We've all heard about "advertised" broadband speeds, and I'm sure plenty of us are also aware that those advertised speeds aren't necessarily a guarantee. In fact, in many areas, those advertised speeds might be something you never see. There are reasons why that might be the case though, and in some of those instances, you might be able to do something about it.

6 Network congestion

Your connection might be shared with other homes

Depending on the type of internet connection you have, you might actually be sharing a network with other people in your locality. In a lot of cases, broadband might be distributed to a cabinet, and that cabinet is then hooked up to houses or apartments nearby, meaning that the outbound connection from the cabinet is shared across multiple households.

Because of this, the cabinet will try to split the total speed across all of the connected clients, and if you're using your internet at a peak time, then it might be the case that it isn't actually possible for all of the connected devices to reach their full speed at the same time. This congestion can be frustrating, and the best way around it is to try and use the internet at more off-peak times when other households aren't using it.

5 Your router might be too far away

It's hard to maintain a strong signal

Sometimes, you might just be too far away from your router. As your distance increases from the router, the chance of transmission errors between the router and your device can increase. This means you may face packet loss and higher latency, and your download speed will likely suffer.

You can solve this typically by moving closer to your router, or by building a mesh network. Before going out and building a whole mesh network though, make sure this is the case by either moving your router or moving your device closer to it before testing your download speeds. Otherwise, you could be wasting a bunch of money on something that you don't really need.

4 Background applications

Did you leave your download on?

If your internet has suddenly become slow and you're not sure why, check some of the programs that you may have running. Steam might be updating a game, you might have left a download running, or you might be doing some else intensive in the background that you didn't realize. You can also use the Windows Resource Monitor in Task Manager to help identify what applications are using bandwidth.

If there's nothing on your own computer, be sure to check your other devices, as they may be downloading or uploading a lot of data that you weren't aware of. This can cause your internet connection to slow down without immediately revealing why. Your router may also let you see how much data different connected devices are transmitting, so it could be a good way to track down the source of the problem if there is one.

3 Server issues

Servers aren't perfect

Sometimes the problem isn't actually your internet connection, and instead, it's the server that you're using. Use sites like Down Detector to check if other people are reporting sluggish performance, and also ask friends if they are having trouble connecting, too.

Typically, a good way to tell if it's the server (especially if you're downloading a file from it) is to look at the download speed of the file and then do some kind of speed test at the same time. If your speed test is significantly faster, then it's very likely that there's something wrong with the server that you're downloading from, rather than your internet connection.

2 Damaged cables

This one has bitten me one too many times

As someone who has built several networks, you'd be amazed how much trouble a bad ethernet cable can cause. If you're wired, don't rule out that your cable might actually be damaged, which can wreak all kinds of havoc. Even switching to Wi-Fi should give a pretty clear indication of if there's a problem with your cable or not.

Seriously though, don't rule this one out. There have been a surprisingly high number of times where slow speeds, packet loss, failing network discovery, and more have all been caused by a dodgy ethernet cable. At this stage, it's actually become a running joke at the LAN events I'm involved in that if there's a network problem to check the ethernet cables first.

1 Upgrade your ISP's router

It's bad

Your ISP's router sucks, and you should upgrade if you haven't already. It likely will have congestion problems with too many devices, which can cause problems with speeds, and it might not even support standards like Wi-Fi 6E or Wi-Fi 7. If it's a Wi-Fi 5 router and you should have download speeds going into the hundreds of megabits, then you should definitely upgrade, as you'll instantly have a much better experience.

In a lot of places, you can now get gigabit internet, but ISP routers were often given to consumers in the days when you would get a maximum speed of 100Mbps... or even less. The same goes for Wi-Fi standards, where Wi-Fi 5 was capable of saturating that download speed over wireless. If you have an old ISP router and you're supposed to have download speeds of 500Mbps or even gigabit, then your problem might be the router.