP. Another factor if you are using a WiFi provided service is you are probably being throttled to a certain degree. I doubt that the number of users on the AP are a major factor, but providers put in hidden throttling on the 3G or 4G networks all the time because they get used so heavily. There isn’t really much you can do if you are using a vendors service, unfortunately.
As noted, your DSL connection is Asymmetric, so your upload rate will be much lower than the download. However, this will not impact Remote Desktop to any great degree - RDP is pretty low bandwidth anyhow (not as low as Citrix/VNC, but ok) and the upload channel is very light (generally mouse/keyboard events and some redraw requests). So I don’t believe that your upload rate is likely to be the problem for Remote Desktop. And it certainly won’t impact Youtube videos, which are downloads.