The iliad fiber offer is now available in Italy, and undoubtedly on paper it is revolutionary in several respects, as the company promises. However, we must pay close attention to the actual browsing speed , because although iliad promises up to 5 Gbit / s in download, from what we understand this speed will be practically unreachable for most users. Indeed, the risk is that of surfing mostly at 500 Mbit / s : half compared to a “traditional” fiber.
How get to 5 Gbit / s over iliad fiber
Let's read what iliad itself says about it, reporting an extract from the company website, which is then present in the contract itself:
The theoretical maximum download speed of 5Gbit / s overall (up to 2.5Gbit / s on 1 Ethernet port, up to 1Gbit / s on 2 Ethernet ports and up to 0.5Gbit / s on Wi-Fi) may vary based on coverage, degree of network congestion, technology available in the area, capacity of the server to which you are connected and use of the Wi-Fi connection.
The 5 Gbit are in practice given by the sum of 4 factors: the 3 ethernet ports present on the iliadbox, each with its own dedicated band that cannot interfere with that of the others (CEO Benedetto Levi was quite clear on this during the presentation), plus the remaining 0.5 Gbit per second for the Wi-Fi network.
To “fill” all the 5 Gbit you will therefore need a device with an ethernet network card of at least 2.5 Gbps (which are not so widespread), and two other devices that reach up to gigabit each; lastly, one or more Wi-Fi devices are also needed, those are certainly more common, just think of smartphones, tablets and notebooks.
An example would be a desktop PC connected to the 2.5 Gbit / s port, a NAS to the 1 Gbit port, and then a smart TV to the third port; all three at cable distance from the router (if you think about it this is not a too common situation). In the absence of one or more of these, you will always have (good) part of the unused bandwidth , because each port should have its own band dedicated to it and not otherwise accessible. But the real problem is another.
The problem of the residual bandwidth for Wi-Fi
According to what was declared by iliad, for the Wi-Fi network the bandwidth available is “only” 0.5 Gbit. And unless it is intended that it is maximum 500 Mbit for each device connected via wireless (but this is not written anywhere, and in any case it would still be a limit compared to the real capabilities of each device and the network itself), this means that you will have 500 Mbit to share among all the devices connected to the Wi-Fi, which are very easily the clear majority of those you will have at home.
Smartphone , tablet , smart speaker , and in general all devices for home automation (robot vacuum cleaners, surveillance cameras, connected appliances, etc.) connect to the network via Wi-Fi. Most notebooks will also be mostly used over Wi-Fi, and probably the smart TV as well, if not adjacent to the router. All these devices will have a maximum of 500 Mbit of dedicated bandwidth, with all due respect to the 4.5 Gbit of residual band.
In the case of any competitive FTTH, with 1 Gbit / s in download, there are no similar limits, and a single wireless device can, if necessary, exploit all the gigabit per second available. In other words: doing a Wi-Fi speedtest on the iliad network you could go slower than on the competition.
And with the 1 Gbit iliad fiber? Good question! In that case there is no indication on the iliad site, and since the maximum band is 5 times lower we can risk that there is no breakdown. You are going to see that the slowest fiber is the fastest one!
But then 500 Mbit is enough?
But if the network has a total of 5 Gbit, why impose this distribution? The first answer that comes to mind is precisely to prevent everyone from making full use of these 5 Gbit, to the full advantage of decongesting the network (and perhaps the costs for the operator, who in any case relies on a service third, that of OpenFiber).
Now, let's clarify that 500 Mbit of bandwidth is still a lot , and even with different devices connected it is difficult for you to experience slowdowns; the fact is that, in light of these considerations, the iliad fiber could still be slower than the competition based on FTTH.
All this in regards to the download speed. As for the 700 Mbit in upload , there are no limitations whatsoever, which would lead us to the “paradox” of having a Wi-Fi with more bandwidth in the uplink and in the downlink .
The solution
However, we underline that there would be two methods for circumventing this constraint:
- connect one (or more) third-party routers to the ethernet ports of the iliadbox and navigate through the Wi-Fi of the latter, instead of with that of the iliadbox
- do not use the iliadbox at all: in this case there should be no limits, but the officially supported models at the moment seem to be just a couple (the Turris Omnia 2020 – 345 € on Amazon – and the unpronounceable MikroTik RB4011iGS + 5HacQ2HnD-IN – 256 €, also on Amazon)
We have already contacted iliad about it and we are awaiting a response from the operator: after all, the documentation provided so far is not full of details, so maybe we missed some important element . If there were any relevant news, we will certainly update the article.
