Boost wifi?

Alright, so I recently moved into university dorms.

When you have a wired connection you get 100mbps download and even higher upload.

Wifi in my room I'm only getting like 10mbps down and a big higher up. They don't offer wired connections in the dorms (presumably to keep the fastest connections to their computer labs and stuff).


My questions are:

A) What would be a good way to go about boosting my wifi signal? I'm using a laptop at the moment connected to a monitor.

B) Is it possible they're capping the wifi speeds? I kinda doubt it because I always get different speed results.

 

on a laptop you should be able to upgrade your wifi card to a better model that includes three antennas instead of the normal two. I've done this on many of my laptops. It's not exactly the easiest install, as the antennas have to be run yourself. normally two-antenna models have antennas that run alongside the sides of the lid, though some will run along the edges of the lower casing as well. youll have to find a place to run the third antenna through the laptop so it won't cause any fitment issues.

 

Benefit of this over usb style wifi antenna?

Any idea if its possible they're simply limiting the wifi speeds?

 

You can be 100% sure that they limit speed for broadcasting.
With luck you can increase the signal strength with some external hardware adapter but it isn't going to change much. I guess you'll have to live with it.

 

it is possible that the speeds in general are a bit slow due to older wifi routers or something to that effect, but I doubt that they will generally limit wifi connection speeds. It wouldn't be hard to do if that was their intent though. Nonetheless, You have to remember that a lot of other people are sharing the same network connection. I'd be willing to bet that if you hopped online during less popular hours, the connection will be much better.

the benefit of doing that is further range and better speeds at long-range connections. the actual speed capability within the same room won't be much different between it or USB, but the range and overall speeds as you move further away will be better on the internal hardware in general if it's decent hardware.

 

Accidentally determined that they're throttling my wifi connection. A bunch of ports are blocked so I used OpenVPN since it scans open ports and I could use a vpn. I speed tested out of curiosity and I get 60mbps instead of 5-10.

I'm going to install a usb antenna anyway since it may indeed help improve that even more.

 

Have you done speedtests at different points in the day? Might just be heavy traffic on the wifi slowing it down.

 

This. Don't bother wasting a lot of money if this could be the simple case.

You still thinking of buying the wifi in your dorm? Rent it out to ppl $5/hr :nuts: :nuts: :nuts: :nuts:

 

Yeah, when you connect with a wired connection its 100mbps. When you connect with a vpn its 100mbps before it gets detected and throttled. When you connect with regular wifi it seems to be 5-10 mbps depending on how many people are on but I only have a couple wifi "bars" so hopefully the wifi extender helps out.

Yeah, going to have to go with slightly faster private connection >-<

Yep, $100 for a "state of the art" modem. $99 for "professional" installation (aka plug in 2 cables and make a phone call). $65 a month on top of that for 18mbps and 150gb of data.

Such a fucking rip off lol. Can't even do that, they have an exclusive contract in the dorms and you can only use a wired connection :/

 

If you can use wired, then do that for the device you're using, console, comp, etc. If its non wired you're going for, wifi extender, but I don't think you can loophole around university policy..

 

Its all wireless, no Ethernet ports in the rooms :/

 

There is no actual way to boost your wifi speed but try to move your router throughout your room to find the best speed. But you most probably need to just buy a new/used router.

 

A) You'll need some special hardware for that which is hard to obtain. You could submit a formal request to the universities IT department/board members or you could try to move closer to one of their routers, or install a better wifi receiver on your laptop.

Most dorms have terrible wifi speeds due to the fact that the buildings are old which can hamper the signal from distributing properly.

B) Most likely not because they probably have their network standardized; however, if there are no wired connections in the dorms then the network could be congested.