Yeah your wifi sucks dude. Or your area.
It’s pretty much impossible to get decent wifi in a dense urban area where there’s competing signal.
The channel has to be clear before any station can talk. So if there’s another ssid or another router on the same channel, you’re waiting for it.
More devices on the wireless (including your neighbors wireless, if you’re on the same channel) means more waiting. More waiting means slower speed.
Add to this that most AX+ gear is defaulting to 80MHz channels and avoid UNII-2 bands (for good reason), bringing us back to 3 usable, non-overlapping channels on 5GHz.
And when you double the channel width, you double the noise with no increase to signal, cutting your SNR (signal/noise ratio) by a good 3dB compared to 40MHz and 6dB compared to 20MHz. The increase in potential speed simply isn’t worth it for the drop in overall quality for a lot of people. But it’s the default, and most people don’t know or think to change it.
Add to that, that a lot of consumer gear defaults to a static channel. Or says “auto” but really just sticks to one channel. Xfinity routers are notorious for this.
Also, no broadcast/multicasr suppression and enabling legacy rates, also default behavior on a lot of consumer routers and sometimes even unchangeable. Legacy rates (support for circa-2000 802.11b) define the minimum speed that is allowed (usually 1Mbps), and that speed is used for all broadcast and multicast. And these get said by the device and then repeated by the router.
Now we also have smart speakers (like Sonos and Google) that use multicast to make multi-speaker groups. That destroys the wifi. Worse, if your neighbor is playing music and you’re on the same channel. It’ll destroy your wifi.
Printers and their drivers like to spam multicast too. Even if they’re wired, because its still the same network.
Old unused port forwards too. Your router will keep looking on the wire and wireless networks for the destination, using ARPs (which are broadcast traffic). If the IP is offline, it can spam the network looking for it.
If you want good wifi, find a clean channel and thoroughly understand https://www.wiisfi.com/. It is by far the best deep dive on wireless and many of its flaws.
What it doesn’t talk about is shit mesh systems. You want a decent mesh it must be tri-band with a dedicated backhaul. Even that is gonna slow down if you’ve got multiple hops between device and gateway. Much better to wire in all the endpoints.
But if you’ve got a clear channel and good, well-configured hardware, and good placement…you can get good speeds on wireless.
But you really should still use a wire (or something like MoCA or Powerline if that’s not an option) for anything more than light browsing and streaming services (not realtime!). Wireless is prone to latency and jitter and some applications (voice/video, work VPNs, gaming) are far more sensitive to that than others.
Edit to add: it doesn’t help that we’re conditioned to think 3 or 4 bars of wifi is “good enough”. Speed and stability drops off very quick with signal, and that only really reflects SNR.
Your weak signal clients are also sending/receiving data much slower and probably retransmitting more frequently, which will occupy more channel time and reduce performance of your other devices.
This also extends to old devices (like an old printer or digital photo frame or w/e), even if it has a good signal. The router slows down to talk to them, which occupies more time, which slows down everyone else.
And the same rule applies to being on the same channel as your neighbor, if they have an old/weak device.
And also, if your phone/laptop can hear the neighbor but the router can’t…your phone is still waiting for the channel to clear from both sides, and likely hearing the router and the neighbor talking over each other.
Eeros like to put all mesh nodes on the same channel and I hate that. That greatly limits the scalability of the environment, since all devices throughout the house are sharing the same airtime.
Tl/Dr: speed is a function of time. Time is a finite resource and you have to share it with all your devices and potentially your neighbors devices too. Think of 1 second of wifi as a pie. We can’t “make more pie”, only make smaller slices of the pie we have.
It’s often not a matter of speed but of reliability.
Simple fact is, there are very few occasions where you truly need more than 10Mbps or so, which can handle 1080p, or 25 for 4k.
High speeds are great for the infrequent download, but for most day-to-day internet tasks…it’s largely unnoticed.
The real killer of wifi is latency, jitter, and loss. And these will present themselves as slowdowns when browsing or low-quality video when streaming…but on a sensitive application (gaming, real-time voice/video, many enterprise/corporate VPNs, especially under heavy use), they can cause serious performance hits.
And there’s tons of factors that go into causing these conditions on wireless that are simply not a concern on wired.