[SOLVED] High download speed, high latency

[JassseM]

Hi all,

First, some background. I live in a basement suite and I use the same internet (provided by Videotron) as the people living upstairs. The wifi signal was quite poor in the basement, so I set up my router (Asus RT-AC1900P) to act as a relay, then connected my devices to that wifi signal instead and wired my PC directly to the router. For the first few days, things were fantastic, I was getting a stable ~30ms ping in games and I had download speeds of around 10mb/s. Yesterday, however, my ping became very unstable. It would hover at ~90ms, drop to 40ms and then skyrocket to well over 300ms. The only factor I am aware of that changed from when things were working perfectly was one extra person moved into the house above, but I can't imagine that's the issue as my down/upload speeds (and ping during speed tests) has remained unchanged and stable.

Here are some additional fixes I've tried:
-Reboot PC/router. The 2nd router reboot seemed to lower my ping to double-digits, but it bounces around from 20ms to 90ms and things are still very jerky and unstable in-game.
-Uninstall/reinstall ethernet driver.
-Tracert to Google, but I couldn't find any consistent culprits.
-Ensuring I'm in the correct server region for games.

I assume the next steps would be prioritizing my PC on the network or contacting the ISP, but before I do so, I just wanted to make sure there isn't anything I may have missed. Heck, maybe I just have to wait a few days and the problem will resolve itself, but who knows. I'm happy to answer any questions, and I appreciate the help!

 

[bill001g]

So what do you mean you set your router up as a relay.

If you connected it via ethernet to the main router upstairs and then connected your PC to the router then it more or less acts as a switch and the problem could be load related.

If you connect to the router upstairs via wifi then all you did was make a fancy wifi nic card that connect to your PC via a ethernet cable rather than being conneted via USB or the internal PCIE bus. It still has all the same wifi problems any other form of wifi does.

 

[JassseM]

So what do you mean you set your router up as a relay.

If you connected it via ethernet to the main router upstairs and then connected your PC to the router then it more or less acts as a switch and the problem could be load related.

If you connect to the router upstairs via wifi then all you did was make a fancy wifi nic card that connect to your PC via a ethernet cable rather than being conneted via USB or the internal PCIE bus. It still has all the same wifi problems any other form of wifi does.

I connected the router via wifi, which is unfortunately the only option available to me. I'm aware of the issues wifi can present with latency, I just don't understand how my ping went from very low and stable to very high and unstable, while download speeds and everything else remains unchanged and stable. I'm obviously no expert in this field but that seems very peculiar.

 

[bill001g]

Wifi is one of those things that is almost impossible to troubleshoot since so many things can affect it. Can be someone walking around the room changing the signal pattern. Can be cars with wifi hotspot driving by. It can be fine one day and unusable the next.

In general the only people that seem to see problem with this are gamers. Any other application is not affected much unless the signal is very weak. This is why it is never recommended to play online games on wifi.

You are much better off using a wifi card directly in your machine. You are likely running the second router as a repeater which will even in best case reduce the bandwidth by 1/2. It actually intentionally transmits a interfering signal on the same radio channels as the main router.

Your second best solution when you can not run ethernet is run powerline units. This will use the electrical wires as ethernet. This assumes that the upstairs and downstairs are on the same electrical system if you have separate power meters it will not work.

 

[failboat]

I connected the router via wifi, which is unfortunately the only option available to me. I'm aware of the issues wifi can present with latency, I just don't understand how my ping went from very low and stable to very high and unstable, while download speeds and everything else remains unchanged and stable. I'm obviously no expert in this field but that seems very peculiar.

Jumps that high will be buffering. so it's bottlenecking somewhere for some reason. it's not easy to figure out where.

iperf3 is a good tool for testing wifi strength. one side must be wired in. you can get a baseline when no activity is happening then you can try a test with 1 wireless device limited to 80Mbs and yours unlimited and see if you get huge drops. There are also RF congestion testing apps.

 

[Ketchup79]

It's pretty simply really: My kids have a few online games they like to play. Whenever they are playing these games, speed on a file transfer across the network takes a hit. Now, if it's a needed transfer, I can tell the kid to take a break, but I doubt you have that option. So unless you can talk the owner into getting better internet and a better router, there may not be much you can do outside of moving

 

[JassseM]

Hi all,

I seem to have found a solution, at least for now. The upstairs wifi had both a 5GHz frequency and a 2.4GHz frequency, the latter of which I had my router repeating. I switched to repeating the 5GHz network instead and aside from a slightly slower download speed, things are stable and my ping has returned to normal.

Thank you very much for your suggestions, I'll be sure to look into them should problems arise in the future.

 

[Ketchup79]

Well, that was my bad. I assumed you were using 5 Ghz, as that's what one needs for any type of wifi speed. Glad you made the switch!

 

[JassseM]

Hi all,

Not sure if I should be making a separate post for this, but considering I already have some context about my setup here, I hope it's okay to continue in this thread instead.

Looks like I've run into another problem! Over the past few days, my internet connection has dropped at random times throughout the day, at random intervals. This seems to be a problem between my repeater and the router upstairs, as my devices maintain their connection to the repeater, they just don't have any internet connection. If I restart the router, the problem is temporarily resolved until it happens again, which can be anywhere from 20 minutes to several hours. This has still proven to be very disruptive.

I once lost internet right before bed and tried leaving it in that state overnight to see if it would fix itself, to no avail. I tried resetting my repeater and manually entering an IP address instead of automatically finding one, but that didn't help either.

My download speeds and the like have remained fast and stable since I switched to the 5GHz network, and the loss of internet connection problem only popped up over the past few days. I will add that I never had this issue when my router was set to repeat the 2.4GHz network, but that network obviously had troubles of its own!

Once again, any help would be appreciated, and thanks for your time!

 

[Ketchup79]

5Ghz has faster speed but shorter range. So if your signal is getting interrupted by something upstairs, that could explain your issue.

 

[JassseM]

5Ghz has faster speed but shorter range. So if your signal is getting interrupted by something upstairs, that could explain your issue.

While that could be the case, I'm not aware of anything that could be disrupting the signal in such a fashion, as it can happen at any time of day, so someone moving/shifting something likely isn't the case. And would a temporary interruption really knock out my internet connection until a reboot?