Slow WiFi speeds in student accomodation

[dan00204]

Hi all,

 

We pay for a 300 Mbps connection from BT in our student accommodation. Yet even on a wired connection, with no other clients plugged in, and using fast.com as the speed test we are only seeing a maximum of 90 Mbps.

The switches are gigabit ethernet so they should be able to handle faster speeds of 100+

 

We use Unifi to control the wireless access points.

And PF Sense as the gateway/ firewall

 

Of course, phoned BT and they say that they can't see any issues on their end.

 

Any have any ideas?

[Aprice]

Can you run a speed test connected directly to the BT connection? At least you then know whether it is their service or yours that is the bottleneck.

 

Also is it up to 300Mbps or guaranteed?

[simpsonj]

Sounds like a bottleneck somewhere along the line. Things I would check:

 

Speed of all the uplink ports - is every port on the 'journey' from client to ISP definitely 1Gbs, and set as 1Gbs on the switches

Is the copper cabling CAT5e at a minimum?

What's the longest run of copper?

What OM is your Fibre (1-4)?

What's the longest run of Fibre?

What is providing DHCP and DNS, and are they connected at 1Gbs?

Any bandwidth steering or limiting in place on the UniFi, firewall or filter?

[FN-GM]

I wouldn't use fast.com. I have found it to be unreliable on anything about 100 megabit. Try speedtest.net

 

I would test with a laptop connected directly to your router with a public IP. Bypassing switches firewall etc. If it's ok you know it's on your side.

 

Next I would look at PFsense. What is the spec like? Could it be features such as IPS and IDS causing it? Connect directly to the PFsense bypassing switches etc and see the speed there.

 

Next move onto the switched network. Use Open Speed Test to test network traffic internally.

Edited November 20, 2023 by FN-GM

[KK20]

what unifi firmware? temporarily downgrade to 6.2.49 if you are on the latest. See if that fixes, then incrementally upgrade. We had similar issues on latest firmware, on our nanoHD we were getting 5 to 10 Mb throughput on clients even though sync was around 833. We settled on a 6.5.28 (I think) with throughputs around 60Mb, still not happy but that will have to do (6.2.49 was much quicker but quite old for CVE fixes)

[Bird97]

Try the built in google speed test see what that says