Fact or fiction: What affects Wi-Fi speed?
Believe it or not, there was a time not long ago when surfing the Internet from your back porch required a very, very long ethernet cable. These days Wi-Fi seems to be everywhere, with inkjet printers, digital cameras, TVs, and even refrigerators connecting to home and office networks without the need for cables.
But for all of the gains made in Wi-Fi technology, much confusion remains about wireless networks and the problems that can plague them. To help clear up some of the confusion, we gathered a list of common beliefs about Wi-Fi speed and set about proving or disproving them using the tools available to us here in the Macworld lab.
‘The farther away from the router you are, the worse your signal strength will be.’
The lower your signal strength, the lower the bandwidth you’ll get over your network. To test whether signal strength dropped the farther away from the router we got, we took a new Apple Time Capsule, which uses 802.11ac wireless, and connected a MacBook Pro directly to its ethernet port to act as a server.
Next, we connected an 8012.11ac-equipped 2013 MacBook Air (with Wi-Fi updates applied) to the Time Capsule’s closed network and ran AccessAgility’s $5 WiFiPerf. As the name implies, the utility measures wireless performance over a network. I took the whole setup out in front of my quiet suburban home and ran the test at a number of set distances, ranging from 6 feet to 200 feet in direct line of sight with the Time Capsule.
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