Wi-Fi performance and your device

Even though you may subscribe to a high speed TELUS Internet plan, your Wi-Fi device may only achieve a portion of the maximum speed of your plan.

Newer or higher-end devices are more likely to outperform older or lower-end devices. Since not all devices are created equal, you might notice that some of your devices perform faster when connected to your Wi-Fi network.

Wi-Fi speeds may be slower on older devices, such as early generation smartphones, tablets and iPads. These same devices may also be impacting the performance of your whole Wi-Fi network, slowing down other devices in your home. All Wi-Fi devices have to communicate with your modem, the legacy devices communicates slowly with the modem and every other device will have to wait longer until this device finishes thus slowing the experience on the newer devices.

Wi-Fi can propagate on 2 different frequency bands: 2.4GHz and 5GHz. Wi-Fi on 2.4GHz travels farther but slower than 5GHz. Older devices mostly operate on 2.4GHz band, while newer devices operate on either 2.4GHz or 5GHz. If a device is capable of 2.4GHz and 5GHz, this is considered a dual band device. To learn more about dual band Wi-Fi networks, read the related article below.

: Wi-Fi operating on 2.4GHz band provides coverage over a larger area, while 5GHz covers a smaller area but can provide faster Wi-Fi speeds.

You might be wondering how fast your smartphone, tablet or laptop are over Wi-Fi. We ran some real life tests with a few popular devices to provide some examples:

Device Wi-Fi speeds are dependent on the supported Wi-Fi technology standard (ex. 802.11n, 802.11ac), the number of antennas in your personal device and other factors found within your device specifications.

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: Newer Wi-Fi adapters are capable of delivering improved performance. If you are tech savvy, you may want to upgrade your computer’s Wi-Fi adapter.

Here are some other ways to improve your device performance:

Tested with the TELUS Advanced Wi-Fi modem on 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands in real homes on Gigabit Internet (which was validated to achieve 950 Mbps download speed tests using wired connection). The results in this table were measured using speedtest.net over Wi-Fi. Individual results may vary depending on the construction materials of your home, location and configuration of your Wi-Fi modem, location and capabilities of Wi-Fi devices, number of nearby Wi-Fi networks, number of active Wi-Fi devices or other factors.