Question I have a little packet loss spike problem ?

[gekosauras]

I have for the past year been enduring a ping spike, and a packet loss spike. I have moved rooms after sorting all my previous internet problems and this is where I'm stuck.
tldr people moved in, I had a work around by resetting the internet using an online gateway and now doesn't work so I have to do things with ping/packet loss.

I'm currently running a computer in a room directly adjacent to the previous room,
i started by using a power line ethernet adapter in my previous room with no problem what so ever, I then moved rooms and it was unbearable. the power line adapter is a D-Link. i then moved to a Wi-Fi dongle. the power line adapter works worse then the Wi-Fi dongle, depending on the program it effects it differently, voice chat programs get both packet loss and ping issues, some games get both ping and packet loss some don't get affected by it at all.

I previously had a workaround, I reset while no-one was home and it worked perfectly, for about a few days not even a week and then it stopped working. it was a noticeable occurrence that when someone walked into the house the internet would "seize" and then continue multiple times in a minute. there was no difference when i reset the internet with someone else being home. I guessed this was a bandwidth problem however when i deactivated all devices other then the computer it still stayed the same.
this problem is isolated and only affects the computer.
i can get my hardware names but it will take me light years,

thanks for your time in advance.

 

[bill001g]

Wifi is affected by so many things it seems almost magic what can break and/of fix it.

Powerline is a bit better but it depends on how the power wires run. It works best when you are on the same circuit breaker. Even in a room just on the other side of the wall you could be on a different breaker so the signal must go all the way to the main panel and then back. All kinds of things that can interfere with your signal in that path.

Not sure what to recommend. Best would be if you could say mount a couple of ethernet wall plates back to back on the common wall. This would let you use a ethernet cable to the router. It depends if you are allowed to cut any holes in walls.

With wifi you have only a couple things you can do. It is the standard try the other radio band. 2.4 or 5. Try to change the channels on the router that are used in each band. You can also look at changing the channel width to 20 rather than 40 or 80. This will run slower but it tends to be more stable. You could also try to move the computer/antenna around so they face different directions in the room hoping to get a slightly better signal. None of this tends to be very successful and sometime it is very short term since you could have neighbors making changes to their wifi also.

The problem with other people and devices in your house is massively more difficult issue. There really is no way to really control how much bandwidth they use and when they use it. In general there is plenty radio bandwidth for common uses. Even something like 4k netflix only uses 25mbps and even couple people doing it should have plenty. Problem is there is no actual control over which devices uses wifi and when so the can interfere. And then you have all the interference from your neighbors wifi which you can never control.

Games are pretty much the only application that is affected a lot by the wifi issues. Most other apps have buffers to hide delay and loss. I am very surprised powerline it worse. Powerline can be slower than wifi but it tends to be more consistent with very little packet loss. Games need almost no bandwidth to play them so a slower speedtest number doesn't matter.

 

[gekosauras]

I managed to fix the issue! There is a new thing I found called mesh wifi, I assume it was a combination of a dead spot in the house + bandwith. It costs a pretty penny for a fix but was quick, is rather reliable and did its job.