said by bluepoint:You can not compare your experience to others. Yours is a new install while others are exisiting service that were upgraded to higher speeds.
My first reaction was yes, that is an important distinction. But, on reflection, I think it's useful to point out that in my case I already had the old bad router, as a result of having FIOS TV installed fourteen months ago. At that time, I was on a wireless Internet plan, so I chose not to implement FIOS internet. So, in a sense, when I decided to add Internet to my FIOS package, it was not a classic new install, in the strictest sense of the word. In fact, initially, when the engineers showed up, all they did was activate my old bad router, and confirm that I had connectivity. It was only after we'd done all that that I mentioned (and, in fact, demonstrated) that my laptops were too far away to reach the Ethernet cable and that I'd be connecting through WiFi. At that point, they warned me that in that case the router would need to be swapped with a newer one. In fact, I just remembered something else. After they connected me to the old router, I immediately ran a Speedtest which came up with some rather bad numbers, relatively speaking, in comparison to the promised 50/25 tier:
To do them justice, however, they had warned me that the router would need to be changed and that I wouldn't get good WiFi numbers on the old router BEFORE I ran that test. The only reason why I ran that test was because I wanted to make sure that I wasn't getting in range of the 50/25 speeds (keep in mind that I had no idea how lucky I was to be offered that new router free of charge).
I suspect it was actually seeing that I wouldn't be able to connect through Ethernet that may have helped persuade them to offer me the new router.
Of course, after they swapped out the router, I ran another test, and experienced the expected improvement:
I have since maxed it out, by switching to an individual channel rather than Auto in the router settings:
After a lot of testing, it turns out that one of the non-recommended channels, 4, has been the most consistently speedy of my channels (even though most experts usually recommend 1, 6 and/or 11); go figure.
