A Bonnington customer rang us last month about their new full-fibre install. The line was tested and delivering 900 Mbps at the router, the ISP-supplied hub was brand-new Wi-Fi 6, and the phone standing next to it hit 480 Mbps on a speed test. Their 2018 HP laptop, sat right beside both of them on the kitchen counter, would not go past 68 Mbps. They had already gone round in circles with the ISP’s support line, been talked into a mesh node they didn’t need, and were about to buy a whole new laptop.
That job took us about half an hour on the bench. The laptop had an Intel Wireless-AC 8265 inside it — a 2016-era two-stream 802.11ac card that maxes out around 250-300 Mbps in the best real-world conditions and is honest to call the bottleneck of a gigabit line. We swapped it for a Wi-Fi 6E module, put the laptop back together, and it was hitting 620 Mbps at the same kitchen counter and 380 Mbps in the back room of the flat. Same fibre, same router, same house, different card. That is the whole story of this post, and it repeats itself two or three times a month in the waterfront flats and converted warehouses around Bonnington Road, Great Junction Street and the Water of Leith.
The One Test That Tells You It’s the Laptop, Not the Fibre
Before anything else, stand your phone and the laptop side-by-side, within about two metres of the router, and run the same speed test on each. Use fast.com or your ISP’s own speed page on both, back-to-back, so you’re measuring the same conditions. If the phone hits several hundred megabits and the laptop is capped in the low tens or somewhere under 100 Mbps, the fibre is fine, the router is fine, the room is fine, and the difference lives inside the laptop.
If the phone is also slow at that distance, that is a different post — usually a router placement or thermal issue, and we’ve covered the pattern of that separately in the guide on why your new fibre didn’t speed up your Wi-Fi. But when the phone is fast and the laptop alone is slow, the laptop is the story, and everything below applies.
Why Old Wi-Fi Cards Have a Speed Ceiling
Every laptop has a wireless card inside it, and that card has a headline standard and a stream count. A 2013-2015 laptop typically has an 802.11n card with one antenna stream — theoretical maximum 150 Mbps, real-world 30-70 Mbps on a good day. A 2015-2018 laptop typically has an 802.11ac card with one or two streams — theoretical maximums of 433 Mbps or 866 Mbps respectively, real-world roughly 120 Mbps or 250-300 Mbps once you factor in room conditions, TCP overhead and neighbour interference. Only laptops from around 2019 onwards carry Wi-Fi 6 (ax) cards that can genuinely make use of a gigabit line.
The gap between the theoretical number on the specification sheet and what you actually get on the sofa is bigger than most people expect. Cut the theoretical number roughly in half for a strong signal in the same room, and closer to a third once you’re on the other side of an internal wall. That is why a 2016 laptop with a 2x2 ac card, sat in the room next to the router, will happily run at 200 Mbps and never go faster no matter how much fibre you throw at it. The card is the ceiling.
How to See Which Card Your Laptop Has
On Windows this takes ten seconds. Right-click the Start button, open Device Manager, expand “Network adapters”, and read the name of the wireless card. Anything called “Wireless-N”, “Centrino”, or ending in a four-digit number below 8000 is old enough to be your bottleneck. Anything with “Wi-Fi 6” or an AX-prefixed model number (AX200, AX201, AX210, AX211) is modern. Intel’s AC 7260, AC 8260, AC 8265, AC 9260 and AC 9560 are all 802.11ac cards that were common in laptops from about 2014 through to 2020, and all of them will cap a gigabit fibre line.
You can double-check by opening Command Prompt and running netsh wlan show interfaces. Look at the “Radio type” line. If it says 802.11n or 802.11ac, the card is old-standard and will cap your line. If it says 802.11ax you have a Wi-Fi 6 card and the bottleneck is somewhere else. That one command answers the question in seconds.
1. Get Closer to the Router, and Onto the 5 GHz Band
Before you spend anything, be honest about your usage. If the only device that’s slow is a laptop that sits at a fixed desk two rooms away from the router, half the deficit is distance and internal walls, not the card. Move the laptop into the same room as the router for one afternoon and rerun the speed test. If the number roughly doubles, you have both a card problem and a placement problem, and it’s worth fixing the placement first because it does not need any new hardware.
The other quick thing to check is the band. Modern routers broadcast two networks with the same name, one on 2.4 GHz and one on 5 GHz, and older laptops sometimes stick on the 2.4 GHz band out of habit. On Windows, click the Wi-Fi icon, open properties for the current network, and look at “Network band”. If it says 2.4 GHz on a router that supports 5 GHz, forget the network on the laptop and reconnect — it’ll usually latch onto 5 GHz on the next join, which alone can double a slow reading. If your router lets you split the two bands with different names, split them and connect the laptop explicitly to the 5 GHz one.
2. Plug in an Ethernet Cable
This is the answer we recommend most often for a laptop that lives at a desk. A single ethernet run from the router or a switch to the desk gives you the full line speed with none of the wireless variables, no dropped Teams calls, and no dependence on what the card in the laptop can do. If the laptop has an ethernet port, plug in a Cat6 cable and you’re done. If it’s a slim laptop with USB-C only, a small USB-C to gigabit ethernet adapter is about the length of a pen and pulls line-rate on any modern USB-C port.
We’ve written about the specific speed cap you can hit on the wired side too — a USB-C-to-ethernet adapter or a wall socket wired to old Cat5 will sometimes lock a laptop at 100 Mbps rather than 1000, and the fix there is separate. If yours is doing that, the Easter Road guide on ethernet capped at 100 Mbps walks through exactly what to check. In every other case, one cable will end this problem for good on the desk it’s plugged into.
3. Add a USB-C Wi-Fi 6 Adapter
If you don’t want to run a cable, and you don’t want to open the laptop, a small USB-A or USB-C Wi-Fi 6 adapter is the easiest middle path. You plug it in, install the manufacturer’s driver, disable the internal Wi-Fi card in Device Manager so Windows doesn’t argue with itself over which to use, and connect to the same network on the new adapter. In our workshop, a decent USB-C Wi-Fi 6 stick reliably delivers 400-600 Mbps in the same room as the router and 200-300 Mbps two rooms away, which is comfortably enough for a fibre connection to feel worth the money.
The caveats are honest. Cheap USB Wi-Fi sticks from the marketplaces are often mislabelled — a “1200 Mbps AX” stick that turns out to be an old ac chipset in a new case, or a driver that only works on Windows 10 and breaks on Windows 11 updates. If you go down this route, spend the extra few pounds on a name-brand adapter from a known chipset. And accept that a stick sticking out the side of a laptop is easy to snap in a bag — not a problem on a desktop, worth thinking about on a laptop that moves.
4. Swap the Internal M.2 Wi-Fi Module
For a laptop that’s otherwise good — a healthy battery, a fast SSD, plenty of RAM — the tidiest fix is to open the back, unclip the old M.2 Wi-Fi module and slot in a Wi-Fi 6 or Wi-Fi 6E one. On most laptops from the last decade the wireless card is a standard M.2 2230 module held down by a single screw, with two tiny antenna cables clipped on the top of it. An Intel AX210, or the newer AX211 for laptops that support it, is a straight replacement and Windows drivers install themselves on next boot.
The work itself is a routine laptop repair job on the bench — typically thirty to forty-five minutes on a laptop with a normal service hatch, longer on a slim ultrabook where the whole bottom panel comes off. Two things catch people out if they try it themselves. The first is that some laptops (a subset of HP, Lenovo and Dell business models) have a firmware whitelist that refuses to boot with an unrecognised wireless card — you have to check the exact model before you buy the part. The second is the antenna clips, which sit on tiny gold pads and will lift the pad clean off the card if you pry them the wrong way. This is exactly the kind of upgrade we scope alongside our other hardware upgrades because it’s a sensible part and honest labour, and the difference on the bench is measurable in the first two minutes.
Bringing the laptop to us for this is straightforward. Book it in for laptop repair in Bonnington, and we’ll confirm the compatible card, do the swap, run an iperf3 test on the workshop’s gigabit link to prove the new number, and hand it back the same day or the next depending on the queue. If you’d rather we came out and did it in your kitchen, that’s a networking and Wi-Fi callout — we bring the card, the tools and the test kit.
When It Isn’t Worth the Swap
Not every laptop earns the upgrade. If the machine is more than seven or eight years old, has a mechanical hard drive, is on 4 GB of RAM, and struggles to open a browser even before the Wi-Fi is measured, the honest advice is not to spend anything on the wireless. Swapping the card in a laptop that’s otherwise at the end of its life gets you a faster connection to a machine that still feels slow at everything else, which isn’t the outcome anyone wants. In that case the sensible route is a new machine, and we’ll always tell you plainly when we see one on the bench.
Similarly, if the laptop is a slim ultrabook where the wireless card is soldered to the board rather than fitted as a separate M.2 module — some MacBooks, some very thin Dell XPS and HP Spectre models — there is no internal swap available. That leaves ethernet or a USB Wi-Fi 6 adapter as your only realistic options, and both work well. We’ll always open the laptop up on the bench first and check what’s inside before quoting the card option.
When to Book It In Rather Than Guess
The whole diagnostic path above is honest but it takes an hour of your evening and a bit of faith in the numbers. If you’d rather just have someone tell you what’s in the laptop, whether it’s worth swapping, and how much speed you’ll actually gain on your fibre line, drop it in. We’ll open Device Manager, run the wireless standard command, benchmark it on the workshop link, and give you a plain-English answer — sometimes a card swap, sometimes a USB adapter, sometimes an ethernet drop, and occasionally the honest answer that the laptop is fine and the router placement is the issue after all. The same pattern turns up right along the shore, from Leith and Newhaven up through Granton-Pilton, so we’ve seen most of what these buildings do to a signal.
Last updated: 1 October 2026