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Degradation of speed over wifi and upgrading service

I currently have a 300mbps service through Xfinity. I usually have 358mbps coming in to eero, but don't see anywhere near that throughout my house over wifi. At best, I can get 200+ in the same room with the gateway eero. My house was built in 1920 and has plaster and lath walls and ceilings - signals don't flow easily. Upstairs (where the gateway is, but in different rooms), I can usually get above 100. Downstairs, some rooms are lucky to get 50. 

How to fix all that isn't really my question though. I'm going to be dropping Xfinity soon and switching to AT&T Fiber, possibly 1000mbps service. How does wifi speed degradation scale as incoming speed increases? Am I only seeing 50 downstairs because that's as much as I'll ever get down there with my current eero configuration? So if I get any (greater) speed in, am I still going to see the same speeds throughout my house since it's already capping based on my house/arrangement/etc.? Or if I get a greater speed in, will it be greater everywhere, just still noticeably slower in certain areas of the house?

 

Thanks. Hope that makes sense. :)

5 replies

    • Steve1963
    • 5 yrs ago
    • Reported - view

    Hi,

    I recently upgraded mine (Cox) from 300 Mb/s to Gigablast (1Gb), and my wireless speeds went up marginally but not dramatically.  I was, however, getting much better speeds than you seem to be to start before the upgrade, though my house was built in 1961 and has mostly sheetrock walls and wood floors, and a finished basement.  I was getting in the low to mid 300's at the gateway Eero, and usually 200-220 on my first satellite Eero (living room) on the opposite side of the house from the gateway (I have a 3-Eero Pro config, second gen.), and 170-200 on the second satellite in the basement.  Those numbers were similar whether connecting wirelessly or via ethernet to the satellites, surprisingly, as I expected the ethernet performance to be much better.

    After the upgrade, I now get 270-320 wirelessly or via ethernet from the living room eero, and 220-250 in the basement - slightly better via ethernet but not a dramatic difference, say within 10%.  I usually get no better than 420 or so wirelessly from the gateway eero, and usually 700-800 Mb/s wired.  I've only hit 900 on a couple occasions, but I have 105-110 clients connected to my eero network at any time, so am absolutely thrilled with the numbers considering that much client overhead, and it's been extremely stable.

    You didn't say which eero system you have?  1st or 2nd gen?  Beacons or regular eeros?  It makes a HUGE difference.  I never got more than 170-ish Mb/s from the beacons before upgrading, usually 140 or 150, but could get 220 or better from the tri-band regular eero in the same spot.  I think I hit 200 Mb/s from a beacon only a couple of times.

    To be fair, few routers really do much better than 400-500 from a wireless connection.  I hooked up a Linksys EA9300 to test after upgrading to Gigablast, and it didn't perform much better with client computers than the Eero gateway did, despite much stronger advertised wireless specs.  I went back to Eero and have used it exclusively since.

    • Drew
    • 5 yrs ago
    • Reported - view

    Hi, mandamonium – Thanks so much for taking the time to share your thoughts and concerns with us, and welcome to the Community!

    Generally speaking, above a certain point, increasing the available speed from the ISP won't increase the speeds you see on devices if the limitations are due to device capability, router placement, environmental factors, or some combination of the three.

    Based on what you've described, it certainly sounds like we'd be able to offer some guidance on placement and network layout so you can get the most out of your network. Please give us a call at 877-659-2347 and we'd be happy to assist. You can also email support@eero.com with "Community" in the subject line and I'd be happy to make sure a senior specialist helps out!

    Thanks again for taking the time to share your experience with us, and we look forward to hearing from you further!

    Kindly,
    Drew, eero Community Team

    • JHH4
    • 5 yrs ago
    • Reported - view

    I’m in the same boat.  I had 400 Mbps and routinely got 480 down on a wired connection but my 2nd Gen Eero pro is only able to wirelessly transmit around 220 Mbps.  If I’m close to and connected to the base eero I can get around 315.  The problem IMHO is the way that eero uses it’s wireless backhaul.  It’s a 2x2 backhaul and from my understanding it’s not a true dedicated backhaul.  When compared to my old Orbi which has a dedicated 4x4 backhaul the limitations are obvious.  The Orbi is able to wirelessly transmit 325+ speeds through the nodes and I get full speed from the base.  I moved away from the Orbi system because they introduced new features back in October via a firmware update making my system unstable.  My devices were dropping off the network and reconnecting at random.  It became a problem when my AppleTVs did this interrupting the shows I was streaming from Plex or DIRECTV Now etc.  Now that I’ve switched to eero those problems have gone away and I’ve also downgraded my speed from my ISP to 200 Mbps and saving about $30 a month which I put toward the monthly payments for the new eero system.  Eero in it’s current hardware configuration will only be able to wirelessly transmit through each node somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 Mbps.  If you wire them together for the wired backhaul feature you will overcome the backhaul limitations and get full speed out of each node.  I assume that eero will introduce new hardware in the future that will be more competitive with Orbi and the others but until then we have to live with the limitations of the hardware. 

    • alz0rz
    • 5 yrs ago
    • Reported - view

    I have never seen anything more than 200 mbps up or down on my AT&T fiber 1gigabit connection over Wifi using 2nd gen 3 eero pro configuration.

    My wired speed tests are all above 800 mbps up and down.

    No matter the amount of troubleshooting. It is very disheartening. I know the iPhones and laptops all have wireless (802.11ac) that can do much higher than that. I am of course still not expecting wired speeds over wifi but I would be happy to get closer to hitting the 802.11ac cap. 

      • mandamonium
      • 5 yrs ago
      • Reported - view

      alz0rz Yeah, same. Since I posted, I did upgrade to the 1000mbps service. On my wired connection, I'm getting over 900 up and down.Even standing right next to the gateway eero (and verifying I'm connected to that one), the fastest I've ever got over wifi is 380ish. I've got 5 eero online right now - 2 2nd gen, 3 first gen. Connecting to the AT&T gateway gets me 500-600 in same room. I've tried taking it down to just one, two, 6, every possible combination and locations and most of my house is pretty consistently 150ish. Only one small area of the house is ever higher than that. It's disheartening and frustrating.

Content aside

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