Question How to fix ping spikes on my pc, wifi not the issue(?)

[draingel]

I have been dealing with constant ping spikes for the past month. I bought my pc exactly a year ago and I never really had ping spikes until early this month. My wifi has been the same so I dont know why it randomly started spiking just recently. I use wireless connection but this has never been an issue in the past, it used to work perfectly fine with around constant ~4 ping. Now, i have 3-4 ping that spikes up to ~200-300 every 30ish seconds. The ping spikes are affecting everything, including all games, videos, streams, voice calls, etc. I reinstalled Windows to see if this would fix the issue but it did not. I was on windows 11 when the issue began and downgraded to windows 10, and the issue is still occurring. I ran a ping test to the router on both my pc and my mom's macbook. The only device with ping spikes is my PC, as my mom's computer has a constant 4 ping as normal. I am almost positive this has to be an issue with my pc and not the internet but I just can't figure out what. I am wondering if this could be a wifi card/adapter issue? However, I tried updating it and it said everything was up to date. my pc drivers are up to date as well. I have a Realtek RTL8852AE WiFi 6 802.11ax PCle Adapter, version 6001.10.354.0

I have ziply fiber internet, and my pc is an HP omen 40L desktop with ryzen 7 5800x, RTX 3070

 

[bill001g]

The problem with wifi is "you" may not have changed anything but your neighbors may have installed new wifi equipment that now runs on the same channel as you. Your router could also have rebooted and changed channels to ones that now interfere with other wifi signals.

Ping spikes will not affect most normal traffic. This like netflix or youtube video have buffers to hide these. Stuff like web surfing already gets massive amounts of random delays because of the stupid advertising loading.
You can sometime see a small glitch in the video with live video conferencing but that also happens even when you do not have a network issue in your wifi.

The only thing it does affect a lot is online game which is why they say to never play online games on wifi.

It is the pretty standard thing like try other wifi channels, change the channel width, try to force a connection to 2.4 and/or 5g radio band.

There used to be a setting in windows that caused this when it would scan for other networks and people used to recommend you disable this. Microsoft has rigged it though that this setting turns itself back on. They might have also fixed that problem because you don't see people complaining about this much.

........if you really think it is something other than the wifi your best test is to use a ethernet cable to see if you get the same problem.

 

[draingel]

thank you for your reply! i will get an ethernet cable and test it out, thanks for the help