Technicolor TG582n FTTC - Why is WiFi So Slow?

[#1]

I'm more than happy with the service I get from Plusnet......................apart from their fibre router which is a very sub-standard piece of kit.
I bit the bullet 18 months ago & purchased an Asus RT-N56U & more than doubled my wireless speed on my fibre connection. It was £70.00 well spent & I've easily recovered that amount because Plusnet's product is by far the cheapest in this area of the New Forest.

[#2]

I must say PN fibre is excellent , but i presume i was lucky as being one of the first ,,  i got the netgear wnr100v3 rather than the thompson  wifi no problems 

[#3]

Quote from: ejs

The trouble with wireless is that it's complicated and most of the advice on the Internet about it is wrong. The usual advice is to download some program to draw pretty graphs so that you can choose the "best" channel, determined to be the channel with the fewest or weakest other wireless networks on. Unfortunately, the channel with the fewest / weakest other networks won't necessarily be the best one, it doesn't take into account other forms of interference, it doesn't take into account how heavily each other network is used, it doesn't take into account that there might be other wireless devices close to you, but the access point (router) of the network they are on could be further away.

For that you really need something that can do Spectrum monitoring rather than just wi-fi scanning, I used to have access to a WiSpy which was pretty nice for that but it's ridiculously expensive for a home user,  Some of the Mikrotik Routerboards can do it using their "The Dude" application however the graphs are not that easy to read and rather slow to update.
I'm actually tempted to pickup a UBNT airOS based radio so I can play with the "Airview" feature, I've used it briefly on one of their 5Ghz radios and it seems to be ok from what I remember.
Of course this kind of kit is never going to be anywhere near as accurate as a proper professional spectrum analyzer but it should be able to provide enough information to find out it's the alarm sensor or next doors video sender obliterating your wi-fi channel

[#4]

You can check for most of those things apart from the non 802.11 transmissions/interference by putting an ordinary wireless adapter into monitor mode with wireshark (Linux) or Microsoft Network Monitor.
Anyway, the point was it's better to just try some different channels rather than track down the last free version of inssider and get fixated on whichever channel it says is the best. The fact that you can detect some other wireless networks doesn't mean that they must be the cause of your wireless problem, even if you and them are on the same channel. But it's easy to blame neighbouring networks just because they are there, when you don't want to admit that your router isn't particularly good.