I did a speedtest at Uni over the wifi and only get 48Mbps each way. From a wired connection I hit per-user cap of 100Mbits each way.

I think Wifi is just a bit shit, tbh.

The superrouter I've been supplied is apparantly the dogs danglies.

It runs dual band 2.4/5 Ghz at both 20/40 Mhz all at the same time and at 802.11a/n/ac/b/g/, however it also looks like it's one of the shittest for wireless !

I didn't know there was a speed difference between wired and wireless, thought it was just limited by the speed of the cards, a slight difference I could live with but 50Mbps !! I've upgraded from 20meg ADSL to 80meg fibre and only doubled my wireless speed.

Reading online it appears part of the problem is my existing cards/dongle operate on the n and g protocol at 2.4Ghz and are limited to 54Mbps (which is the speed I thought I'd get) so upgrading to a faster card with a newer protocol should improve things but they will never reach the max speed.

Funny how the ISP's don't say the only way to get close to maximum advertised superfast fibre download speeds is by using a wired connection, but all supply wireless routers.

It is also a wired router....?

WiFi never gives advertised speeds.

Speaking as a network engineer, wifi is always shonky. Cables are always the best way, even if they're messy.

After a bit more research it looks like my adapters are old and don't support some of the newer tech.

Seems I can get a bit more speed by getting a dual band adapter that supports 802.11 n and ac, although from what I've read 'ac' can actually be slower than 'n' due to interference issues.

Quite surprised there's differences in speed between different 'n' class adapters, thought they all operated to the same specification so the speeds would be identical.

Aren't network standards based on highest possible theoretical speeds?