Surface Pro 3 Slow WiFi - 72Mbps Max (driver)

Question

I have an Apple Airport Extreme 802.11ac wireless router at home and am only connecting at a max of speed of 72Mbps (usually closer to 11Mbps if I'm more than 20 feet away from the WAP). I have two other 802.11ac laptops at home (Samsung AB9+ and rMBP) and my two other computers are connecting up at 800Mbps+ and pulling down the same on Internet speed tests; yes, I have real GigE connectivity. Is anyone else having these problems?

Answer 1

I'm getting 866mbps on my AC router.  I get 166mbps on my N router.  So yes, I'm happy!

Answer 2

Yeah I think I'm happy but I'm going to give it a full work week before I'm confident.

Answer 3

Folks,

Is it safe to say that this issue has been resolved. The link speed of my adapter is 300mbs consistent nowadays, but throughput still seems sort of low. Speedtest does provide the SLA speeds from my provider. I noticed that there have been no new posts recently. Has this been fixed for you guys?

Answer 4

Normally to test the internet speed you can use the Speedtest.net but if you want to know the actual throughput of the wireless connection between the router and your SP3, you will need to download a file from the router itself if it has a HD connected to it or another machine connected to the same router via ethernet and make sure you have a Gigabit LAN setup in the router and also in the other PC.

Then you can do file transfers and truly see that actual wireless speed.  The speed shown in the network card properties sometimes is not very accurate.

Some routers' web interface allow you to test the wireless speed but most of those are found in corporate only.  I have a GB LAN setup and I can test by copying files to the SP3.  In AC mode I get 250 Mbps or so which is acceptable.

Internet speed as long as you get anything over 20-30 Mbps consistently, you are good.  My internet connection maxes at 50 Mbps anyway!  Your mileage may vary.

Answer 5

A lot depends on your router and your environment. Some folks still connect to only the 2.4GHz band on a dual 2.4/5 GHz system when the SSIDs are the same name. A few folks with older 802.11n routers are still having issues.

That said, because of all the variables, the only way to level the playing field is places like speedtest.net.

You could use iperf https://iperf.fr/ and do some real analysis, too.

The "speed" seen in the network window isn't consistent for everyone, and again depends on the router that you are connecting to.

In my case, currently using a Netgeart r7000, I have a 105 meg ISP connection and consistently measure 113-115 or higher at speedtest,net. If I watch the network window, I see fluctuations all the time. I just capture the screen shots below over several minutes on my SP3.  I've hyperlinked this to a version of the screen shots that should open in a larger view than here in the forum, but that server is going to reboot shortly so you may have to click a couple of times if the server is still rebooting.