Thank you for taking the time to respond.
1. done
2. done, i tried all as you suggest but I am afraid it made no difference to the speeds.
3. yeps this was the case.
4. Disconnecting from the TC wireless network and reconnecting to the virgin media superhub wirelessly also made no difference to the speed, with mac air and my windows laptop both experiencing good >50mbs rates however Iphone 4, 4s and ipad all circa 8-15Mbs.
5. I have my macmini running Snow Leopard it is ok when hard wired (i have seen >60Mb!!) but over wireless the speed on this too similarly drops to the 8-15mb range.
The mac air and my works laptop are blisteringly fast over wifi, only tried the air on both 2.4 and 5Ghz networks but again they totally rock.
Not quite sure where this leaves me, on the face of it and I can accept that apple mobile devices are not as powerful as computers...yes however, if anyone is still alive and following this, then why does the macmini speed drop to the levels of the iphones and ipad when on wifi. :-/ If I can solve this then I will just accept that phones and tablets are (shock horror) not as powerful as computers. I will do some digging around there and leave it at that.
Finally, it cant be the 2.4Ghz link or capabilities as the air and my works laptop certainly works at the higher speeds on that network.
Thank you for your help.