Network Cards

I had my House Wifi sped up a bit to 30 mbps from 6 recently. I don't notice much difference. My Wifi Card was probably purchased about 5 or 6 years ago. It is compatible with 802.11N. I was looking on New Egg at the cards. One had two antenna's. Does that do anything or just look good? Would a new card have any parts that might help me get better reception over the older one I had? Do you think a new card would make any difference? I appreciate all input. Thanks,

One other factor in the speed upgrade is your internet habits, You will have automatically adjusted your requirements for use of the internet to suit your bandwidth, you will by human nature, not do things that you find slow when doing other things , but wait until one has finished before starting the other. It does not make sense to download updates or a new game from steam etc, whilst you are watching Netflix or Youtube so you arrange things differently

For example your original 6Mb/s could handle three concurrent 1080p HD video streams your New 30mb/s can handle fifteen - but I doubt that you have suddenly added several new TVs the main advantage of a larger bandwidth in real terms is the number of concurrent data streams i can handle at one time - This makes it almost an essential for modern family homes Where Mom, Pop and their 2.4 kids will all have smartphones, tablets and computers plus a range of smart TVs and other items.

There should be an increase in basic downloads of large files, ( major Windows updates or ISOs), and this should show on https://www.speedtest.net and others, but your day to day usage will take some time to change as your actual usage changes

I have a speed of around 60 Mb/s and recently found that speedtest was showing a speed of 8mb/s - this was due to my router using a Quality of service (QOS) system to only allow a process to take what bandwidth it actually needed, and the 8Mb/s was all the site needed to run the test efficiently plus my background tasks.

Also the "AC" Card you have will support wireless speeds much higher than the 30 Mb/s (my New Router will support 600 Mb/s on 2.4Ghz and 1650 Mb/s on 5Ghz) - Most systems of of your age should support at least 150 Mb/s.

If you use ethernet of course the options are different (though the result is the same) - There were 10Mb/s cards and routers many years ago, (and 11Mb/s Wireless), but these were obsolete many years ago, (think 1990s). I would expect the ethernet on your cards to be at least 100Mb/s and probably 1000Mb/s (Gigabyte speeds)

The bottleneck in internet access is 99%+ always going to be the actual internet bandwidth

There is some talk and actual systems out in the wild of 1GHz internet bandwidth, (this is the speed that most of the internet backbone fibre lines run at and you will see it in some Universities), but this is a distant dream for most.

My big complaint is that pages load slower than they did before the upgrade. AT&T put in a new router when then they laid the fiber wire to my house. That what is so puzzling to me. It should be at least as good, but the pages are slower loading. That is why I ask the question about the card. I don't know what else it could be. == I did Speedtest and I got close to 30 up and down.

You have not mentioned if you're discussing ethernet or wireless, but in either case the both systems are fully backwards compatible with the previous standards so you should get at least the same as before, (after a week or so in some systems that autotune to give best results).

I would certainly put in a call for the ISP to confirm that all is working correctly at their end If you use email you could include links to a results from https://www.speedtest.net (which is the most respected of the tests), also if you have a record of what you were getting prior to the change that will improve your case - Maybe you posted in the What's your internet speed? thread here and you can link to the post

If you need all the gory detail this link may give a better understanding of wireless standards

IEEE 802.11 - Wikipedia