Gigabit Fibre Broadband vs WiFi 7 vs Ethernet

Broadband, both for commercial and residential is getting faster and faster in the UK, and many ISPs are now offering gigabit home internet connections in urban areas, and some go even faster. BT, Truli and Community Fibre offer at least one package that goes North of 1Gbits/second (some as high as 3Gbits/second), which might not be much compared to South Korea where you can expect these sort of speeds on the bus or in a fast food joint, but it’s pretty good for Blighty, despite Government involvement (Quango, anyone?) For digital geriatrics such as myself, this is warp speed when I compare this with the on paper speed of 56Kbits/second, which was very much the norm just 25 years ago.

While the idea of an ultra-fast internet connection is appealing, once you’ve ordered it and been though the trauma of finding out that you’re now contracted for 24 months and not getting anything like the speeds you expected, there are some things you need to check on your end of the connection before you start hitting up Trustpilot with a howler.

Assuming that your ISP is acting in good faith, they’ve not plugged your cabling into the wrong socket at the exchange, or started to drill holes in your neighbours wall (all of these have happened to me, in one visit) and the router they have supplied isn’t utter crap, the most likely candidate is…Wi-Fi. It doesn’t matter how many times I say it, how loudly, or how colourful the expletives I add, no-one ever listens, so I’ll try writing it. Wi-Fi is for convenience, Ethernet is for performance.

At the time of writing (late May 24) the current new Wi-Fi standard that is being rolled out is WiFi-7. Up until now, Wi-Fi hasn’t had to worry or struggle with internet bandwidth, only with the number of users/devices that the signal is shared with in your home/office. This is because the amount of data coming down the line has been below it’s capacity to distribute. This is important because you must make sure that your new router is not only MIMO, but MU-MIMO.

I can almost hear the collective sighs of people thinking this is going to be another article of IT acronyms, but please bear with just for a moment, I’ll use an analogies instead of acronyms – after these two; Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) is fairly self-explanatory, this means the router is optimised for having more than one or two devices connected to it at the same time. Multiple User - Multiple Input Multiple Output (MU-MIMO), is a much more advanced version of MIMO, and requires a lot more compute power to manage and distribute the data, and therefore is much more expensive. High end routers have a processor equivalent to a high end smartphone – Apple 15/Samsung S24 at the time of writing. Now onto the analogy.

Suppose your line (fibre/phone/4G) is a tap, and your router is a bucket hanging under that tap. Every time another device connects to your router (bucket), it’s making a hole in your bucket. All the time your tap is switched on and the bucket is full of water, everyone’s a winner. Five or six holes (devices) draining the bucket too quickly? Then we have a familiar problem.

Now factor in that most kids will have at least 4 devices that need Wi-Fi. A Laptop, tablet, phone, and watch. They only need to be passively connected to slow down the router/buckets ability to refill with water (data), as there is a constant trickle to the devices to make sure they are ready to send/receive. Assume two kids per house, two adults with two devices each, at least one large TV, some sort of video doorbell etc, in a four person household you’re looking at about 15 holes in your bucket, and when they all start sucking water (streaming YouTube or Netflix in HD/4K), the tap can’t fill the bucket fast enough to keep up with demand.

We’re now coming to the FWP (First World Problem) of the other way round. Not to say that you will need digital mops and towels, but for the first time since the inception of Wi-Fi, the supply will outstrip the buckets ability to distribute the water. The bucket, which if your kids have friends round will now be more like a colander, has more water than it knows what to do with, and it will contact the waterboard who will lower the pressure so that it can be taken where it’s needed. This is all very egalitarian, but you’re paying for your stated speeds, so you should bloody well want to keep them. Or at least I do. This means that if we want to be swimming in data, we’re gonna need a bigger boat, which means a better bucket. If you have a Gigabit connection, you’d better have a WiFI-7 router, and if you have said router, you need to make sure that all the devices that will be syphoning water are Wi-Fi 7 compatible, or they will experience zero difference in speed from old fashioned broadband – although with a MU-MIMO router, they won’t experience as much lag or latency between hitting a link and it loading the page/video etc. For the average 3 bedroom house in the UK, a Wi-Fi 7 certified router alone will set you back between £700 - £1,000. For those lucky enough to live in larger house, or to have a large office, you’ll probably need a MESH system to make sure that child number one can be watching the season finale of Grey’s Anatomy on their watch in 4K while using Wi-Fi chatting to their friends (in HD, naturally) on Facetime.

A MESH system with two repeaters will set you back (including the router) a cool £2,000 and this is without having made sure that all your iPhones, pads, watches, and laptops are capable of receiving Wi-Fi 7. Don’t panic, Wi-Fi is always backwards compatible, meaning all the older devices will still work but if you have a two year old laptop or Desktop, you won’t notice any speed difference if your tap and hose in the bucket can only carry water up to a certain pressure, i.e. Wi-Fi 6, or – God forbid – Wi-Fi 5.

This finally brings us to Ethernet, which means cabling. Pro tip for ANYONE who is decorating, remodelling, having an extension or conservatory built – get your electrician to install CAT 7 Network cable behind skirting boards or trunking, it’s cheap (a 100m drum is about £100 on Amazon) and recessed sockets are discrete and you should aim to have at LEAST one in each room – two or more in an office or sitting room, three if you have a 4K TV. The last thing you want when you’ve got your home cinema setup, is to miss the winning try or goal because the screen is buffering, as I did with England vs Ireland during the 6 Nations 2024 game. Learn from my mistakes. If you work from home or are in an office, you have no excuses. Other than mobile phones taking advantage of Wi-Fi calling due to poor 4G/5G signal, or casual iPad usage, your main device should be jacked in vie Ethernet. Watch this space for network switches (a device that allows more than the standard 4 wired connections on the back of your router). Like Wi-Fi, they are not all created equal. And don’t even get me started on 5G, that’s the biggest racket going in tech at the moment. Coming in the form of a digital rant soon…