I am getting an Infinity 76 connection and BT are offering the dongle as a £20 extra, saying it will grateful improve the speed to my laptop. Having never had fibreoptic before, I would be grateful if anyone can advise whether its worth paying the extra for the dongle

Thanks

If your laptop already supports wifi speeds above 56mbps(WiFi N) then it would be a waste of money.

What the model number of your laptop?

Depends entirely on the relative specs of your laptop and the dongle and what you use your WiFi network for.

There are various standards for WiFi and two frequency bands you can use. If your laptop can do 802.11n standard and use the less crowded 5GHz band then chances are it can already max out your broadband connection with a bit to spare. Even if you can only use 2.4GHz there is a chance you can still max out the connection depending on what other WiFi networks are around to cause interference (which can have a serious effect on speed).

So if you have a laptop restricted to 2.4GHz and loads of neighbouring networks in that band the dongle may be useful if it lets you use the 5GHz band instead. That might give you a useful speed boost. But be aware range at 5GHz can be lower than at 2.4GHz.

If none of that makes a blind bit of sense to you post the exact make and model of your laptop. Hopefully the specs are available online so can be compared to the dongle specs to see if the dongle is worth it.

Thanks guys forthe assistance - my laptop is a very new fairly top end HP one so should be fine in terms wifi supporting spec, so looks like I don't need to pay out extra for the dongle.

I assume if I want to get the absolute top speed I would need to connect my laptop to the home hub using a wire, rather than wirelessly connect?

Not necessarily.

If the network adapter in the laptop is only 100Mb/s then 802.11n can actually run faster! If it's 1000Mb/s (AKA Gigabit) then if the hub is also gigabit then wired will be faster. But either are very likely to be faster than your broadband.

So the ultimate speed is only really applicable to your home network. Say for copying large files from computer to a NAS drive or similar such tasks.