Some of us live with 3mb/s on a good day and no mobile signal. Unless you have need to load huge files from your phone regularly then 18mb/s is perfectly practical. You likely have the option of hardwire phone to PC for large file transfers as well.

pgk

Both the Apple devices probably use similar processors and if old that may limit the download speed. If a modern laptop or smartphone give you the higher speed over WiFi it might be worth upgrading.

You will get nowhere near the fixed line speed of your hard wired PC on a mobile device connected via wifi.

I have a high end very fast main PC connected direct to the router, on it I get 210Mbps down & 21.78Mbps up.

On my 5 year old Dell running Win 10 with a Dell wifi dongle that attaches to a special port (not usb) I get 20.3Mbps down and 19.79Mbps up.

My Acer Android one year old gets similar to the Dell.

I am with Virgin media on fibre optic connection to the house. I find that 20Mbps is perfectly fine for normal browsing and small file downloads.

regards

Just checked my Samsung A10 phone and it is only very slightly faster than the Dell or the Acer.

Edited By Oldiron on 20/12/2019 12:21:27

Edited By Oldiron on 20/12/2019 12:26:52

Check what network and speed the devices are actually using. If old they may have been set up to work with an elderly router limited to one of the original Wifi protocols, which are slow and use the overcrowded 2.4GHz band. All devices should elect to use one of the newer protocols, and switch to a less cluttered band or channel while they're at it.

Chaps used to the slow pace of development of mechanical gizmos may be surprised at how quickly electronics are moving. A 5 year old smart phone is out of date, not because it's badly made, but because its technology continued to develop rapidly after it was built. Wifi is a good example. The first implementation of 801.11 appeared in 1997 and ran at 20mb/s in the 2.4GHz band. Just over 10 years later 801.11n delivered up to 300mb/s at 5Ghz. New computers and phones now come with 801.11ac (first available 2014), and might get 1300mb/s at 5GHz. A very new computer might support 801.11ad, and 802.11ax, 802.11ay, and 802.11az are in the pipeline.

Whether these speeds are actually achieved depends on how electrically noisy the location is, and how thick the walls are. Looking at slow Wifo connections with a traffic analyser and sniffer often reveals loud competition from neighbouring networks on the same channel, and man-shouting-in-noisy bar conversations like:

iphone to router – connect me to internet please
router to iphone – what? Say again.
iphone to router – what? Say again
router to iphone – OK, I said say again
iphone to router – connect me to internet
Router to iphone – OK, use this address
iphone to router – what? Say again

etc etc. The link spends more time asking for repeats than transferring information.

I'd have thought 18mbs would be fast enough for most simple purposes. If it's not easy to fix I'd tolerate the problem and be pleasantly surprised by the improvement when those past-it Apple devices are replaced in due course!

Dave

I borrowed a new £900 Samsung phone and demonstrated 510Mbps but it was literally balanced on top of the router, and 450Mbps around 2m away so phones can do fast. This would be using 5GHz for the wifi link.
Do you need speed?
Streaming a high definition video to a full size TV in MPEG2 format requires about 18Mbps. The newer MPEG4 format needs half that. A phone screen is tiny and uses a lower resolution feed so something about 2Mbps will do.
2.4GHz wifi is usually good for about 110Mbps and gives better range than 5GHz but this is only for a new enough phone. Older devices will be way slower.
Bear in mind when doing speed tests over 350Mbps that many test services are at the limit of their capability and have not caught up with the latest speed capabilities of the network.

The issues people mostly have is older devices, range, blocking by eg foil covered plasterboard, reflection off glass doors when they can 'see' the router, orientation and bad positioning of the router, and competition for the airtime with their neighbours.

The really high bandwidths possible are really intended to be used for multiple devices simultaneously at lower individual rates not one device going flat out.

Just got speed of 76Mb/s on my 6 years old ipad mini using Ookla.I don’t think new ipad would be any different.

51Mb/s on a 6 year old Moto G mobile phone.

Edited By Maurice Taylor on 20/12/2019 23:06:52