What affects Internet speeds

To boost your Internet speed, discover what disrupts or slows your Wi-Fi and wired connections.

To ensure that you can reap all of the benefits offered by gigabit speeds, we've put a lot of work into designing devices to help deliver that gigabit experience inside your home. First, we pull a fiber optic connection directly to your home and connect it to a Fiber Jack. Then, the Network Box or router takes the gigabit connection from the Fiber Jack and distributes the ultra-fast Internet inside your home. 

For detailed information about Internet speeds, visit the Maximum Wired and Wi-Fi speeds on Google Fiber article.

Speed issues over Wi-Fi

When you use devices over Wi-Fi, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to achieve gigabit speeds. You can improve your speeds by carefully managing any interference from outside sources, which can significantly reduce network speeds for devices operating over Wi-Fi.

Speed issues on wired devices

Although Google Fiber provides incredibly fast network speeds over wired devices, there are a number of situations to cause your network speeds to slow down.

  • Out-of-date hardware
    The type of hardware you use, age of the device, operating system, web browser, network interface card (NIC) and other applications running on your device all affect upload and download speeds.

  • Slow connections between Google Fiber's network and the websites you visit
    Once your communication leaves the Fiber network, we can’t ensure you’ll receive maximum speeds due to heavy traffic or substantial rerouting delays at any time.

  • VPNs (Virtual Private Networks)
    If the VPN’s server isn’t capable of forwarding traffic at 1 gigabit, your Internet speed may be reduced to the speed the VPN server is capable of.

  • Peak usage times
    Performance due to external factors may be lower during peak usage times, which on our network typically fall between 7 PM and 11 PM in your respective time zone.

  • Video takes priority over data
    If you are streaming TV or movies, the video stream is using part of the bandwidth, and the data stream can only use whatever bandwidth is left.

  • Latency
    Latency is the measurement of how long it takes to transmit or receive packets on a particular network, and is affected by how far packets need to travel, how many network packets need to travel over, and the quality of those networks.

  • Packet loss
    Like latency, packet loss can have a number of different causes, including network congestion, faulty hardware, poor device performance or the presence of software bugs.

If you're having issues with your Internet, view these pointers on how to improve your Wi-Fi speeds or use our network troubleshooter to solve specific problems. 

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