A friend mused that my older laptop might only connect to the 2G band which would always restrict the speed well below,
Certainly easy to check :
(a) Check router specs
(b) Check laptop specs
(c) If laptop covers the full 802.11 spectrum, then check software is connecting to correct spectrum (look for something called "PHY Mode").
whereas another said I was likely sharing the pipe with whomever else was in the street and that would throttle the speed downwards.
In the vast majority of cases, this is more likely to be the problem.
How else do you think the providers can offer "super fast broadband" at a stupidly low price per month. You get what you pay for. Pay more, you get better broadband. Pay less, you get contention, packet shaping, rate limiting,caching, FUPs, AUPs and all the other crap the ISPs sysadmins can conjure up on their core routers so as to try to break-even or even make some profit on the broadband (assuming its not being artificially cross-subsidised by another part of the business... hello BT Retail, I'm looking at you
)
I've also noticed they my IP address stays static, which countermands my assumption that these days they were dynamic, changing when you were offline or the ISP was tweaking the network etc ?
I'm sure if you look at the small print of your contract you'll very much find you are on a dynamic IP address.
You may well find you are on the equivalent of a long lease DHCP from the ISP. But nonetheless, the IP won't be specifically assigned to your router.
As the relentless march on depletion of IPv4 resources continue, you may well find that ISPs with customers on dynamic IP contracts will start becoming more aggressive in an attempt to free up IPv4 resources. You may well find yourself subjected to more nasty sysadmin tools such as "carrier grade NAT" in the not too distant future. BT have already been slowly and quietly rolling it out to their unfortunate customers since 2013.
There are other weapons than "carrier grade NAT" at ISPs disposal, if an ISP is using CGNAT
and is adhering to RFC6598, then you'll have an external IP in the independent reserved IANA 100.64.0.0/10 range. But ISPs may of course ignore RFC6598 and use something else like RFC1918 .... or worse !
To inject a little bit of balance, for your average eyeball network user, CGNAT and the rest is unlikely to make much difference to their life if what you do on the internet is confined to the environs of a web browser such as Firefox. But if you're doing corporate VPNs, voice over IP or anything more interesting than watching EweToob then you're going to be in for a miserable time. If you thought local router NAT was bad enough, you aint seen nothin yet !