Afternoon folks,

Looking for some guidance understanding my current internet connection and if it's worth paying more for a faster connection.

Currently on cooper broadband network and pull 45-75Mbps depending on time of day etc. and could upgrade to full fibre with a guaranteed 145Mbps minimum. I use a Surface Pro 4 and dock, so when working at my desk I've over a wired connection but the rest of the time on WiFi. Lady friend uses her surface on WiFi only. The surfaces have an internal wireless AC adaptor. We have a HTPC which stores all our videos/films/photos and that is connected to the router by TP-Link AC1200 powerline adaptors. I'm in a new house with thin internal walls and good wiring with the powerline adaptors on the same power ring. I get good WiFi signal throughout the house.

This is where I start to get a bit confused...
Obviously the powerline adaptors are never going to provide the rated 1200Mbps, however the TPlink manager states a rate of 388Mbps. Amble for streaming HD content, but not that fast when moving larger files from the HTPC to a surface. The Surfaces claim a WiFi speed ~500-700Mbps depending on location (via router monitor pages, or using Windows Network and Sharing Centre, they are broadly the same).

There are only 2 of us in the house, so I wanted to understand the speed from a computer to the router and therefore if it's worth paying more for faster broadband. The idea being if we are saturating the connections then paying for faster broadband won't help!

Browsing the net I found iPurf3 to test connection speeds, which provided:
  • Surface (WiFi) to surface (ethannet) was ~74Mbps (WiFi next to the router)
  • Surface (WiFi) to Surface (WiFi) was ~70Mbps
  • Surface (ethanet) to HTPC (powerline) was ~102Mbps
  • Surface to HTPC (powerline) was ~57-69Mbps (69Mbps being next to the router).


This is a huge decrease over the quoted speeds elsewhere and doesn't feel right! This also suggests that the connection is close to saturation already (assuming both of us aren't trying to max out the internet) - again this doesn't feel right. I believe some of the quoted figures are maximum throughput but still wouldn't expect such a huge drop.

Can anyone shed some light on this? If you can't tell I'm by no means a networking expert - beginner at a push! I ran iPerf3 with default everything, so likely I've messed that up. What settings should I be using to provide a realistic network speed? Or should I be using/doing something else? Should there be such a huge drop between various throughput figures and something like iPerf3? Could any bottleneck be due to the router? I'm using a Fritz!Box 7530 which I believe is a good match for my hardware (wireless AC, gigabit LAN).

Ta for the help!