wifi speed on tab 2 10.1 (4.2.2) v PC speed

[weematt]

I am with Talk Talk as my broadband supplier with an "up to 20Mb/s" connection over a phone line though a D-Link wireless router.
I have also installed a Netgear extender to cater for loss of signal upstairs.

My PC with wired connection to my router can attain 14Mb/s on a very good day but more typically about 12Mb/s. Via Wifi the PC clocks at about 2Mb/s slower than when wired. All measured using Ookla speed test.
When I speed check my tab 2 via wifi at the same location the result is about 20% slower than wifi for the PC. I can get slight speed improvement if I move the tablet closer to the wireless router but that is not where I want to be when browsing or streaming. I also note that the speed is worse (no big surprise) when using the Netgear extender for PC or tablet.

I searched for some help and got this explanation from Ookla help pages.
(Did a little grammar sorting but this is mostly their words)
"Differences in hardware: If you're both on a Wi-Fi connection, know that phones and tablets typically have less sophisticated Wi-Fi antennae than larger devices like laptops. Phones can't reach the 5 Ghz frequency and support fewer "spatial streams" than modern laptops. These differences may negatively impact your phone's Wi-Fi speed, especially in areas of high interference on the 2.4 Ghz Wi-fi frequency. Even in ideal conditions, Anandtech found that the fastest phones may only reach 35 mbps over wifi, with most lower than that."

I am running a monitoring suite in my PC from PRTG which monitors a number of items including the load time for a couple of chosen web pages. I can see from the data that my IP provides a highly variable service and intend to take that up with them.

I have tried setting my router to channel hopping mode and that does not seem to help. I am in a stand alone house but can see a dozen or so other SSIDs around me, some of comparable strength to my own depending on my position in the house. Some of the others are channel hopping too!

Anyway the issue that troubles me is the loss of speed as measured at the tablet. Is there anything I can do with existing broadband setup or tablet to speed up my tab 2's wireless performance?

I have no serious options in my area to go to faster supply. All the offers are the same technically, I would just be paying the bill to a different company. Can I jazz up the router? Hack the tablet to improve the antenna?

Any help would be appreciated.

 

[Rukbat]

1) The speed you're buying is the speed between you and your provider. They have absolutely no control over the speed between their equipment and the server you're connecting to. That's your "highly variable" part. Connecting to the supercomputer in the building next to theirs might give you 20mbps, but connecting to a server some guy is running on an old Blackberry connected to the internet by 30 miles of corroded wire running through the Amazon won't be fast enough to tell that your computer found the page before your grandchildren die of old age. So that variability isn't a problem, it's how the internet works. (That's why you buy "up to" 20 mbps. They'll limit you to that no matter how fast the data is coming in, but they can't speed up slow data. Your Porsche doesn't go any faster than my roller skates in a traffic jam.)

2) Get an app like Wifi Analytics (free at the Play store). See which channels are being used near you. Put your wifi on a channel as far as possible from any channels being used, to eliminate as much interference as possible. (It's somewhere in the "wireless" part of the menu of the router.) As far as extenders - they usually lose about half your available speed, so a 54mbps extender is giving you an effective speed to the phone line of 27mbps. (Which of course means nothing since, unless you're within about 100km of the server you're connecting to, you'll seldom see speeds over 1mbps these days. All that 20mbps is buying you is the ability to run about 20 simultaneous connections at full speed.)